These days, it’ s not good enough just to be a writer in a garret, banging away at your books. You’ ve got to promote. Present. Appear on radio, TV, newspapers, blogs, You Tube, whatever. Get around and speak in schools, universities, conferences. And literary festivals, which from a modest start thirty or so years ago have now mushroomed into a great big industry with events held in a bewildering variety of places.

Here in Australia, from when festival season kicks off round about March, you could practically go to a different literary festival every two weeks or so. Sometimes they come even thicker and faster than this. There seems to be an inexhaustible appetite for them. And they come in all shapes and sizes, from one-day very tightly focussed modest events to week-long extravaganzas featuring celebrity authors and all kinds of razzmatazz. In my experience the smaller and middling festivals are the most enjoyable for most writers; the big ones, with their star systems, tend to make you feel as though you’ re just there to make up the numbers and fill in the spaces between the main events( unless of course, you ARE one of the main events!)

When you get your first invitation to appear at a literary festival, it can be quite a thrill. Or a scary thing, depending on how happy you feel about speaking in public. You tend to agonise over your presentation- very often people prepare formal speeches, not realising that the format for literary festivals, with its archetypal panel format, rarely gives you the chance to expound at length( and that if you do, it won’ t be popular with the crowd!). And most people will be asked to speak on a multiplepresenter panel; it is‘ the stars’ who are given their own hour to be‘ in conversation’ with some admiring interviewer. You also tend to imagine, as a novice, that this will be an opportunity to sell books- but at least in Australia, that isn’ t the case. People do buy books at festivals- but generally the queues at the signing tables are once again for the star authors, not for you.( And some festivals are insensitive enough to put a‘ new’ author and an established one side by side at the signing table- not a very good experience for the self-esteem!). You might also idealistically think that writers will exchange ideas fearlessly and stimulatingly on an equal basis in front of motivated, engaged crowds. And sometimes you’ ll be thrillingly right; but all too often, there’ s sadly little time for that, and you might instead get a feeling of wellrehearsed patter, followed by questions from the crowd which can turn on occasion into tedious statements- the questioner merely wanting his or her own turn at the soapbox, not caring at all what’ s been said on the panel( this is a particular bane at big festivals). You might have the naïve hope you might connect with all kinds of other writers- and generally speaking, you’ ll be glad to discover that is so. It is one of the nicest things about appearing at writers’ festivals- the meetings in the Green Rooms behind the scenes, the connections and friendships( and not just career-oriented networks!) that are made between writers of all backgrounds and at all sorts of stages of their careers.

Yes, there are egotistical jerks. Yes, there are bigname authors whose behaviour to other writers as well as to their own publishers and publicists, is abysmal- their sense of entitlement revolting- but in general, most authors, including the famous ones, are not like that at all( and some minorname authors are every bit as bad as the celebrity jerks!).

It’ s likely you’ ll come away from your first experience on the festival circuit with both a bruising feel of your own lack of importance and of how you’ re really a very small cog in a very big wheel; but also a heartening sense of a community of writers, facing very similar problems and pleasures. You might also have come away with a pile of books- writers buying each other’ s books is a common sight at festival bookshops! You’ ll have learned a good deal- and as the years pass and you go to more and more such events, you will come to understand certain things about how to get the best out of a festival, and what to avoid.