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Being a Coventry Kid I was really pleased when Coventry came up with its very first Coventry Book Festival. Called Literally – Coventry Book Festival it took place a couple of weeks ago, and much to the delight of the organisers managed to secure a few big names! Amongst them Philip Pullman and Henry Winkler (aka The Fonz) ...Hey!!
Philip Pullman made a rare appearance to collect an award for his novel Northern Lights at the
Coventry Inspiration Book Awards which was a highlight of the festival. These awards are open to anyone anywhere, and this event has been going successfully for a number of years now. Books can be nominated and voted on – and by the way, they are currently accepting nominations for the 2013 awards, so take a look at this link and see if there are any books that you would like to nominate.
www.coventry.gov.uk/bookawards
The leading light as festival organiser was Coventry City Council's Joy Court who is such an enthusiastic champion for everything to do with books, reading and writing whether you're young or not so young. And with Joy at the helm, a whole week of book and literary events were organised – daytimes and evenings. There were lots of school events, talks and workshops and something going on every evening. As far as I know all the authors gave their time for free and the nice thing was, all the public events were also totally free to attend too.
From my own point of view it was a busy week as one of my jobs was to help judge the short story competition, which lots and lots of children and adults had entered; then came some school sessions and four evening events to take part in. Although the Wednesday Inspirational Book Awards ceremony wasn't actually a 'taking part' event as I certainly hadn't won any awards, but it was an enjoyable evening of sitting and listening – and it's not every day that you get to listen to Philip Pullman speaking live. Although in the picture below he's sitting listening to someone else.
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Sounds like great fun, Ann! I'm interested in the book you produced - where can I get a copy, and how did you publish it? Might in future do something similar with the community class I teach.
Hi Sue, Greenstream Publishing did it for us. Our group were lucky because the man behind Greenstream is one of our members. He did all the difficult bits regarding layout, ISBN, he deals with the distribution and getting it onto Amazon etc. His website is: www.greenstreampublishing.com
We publicised the anthology locally with press releases, book signings at Waterstones and (as mentioned in the blog) some performance evenings. Good luck with your venture if you go for it. The man at Greenstream is Mike Boxwell.
Thanks, Ann!