Last October, I spent four days standing behind a folding table in a converted tobacco warehouse in Asheville, North Carolina, talking about books with strangers. My feet hurt. My voice was shot by day two. I ate more barbecue than any reasonable person should in a four-day span. It was, without question, the best week of my professional year, and I’m already planning to go back.

Literary festivals occupy a strange position in the publishing ecosystem. They’re expensive to attend, exhausting to participate in, and nearly impossible to quantify in terms of direct return on investment. If you ran the numbers purely on books sold at the event versus the cost of getting there, staffing a booth, and printing promotional materials, most festivals would look like terrible business decisions. I’ve had colleagues in the industry tell me exactly this. “Why bother?” they say. “Just put the money into online advertising.”

They’re missing the point so completely that I almost don’t know where to start explaining why they’re wrong.

I attend between six and eight literary festivals a year. Some are large, established events like the Brooklyn Book Festival or the Texas Book Festival in Austin. Others are smaller, more regional affairs with a few dozen vendors and a couple hundred attendees. Each one is different in character and scale, but they all share something that no digital platform, no social media campaign, no email newsletter can replicate: the experience of standing in a physical space surrounded by people who care about books.

That probably sounds sentimental. Let me make it concrete.

At the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville last year, I had a conversation with a woman in her sixties who told me she’d driven three hours from rural Tennessee to attend. She comes every year. She doesn’t buy books online because her internet connection is unreliable and she doesn’t trust entering her credit card number on websites. The festival is where she discovers new authors, touches the books, reads the first pages, and makes her purchasing decisions for the next several months. She left our table with four books, including Still Waters, which she said reminded her of the landscape around her home.

No algorithm would have connected that reader with that book. No targeted ad, no matter how sophisticated, would have found her. The festival did. And she’s not an outlier. At every event I attend, I meet readers who exist largely outside the digital ecosystem that dominates publishing conversations. They’re older. They’re rural. They’re people who still get their book recommendations from librarians, from friends, from walking past a table at a festival and being drawn in by a cover or a conversation.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is a different animal entirely. It takes over Borough Hall and the surrounding streets in downtown Brooklyn every September, drawing tens of thousands of people over a single weekend. The crowd there skews younger and more urban. There are panel discussions, readings, signings, and a massive outdoor marketplace. The energy is electric in a way that’s hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it. People are excited about books. They’re carrying bags full of them. They’re arguing about them on park benches while eating empanadas from food trucks.

What I love about Brooklyn specifically is the accidental discovery factor. Because the marketplace is so dense and varied, readers who came looking for poetry end up at a fiction table. People who were there for a panel on climate journalism wander into a booth selling literary magazines. The physical proximity of different kinds of publishing, from the Big Five imprints to tiny one-person operations, creates a kind of democratic leveling that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Your small press table is right next to Penguin Random House’s setup, and the readers don’t care about the size difference. They care about what’s on the table.

I should mention that festivals are also, frankly, important for our own morale. Publishing is a business conducted largely through email. You send manuscripts into the void and wait. You negotiate contracts over phone calls. You watch sales numbers tick up or down on a screen. It can feel abstract, disconnected from the actual humans who read the books you make. Festivals are the antidote to that abstraction. You watch someone pick up a book, open it, start reading, and decide to buy it. You see them come back the next day and tell you they stayed up until 2 AM finishing it. That feedback loop, immediate and human, is something I genuinely need to stay motivated in this work.

The Texas Book Festival deserves special mention because it’s one of the best-organized events in the country and because its programming is consistently excellent. Held on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin every fall, it manages to be both serious and accessible in a way that many festivals struggle with. The panel discussions are substantive, featuring major authors alongside emerging voices. The marketplace is well-curated. And the festival’s commitment to literacy programs, including donating books to Texas schools, gives the whole event a sense of purpose that goes beyond commerce.

I also want to talk about the smaller festivals, because I think they often do something that the larger events can’t. The Savannah Book Festival, for instance, is intimate enough that you end up having extended conversations with readers in a way that’s impossible at a massive event like Brooklyn. I spent forty-five minutes at the Savannah festival talking with a retired English teacher about the state of contemporary fiction. She had opinions, sharp ones, and she pushed back on some of my assumptions about what readers want. That conversation directly influenced how I wrote the catalog copy for our spring list. You can’t get that kind of unfiltered reader feedback from an Amazon review.

The Decatur Book Festival near Atlanta is another favorite. It’s community-focused in a way that feels genuine rather than performative. The whole downtown area gets involved; restaurants put up book-themed specials, local businesses sponsor events, and the streets fill with a mix of dedicated readers and curious passersby who wandered in because they saw the tents. Some of our most unexpected sales have come from people who weren’t specifically looking for books at all. They were out for a walk and got pulled in by the atmosphere.

One thing I’ve noticed across all these festivals is the importance of the author appearance. Readers want to meet the person who wrote the book. This might seem obvious, but I think we underestimate how much the personal connection matters. I’ve seen readers who were mildly interested in a book become committed buyers after spending five minutes talking with the author. There’s something about hearing a writer explain why they wrote a particular book, what compelled them, what kept them up at night during the writing process, that transforms the book from an object on a table into a personal communication from one human being to another.

We try to bring our authors to at least two or three festivals a year. It’s not easy, logistically or financially. Most of our authors have day jobs and families and can’t disappear for a long weekend on short notice. But the ones who do come consistently report that the festival experience re-energizes their relationship with their own work. Writing is solitary. The festival is the opposite. It’s the moment when the private act of creation meets the public act of reading, and something happens in that meeting that both parties need.

Let me talk about the practical side, because I know other small publishers read this blog and might be wondering whether festivals are worth the investment. Here’s my honest assessment.

The costs are real. A typical festival might run us between $1,500 and $4,000 all in, depending on location, booth fees, travel, lodging, and materials. For a small press operating on thin margins, that’s significant. We can’t attend everything, and we have to be strategic about which events we prioritize.

The direct book sales at festivals usually cover between a third and half of the cost. So purely on a per-unit-sold basis, festivals lose money. But that calculation misses everything that matters. The email signups we collect at festivals convert to purchases at a rate about three times higher than signups from our website. The readers we meet at festivals are dramatically more likely to leave reviews, recommend our books to friends, and buy our future releases. They become part of our community in a way that anonymous online buyers simply don’t.

There’s also the industry networking angle. At every festival, I end up in conversations with other publishers, with agents, with booksellers, with librarians. These relationships, built over years of bumping into each other at the same events, are genuinely valuable. Some of our best author referrals have come from connections made at festivals. An agent I met at the AWP Conference three years ago has since sent us two manuscripts, both of which we published. That relationship started with a conversation over bad conference coffee.

Bookstore relationships are another benefit that’s hard to quantify but very real. When I meet an independent bookseller at a festival and hand them a galley, that’s a fundamentally different interaction than sending a mass email to a list of bookstores. The personal recommendation, face to face, carries weight. Several of our strongest bookstore partners, stores that hand-sell our titles consistently, started as festival connections.

I want to address something that’s been on my mind lately, which is the question of whether literary festivals are becoming too homogeneous. There’s a valid criticism that the festival circuit can feel like a traveling show, with the same publishers, the same authors, and the same conversations appearing at event after event. I’ve seen this tendency, and I think it’s a real risk. When festivals start programming for other industry people rather than for readers, they lose the quality that makes them special.

The best festivals resist this by staying rooted in their local communities. The Mississippi Book Festival, held in the state capitol building in Jackson, feels distinctly Southern in a way that isn’t performative. The programming reflects the literary traditions and contemporary concerns of the region. The Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago has a Midwestern directness that I appreciate. These festivals have personality, and that personality comes from the place where they happen.

I also think festivals need to do a better job of reflecting the full diversity of who reads and writes in this country. Progress has been made here, particularly in the last five years, but there’s still a long way to go. The Leimert Park Book Fair in Los Angeles and the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. are good examples of events that prioritize diverse voices in their programming. More festivals should follow their lead.

For readers who have never attended a literary festival, I genuinely encourage you to find one near you and go. Most are free to attend (you pay for the books, obviously, but entrance is usually open). Bring a tote bag, wear comfortable shoes, and plan to be surprised. The magic of a good festival is that you go in looking for one thing and leave with something you never expected. Last year at the Baltimore Book Festival, I bought a poetry collection from a press I’d never heard of because the publisher described it so passionately that I couldn’t walk away. I’ve since recommended it to probably twenty people.

That’s the thing about festivals that I keep coming back to, year after year. They remind you that books are not content. They’re not product. They’re not units to be optimized and marketed and tracked. They’re objects made by people for people, and the best way to experience that reality is to stand in a room full of both and watch the connections happen in real time. Every October in Asheville, every September in Brooklyn, every November in Austin, I get to watch someone fall in love with a book. And every time, it reminds me why I got into this business in the first place.

We’ll have a table at the upcoming Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show and the AWP Conference in the spring. If you’re there, come say hello. I’ll be the one with sore feet and too many opinions about first chapters.