TL/DR VERSION: There’s a recurring discussion that occurs year after year about the types of writers who get excluded from literary festivals (the latest iteration being the self-publishers behind #SelfPubIsHere). As a writer, former conference organiser, and current PhD student/cultural theory wonk I put together a bunch of thoughts about the types of publishing capital in play.
Every year, when the literary festival season comes around, I see the same iteration of the same argument: why don’t Australian literary festivals feature more fantasy writers/romance writers/things-that-aren’t-lit-fic writers. Every year, people offer up solutions that aren’t really solutions because there’s a fundamental disconnect between the way they think festivals work and the way they’re actually being put together.
This year, a bunch of self-published authors have started a campaign to try and rectify the lack of self-published authors on festival programs and award slates. Slightly new take, but I have exactly same doubts about its success.
Now, I first self-published back in 2005. I’ve got a new self-published book coming out at the end of the month (which you can totally pre-order). I tend to believe that every writer working today, regardless of how they’re building their career, should at least understand how to self-publish and ebook and how people build their careers. They may build the bulk of their career around traditional publishing, but there’s something to be said for using self-publishing for less commercial works or reverted rights.
On the other hand, self-publishing isn’t all I’ve done in my life. I’ve been published by smaller traditional presses. I’ve spent a few years managing the Australian Writers Marketplace. I’ve run a couple of writers conferences, and I’ve got a circle of friends that include a fair number of editors, agents, and folks who run festivals and writing events.
This means I see the frustration from both sides, and it frustrates me. To the point where, for the last two Genrecons, I tried to put together a workshop that was basically “how to get Genre writers on Festival programs,” but the timing never worked out with the folks I had in mind to run it.
I also spend a lot of time thinking about where the disconnect comes from in these discussions, and why it keeps occurring. I’m also doing a PhD where I spend a shit-ton of time thinking about how the industry frames things, and occasionally run these ideas past folks I know.
Every time these discussions get started, I find myself frustrated by the folks on both sides, so I wanted to write a little about the difficulties of getting genre/indie/etc works into an established major festival from my perspective.
I want to talk about capital within the publishing industry before we start talking festivals specifically, because it’s a useful framework for understanding what’s going on. I’m borrowing this term from John B. Thompson’s study of the Publishing industry, Merchants of Culture, where he builds upon the work of Bourdieu and lays five tools that are leveraged to make things happen in the contemporary publishing field.
The full list of five looks something like this:
Now this is a very simple model for the way writers, publishers, and readers operate in a very complex, constantly shifting landscape, but it offers three useful things to consider before we start talking about festivals:
First, this break-down shapes the way we talk about books based upon the kind of capital they accrue (or are perceived as accruing). That joke about literary authors getting respect, while genre authors get the money? Largely a break-down of what we assume the respective authors are trading their respective intellectual capital for.
Second, for new and emerging writers, this exchange of capital has traditionally been simple and straightforward: a new writer created intellectual property, then leases the rights to publish that property to a publisher to access their economic, social, and human capital. The book then accumulates symbolic capital as it builds up fans, reviews, awards, etc, that can be leveraged for a better deal down the line.
Of course, none of this is writer specific. Publishers accumulate symbolic capital, as do reviewers. It’s why a review from, say, Locus or Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, tend to mean more than a review from a freshly-started reviews blog.
Which brings us the the third important thing: when self-publishing, you’re generally eschewing the publishers economic capital, knowledge base, social capital, and network in exchange for what you can leverage yourself. It takes advantage of the fact that we can build social contact with our readers directly via the internet, and increasingly in the form of authors notes and direct contact in the books themselves.
Self-publishing also adds a new wrinkle to that literary/genre dichotomy, as it generally leans of a completely different set of social and symbolic capital than the traditional publishing industry in order to make money. In fact, part of the reason that the discussions between self-published and traditional authors break down is that they’re using outright different definitions of success without understanding how the other side do things.
Couple that with a short history of self-publishing advocates talking up the commercial advantages, and the long history of self-publishing being synonymous with vanity publishing prior to the existence of the kindle, and self-published authors are largely starting behind the eight ball in terms of symbolic capital.
Admittedly I’ve not run the program for a writers festival of any size, but over the years I’ve done the author program for various cons in addition to running the GenreCon writers conference four times now. This gives me a perspective on how I use capital in those spaces, and what gets some folks on the program and others not. I also have a bunch of friends who have put together festivals in the past, and as a consequence of our respective interests there have been occasional conversations about the process.
I will not speak for them here, but those conversations do inform the way I’m thinking about. It does mean I may have parts of this wrong, and I’m happy to have folks call me on it.
Right then. To put it bluntly: every writing event is trading on symbolic, human, and social capital of its guests in order to earn the financial capital that keeps the event running. All of them will lean a little harder on certain aspects, too, depending on their goal and the desires of their stakeholders.
Years ago, in the Jurassic era when I ran open mic nights on the Gold Coast, our focus was on the social capital. The performers we were getting in brought their friends, and we played on the growing community established to gradually give the event some symbolic weight on a local level. We charged fuck-all for people to get in, and trusted in our ability to make income from the bar and the desire to hang out with fellow creatives (which was, on the Gold Coast, a pretty massive selling point). We rarely had folks who came loaded with high profile symbolic capital, but over time there were regulars who build it up through repeated performances and engagement.
More recently, GenreCon worked off a similar model, filtered through the kind of approach used at science fiction conventions. We sold the conference on the potential to boost a writer’s industry contacts (social capital) and skillset (intellectual capital), which tended to influence the kind of writers we put on the program. In return, the event required a high outlay of the attendee’s financial capital in the form of registration fee of several hundred dollars, and we tapped the goodwill of our attendees to populate the program.
This means that while we invested in certain guests who were high in symbolic capital every year, we were much more interested in the latter – getting a best-seller or award winner wasn’t much good to us unless they possessed the experience and sill to talk to other writers in a complex way and an understanding that their role as guests was partially social. The lure of symbolic capital might get people to the event, but unless it delivered on the social and intellectual front it wasn’t going to succeed long-term. On the other hand, those high prices put a limit on the number of attendees, which made other forms of financial capital (sponsorship) harder to secure.
Supanova, to take another event who used many of the same writers, traded in something different. Their ticket prices are comparatively low because (I’m guessing based on my experience with a similar event) a larger portion of their income comes from booth sales from people looking to sell to the attendees. Ticket prices do go towards covering costs, but it is the sheer consumer mass thats coming through the doors that allows Supernova to market to their industry customers.
This places a higher premium on the symbolic capital of the guests, as their primary purpose is getting people into the building. This makes writers a considerably less valuable prospect than TV stars in terms of the capital that’s meaningful to the average Supanova attendee. This doesn’t preclude other forms of capital being at work – Supanova still has a community that’s built up around it and trades on that connection, but in a different way to something like an SF con or GenreCon. The ability to talk on a panel and provide things for people to do onsite is a bonus, more than a requirement. Attendees are stakeholders inasmuch as Supanova needs them to arrive and the spectacle of so many cosplaying bodies generates a symbolic value of its own, but their primary stakeholders are sponsors and stallholders who want quantity.
Consider, then, the trade of capital going on at a major writers festival. Ticket prices may seem exorbitant from the outside, but I’m guessing that they’re pretty paltry compared to the cost of bringing in the talent and renting the spaces festivals tend to be run in. Even if every session sold out at full price, it’s probably not going to make a huge profit for the event.
Who, then, is providing the bulk of the financial capital to keep a festival running? Arts grants. Donors. Sponsors. People are providing money in order to be associated with the event, because it is laden within a specific kind of symbolic capital that is valued in their field. On top of that, literary festivals tend to be more pick-and-choose than an event like Supanova or Genrecon where they’re onsite for a weekend. Some lit festival fans attend the entire thing and enjoy the feeling of being around so many readers, but many more attendees are coming for a day or a couple of sessions.
Volume of guests matters to a festival as a measure of their impact for those stakeholders, which is why there’s less focus on the kind of interpersonal relationship that builds at a con and more focus on the faster-moving exchanges through signings and panels. Few people go to a literary festival hoping to see their favourite writers in the bar and have a chat, for example, while that’s something that’s part of the selling point for a fan con.
All of this places a higher premium of the symbolic value of their guests, whether that comes in the form of recognition among the festivals core audience or their ability to deliver the kind of experience that the folks providing the financial capital value.
There’s a reason this conversation comes up, year after year, in much the same form: by their very nature, literary festivals are spaces that both leverage and bestow a specific type of symbolic capital. They’re places where writers and readers come together to discuss big ideas and value-add to the reading experience, and they receive public support in the form of sponsorship and arts grants based on that prestige.
The flipside of this: in order to keep functioning, they need to maintain and build upon that symbolic capital in order to keep the sponsorship and grants rolling in. This puts self-publishers and genre authors in a difficult position in terms of landing a place on the program, as the kinds of symbolic capital they earn tends not to be an exact fit with the festival
Now, the money/respect dichotomy between genre and literary isn’t as simple as it’s made out to be: if you’re a regular reader or fan of a genre, you can likely point to the writers who are accumulating symbolic capital within the genre. They’re winning awards. They’re regularly reviewed. Their books generate discussion among the community when they’re released. We are sensitive to the kinds of capital that is meaningful within our sub-field.
Or, to put it simply, an SF writer who has picked up a dozen Hugo awards has probably accumulated more symbolic capital than a writer who has won a single Aurealis Award, which is different from the SF writer who is selling big numbers but rarely gets critical acclaim. There will be similar breakdowns in every genre, and readers are sensitive to these things without knowing it.
Now all of these hypothetical writers may find their way onto a literary festival program – I’ve seen them at Brisbane Writers Festival before – but it’s rare that you’ll find all three on the same program. Mostly, it should be said, because the symbolic capital inside the sub-field of publishing associated with the SF genre or Australian publishing doesn’t necessarily transfer over. The Aurealis Award means less outside of Australia than it does, and it certainly has less symbolic reader to someone who has never engaged with Australian SF at all. The same is true of the Hugo award – if you’ve never heard to if, it’s just another award. Less meaningful, less symbolic, just a series of words that signify a level of esteem rather than something specific.
In this respect, the kind of symbolic capital that is valued within a genre isn’t widely recognised or valued in the literary festival space outside fo some narrow contexts. While the Human Capital those writers represent is great – and having run four GenreCons, I’ve come across dozens of genre and self-published writers who can absolutely kill it on a panel or workshop – their primary value within the literary landscape therefore lies in filling a small and not-always needed nitch until they’ve accumulated the kind of capital that’s more meaningful in the festival context.
This cuts both ways. Genre writers and self-publishers rarely appear at big writers festival for the same reason that literary-but-spec-fic-influenced author like Michael Chabon or Margaret Attwood aren’t rarely invited to be a major guest at SF con: whatever other capital they bring to bear as a guest, they don’t have the kind of symbolic capital that’s meaningful to the core stakeholders of the event and may, in fact, signal the wrong kind of message.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, you’re probably thinkin about the flaws. Namely: literary festivals tend to have new authors on every year, or folks who aren’t particularly well-known within the literary landscape.
All true, and often these folks are brought in because being the place where you discover new talent is part of the symbolic capital an event trades upon. However, what people frequently overlook is how these folks get there and why it’s such a struggle for genre/self-published authors.
If you don’t have the symbolic capital to get on a literary festivals radar, you’re usually there because other forms of capital are brought to bear. To put it simply, a lot of festival spots are filled because the festivals meet with publishers and the publicists pitch specific authors for the program. This set-up places a premium on the publisher’s symbolic capital and weight within the industry (which gets them the opportunity to pitch authors), the Human Capital of their publicist, and the social capital of their publisher’s network in terms of building excitement among industry insiders.
It also means that the authors pitched tend to be couched in terms of the capital they can bring to bear and transform into symbolic capital: What kinds of things can they talk about meaningfully on the program? What can they talk about in a way no-one else can talk about? What kind of support is a publisher throwing in to make this happen? How is their genre/topic regarded by the general attendee?
Many genre and self-published writers lack the contacts and expertise to make the pitch to festivals in a meaningful way (or someone who can do it on their behalf). This can be true of genre publishers as well as self-published authors – I’ve known genre-friendly festival directors who have been frustrated by their attempts to talk to genre-specific and digital publishers about festival spots.
This makes a certain sense when you consider the very different way that genre events run. Cons and conferences tend to be community driven, with everyone showing up to work for free. Their primary value is social – networking with readers, meeting other writers, catching up with friends – and the boundaries between “special guest” and “part of the program” tend to be slightly thinner.
The same is not true at literary festivals. Although they may rely on volunteer labor for the bulk of their support staff, major Australian Literary Festivals pay an appearance fee for every panel or workshop they’re putting a guest on, on top of covering transport and accomodation costs. SF cons will generally cover the cost of transport and accomodation for their guests, and everyone else tends to be paying their own way and buying tickets to attend the event they’re presenting at.
This kind of up-front outlay of financial capital directly affects the kind of risks you can take with a guest, or panel topics, and the other kind of capital you’re willing to trying to leverage.
In genre terms, there’s another factor that plays in here: a good publicist is going to pitch you towards the kind of events where you can generate capital that is meaningful in the sub-field in which your book is being marketed. If genre spaces are better suited to earning you the kind of capital that sells books, why would they push you towards a writers festival with a less-complimentary focus if the symbolic capital it generates doesn’t help push your book?
Having talked up the bigger picture, I also want to take a look at the smaller scale issue that I’ve seen while doing programming in the past: most writers are terrible at seeing how they might fit into an event, either because they’re looking to make the wrong kind of trade (eg attendance=book sales) or they don’t understand how to make their skillset work in the event context.
Sometimes it’s simple to see. No matter how many times I’ve used the phrase We do not program genre-specific panels or events on the GenreCon program sign-up, folks will pitch us fantasy-, romance- or crime-specific panels (particularly if it’s their first time attending). Lots of folk will pitch their specialties as a particular genre or subgenre, which isn’t sufficiently different.
Sometimes it’s more complex, such as being general rather than specific. For example, the vast majority of self-published authors pitch talking about self-publishing in general, or a 101 type topic. Which means, given that I’m generally unfamiliar with their work and processing a lot of information, there are about a dozen people competing for the three spots on whatever self-publishing panel we program.
What tends to get folks will be the folks who have sufficient Symbolic Capital that fits with the topic (ie they’re the most well-known or successful self-publisher at the conference), those who have demonstrated their Human Capital through a more specific topic pitch, or someone who has both those things going for them via a public blog or web presence where they consistently offer new/interesting insight.
In short, the folks who make it easy to program them in a way that’s meaningful to the event being run.
There’s a phrase I noticed when the #SelfPubIsHere posts linked to in the Books&Publishing artifcle that set off all the warning signs: self-publishers want to get on festival programs to connect with more readers and sell books.
The moment I get this impression from a pitch as the program coordinator for GenreCon, there needed to be something really impressive before I’ll program that person in a high-profile spot. It’s entirely the wrong way to be looking at things, because it brings the focus onto the kind of capital that very few writing events are focused on – economic. It’s the least unique thing possible, because every writer wants to connect with readers and sell books, the focus should be on what you can offer.
In this way, pitching yourself to an event is an art form, and learning to craft a narrative where you’re unique is part of it. Writers tend to think in terms of what they’ve done, what they’ve seen before, and how the program may benefit them; program coordinators are generally looking for what will engage their audience, new takes on topics that have been done to death, and interesting combinations of talent that will generate a good discussion their audience wants to hear and their stakeholders want to support.
Those stakeholders include government arts departments (which have agendas), fesival boards (which have agendas), and sponsors (who have agendas).
The latter is frequently left out of these discusisons about festivals, genre, and self-publishing. Audience is only half the story Most arts grants are predicated on the symbolic capital associated with the project, and disrupting that is…risky.
The best advocate, in the #SelfPubIsHere posts, was Robin Elizabeth’s pitch of three authors in her post:
Melissa Pouliot had a cold case reopened because of her debut book. Heidi Farelly was picked up as a regular guest on A Current Affair to speak on finances on the strength of the popularity of her self-published ‘How to…’ books. Lisa Fleetwood became an Amazon bestseller with her debut travel memoir.
These three, out of a bunch of names she mentioned (many of whom I’ve programmed at GenreCons), would catch my eye if I were programming a literary festival because it pitches the authors in terms that are meaningful to a festival program. Their value is framed in the form of a unique hook that cane be used to build discussions around, or secondary markers which can be used to affirm their authority with the audience.
In short, they move the pitch away from the writers agenda, and put in terms the program coordinator can understand without having to do research. It suggests that you can put these people on because they know the game, without fretting that they’re going to disrupt the tenor of the event.
I will stress: I’ve never run a literary festival, just heard reports from the sidelines. Parts of this may be extraordinarily wrong and the theoretical construct that I’m building up suffers from the primary issues of all theoretical constructs – reality is a lot more complicated and sees multiple other concerns crashing into one another.
I primarily put this together to clarify some of my own thinking about running writer-based events and archive some of the things that did influence the ways I did thing over the past few years of GenreCon (and, before that, programming the author stream for a pop culture expo).
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