Earlier this year, I had the privilege of discussing the current climate and future of Literary Festivals with none other than Jo James. Jo has worked in the book trade for more than three decades, from working in an independent bookshop to managing Waterstones events across the country. She went freelance in 2010 and since then has worked on, programmed, and coordinated festivals such as the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Stratford Literary Festival, and the Literature Festival at Sea, alongside many others. This year, she is working on 14 festivals.

To start, for those who don’t know you, who are you? What do you do? How did you get where you are now? Where are you based?

Who am I? There’s a question. I started in the book trade by accident in 1991, 4th of January 1991, to be precise. I graduated from college with a degree in graphic design. The world had gone nuts – there was a big financial crash, I couldn’t get a job, but I needed a job. This was back before the Internet, so you looked in the local paper and that was the only way of finding work. I looked in the paper and saw a job advertised. It was general assistant in a bookshop, and I thought, “oh, that sounds alright, I’ll do that for a year until I can get a proper job.” I got the job, and it turned out that 360 people had also applied for the job. I then completely and utterly fell in love with the book trade. And so, my year in a proper job is now 34 years.

We elevated the bookshop from a little teeny tiny independent to a much bigger, but still independent, shop and started doing events with authors. We won awards for doing those, and I got headhunted by a chain called Ottakar’s. I opened their biggest shop ever and then went into head office and ran their events for the group, and trained all of their shops on how to run events. Then Ottakar’s got bought by Waterstones, and I ran the events for all of Waterstones. I did that for four years and thought, “that’s enough now,” and went freelance with the intention of working on author tours.

So, doing that freelance for publishers was what I thought I was going to do, and I did do some of those, but then I got a call from a festival saying, “we hear you’re freelance now, would you like to come and run our Green Room and do a bit of programming for us?” I had no idea what that meant – absolutely not a clue, but I said I’d give it a go. And then while I was doing that festival, another festival phoned and asked, “would you like to run a programme for us?” Cheltenham Festival was actually the first festival I ever chased for work. I phoned them and said, “I’ve gone freelance, is there anything I can do?” And they went, “Actually, yes, there is. We’re just starting a second site, would you come and run that?” I did that, and that was the only call for work I’ve ever made as a freelancer, and every other job that’s come along in the last 15 years has come along word of mouth.

I’m based in Chipping-Campden in Gloucestershire, but I’ve been all over the place. I’ve worked in Dorset, Salisbury, Portsmouth, and London as well. This year I’m working on 14 different festivals, which is about eight too many. I’m working on them in varying levels [of involvement]. Some of them I’m programming completely, putting every single event together and then running the whole thing with a team and lots of volunteers. Others, I’m just rocking up and running a Green Room, which is lovely because there’s no responsibility apart from delivering that job. So, differing amounts of work for each one. On average, a festival cycle is about nine months for start to finish. So, because I’ve got 14 of them, I’ve got 14 of these babies in varying stages of gestation. I’ve already done two this year, and I’ve got two more in May, two more in June, and then I’ve got eight from the beginning of September through to mid-December.

Speaking more specifically to the festivals themselves, how much have they evolved over the years that you’ve seen? Have there been any sudden, big changes that have impacted lots of things at once, or has there been lots of gradual change?

Again, every festival is different, and each one has its own character and varies in size. One of the festivals I work on is the Cheltenham Literature Festival. It’s the oldest literature festival in the world – it was 75 last year and it’s a beast, it’s a monster. It’s 10 days long. There are hundreds of events, nearly a thousand authors over the ten days, so that’s an absolute goliath to deliver. Then you’ve got other [festivals] where it’s over a weekend and there’s maybe 30 events. So, the festivals themselves are very different in character.

I think as a general rule, having worked in festivals for the last 15 years, an absolutely massive change came when the pandemic hit, obviously, because we couldn’t do in-person festivals. The whole buzz of the festival is getting people onsite and having thousands of people all buzzing around and going to events, and you hear the kind of the bubble and fizz of excitement. I send the authors off to their events, they do them, they love it, they get all the audience interaction, then they meet them at the book signings afterwards. And it’s just a really big fizzy vibe for the whole of the duration of a festival.

It’s very hard to generate that sort of excitement for something you can’t physically touch. So, the pandemic comes along and every single festival I do still happened, but they were all online. The difference with those is, normally at a festival you’ll have multiple events happening at the same time, targeting very different audiences. You might have an event on World War II and then you might have an event on crime or rom-com. So, you’ll programme events that will be on at the same time but will aim to attract very different audiences. When you do it all online, you can’t do that, you can only do one event at a time.

As a result, all the programmes were very reduced. It massively impacted the level of opportunity for authors to get out and actually meet readers (even if they did a virtual meet), because the number of events was so reduced. Signings obviously couldn’t happen because you couldn’t be in person, and actually, authors doing events online is fine, but it’s not the same as an audience member watching two people onstage. You just don’t get the same buzz. They didn’t get the same books sales. I felt really sorry for all the debut authors who were being published those two years [because], as a debut author, festivals are so important to go out and meet readers and try and get people excited and interested in your book. Not being able to do that made it very, very hard for them.

So, pivoting to the online model was a massive change and it meant that festival organisers still had lots of costs. [They] still had to pay people to programme it and still had to pay tech teams to make sure all of the technology was working and to edit the videos and get them online. You still had to pay the authors for speaking, but you couldn’t monetise it. Some festivals did try and put content behind paywalls, and it worked to an extent, but not very well. A lot of festivals were hugely impacted financially by the pandemic, and quite a lot went under.

But what that did do was introduce the digital element to festivals in a way that wasn’t there before. Nowadays, you quite often get speakers dialling in – so you can have a panel onstage and one of those will be on a screen behind the other speakers since they’re based in the US or wherever. People are now used to that as a format, and it does open things up allows you to do more varied events, including events with authors that for one reason or other can’t be there. So that’s been interesting.

I think festivals have become a lot more professional because of the financial impacts of the pandemic. They’ve had to because if they’re not professional, they haven’t survived. We’ve all got a little bit more canny about issuing contracts; beforehand it was all very much, “Gentleman’s agreement” and “[Handshake] and we’ll see you at 3 o’clock on Thursday”; “Yes, absolutely, I’ll be there.” But now I’ll say, “We’ll see you at 3 o’clock on Thursday. How are you getting there? What train are you getting? Here’s the contract. Here’s what we expect you to do on social media to promote it.” I think we’ve grown up in this industry a lot more.

But there’s also the rise of more specialist festivals. You’ve got Harrogate Crime, you’ve got Aye Write, and I think that’s partly due to sci-fi-ComiCon-type things because people see there can be a niche. There’s a new festival I’ve just started which is happening in September this year called the Hereford Military History Festival. It’s military history writing, and that’s it. I do the Stanford’s Travel Writers festival; that’s only travel. There’s the Cheltenham Science Festival; that’s only science. They will all work for their niche audiences and that’s exciting to see. So it’s really nice to see people thinking about the content of festivals and what they’re delivering and making sure they deliver something that they believe passionately in.

Interesting. So, the pandemic brought lots of challenges, but also some positive change. On that subject, what do you find most rewarding about what you do? What sticks in your memory the most?

I think what I’ve found really rewarding is, having been in the game long enough now, I know enough about festivals and how they run. I’m quite unusual working on so many festivals. Most people are employed by a festival so, even if it’s part-time, they might work on a couple. But working on 14 is just ridiculous. It’s insane. But because I work on so many, I’ve got a very broad spectrum of experience of different types of festival, from ones in hotel conference centres to ones built in tents in fields, and everything in between. What I’ve found now is that I enjoy helping new ones start up. So, there’s a couple of new ones I’ve got in my portfolio. It’ll be the first Hereford Military History Festival in September. We only got the all-clear to start programming the Fleet Street Quarter Festival of Words in the middle of January which is scheduled for May. That one’s got a bias towards non-fiction and journalism and literary history, as you can imagine being based on Fleet Street, but not exclusively. They’re very keen to promote debut authors and literary diversity, so we’re looking at that kind of end [of the spectrum]. The more established, big-name authors are not necessarily the ones we’re going for.

Because I’ve effectively got four and a half months from starting a brand-new festival to delivering it, I’ve got a ridiculously tight timetable. But it’s a very well-connected bunch of people who are organising it which does help enormously because they can just say, “Oh, that’s fine I’m having dinner with Lord or Lady whoever-it-is next week, I’ll ask them.” That does help and because it’s in London and in Fleet Street, it does mean we can use solid buildings, which is great, and we don’t have to find marquee companies and get licenses and all of that sort of thing.

It makes the programming easier, but actually that whole process of talking to people about what a festival involves and what avenues they’re going to go down, and looking at everything from the physical structure of where the festival is going to be to be actual logistics of running it and getting the authors there (“Do they need accommodation? Who’s going to feed them? Have they got a stage? Do they need ramp access to stage?”) and all of that sort of thing that people don’t think about until they have to think about it (or until it’s too late and they don’t realise they’ve got to think about it). I love doing that – that’s the bit I join in at. Once they’re up and running, they’re kind of boring – they’re done!

On that note of people not thinking of things, I’m wondering, what are some of the challenges that people might not realise exist when working on festivals?

Yeah – lots of challenges. The first one is making sure (and this is really basic) that you’ve got the right author, because there are occasionally two authors with the same name and you need to make sure you’ve got the right one! Then, once you’ve got the right author, that you are promoting the right book. I’ve had events in the past where an author has expected to be talking about one book and I’ve actually booked them to talk about a different one, and that’s miscommunication between me, the publisher, and the author. So very clearly stating what you expect the author to do right at the beginning is really important. Also important is making sure they’re comfortable with that, because some authors are really extroverted, very outgoing, wonderful being interviewed, lively onscreen and onstage, and they’re just brilliant, born performers. Then you’ve got others who are really introverted and quite quiet. Knowing who you’re dealing with, matching them with the right chairperson, someone who can contain them or bring them out is really important.

If they’re [introverted], do you put them on a panel? Because they might just shrink into a chair and not say anything. There are some authors who just shouldn’t do events. They just shouldn’t, because writing is a really solitary occupation. You know, you sit in a room on your own in front of a keyboard and off you go. That doesn’t necessarily make you a natural born performer. And if authors are not confident performing, then either give them some training, or don’t put them through it, because there are some who just clearly hate every second of being in the limelight. That doesn’t result in a good show for anyone. If an author doesn’t engage with the audience during the event they won’t sell any books afterwards. Then everyone is let down, everyone feels disappointed, and everyone, the author and the publisher, gets pissed off. The festival gets disappointed because the audience won’t have had a nice time and we’ll have bad feedback. So, matching the right author to the right event is so important.

If an author is going to do an event, be mindful of their ego because everyone’s got one. We might all pretend we’re very humble, but actually everyone’s got a certain amount of ego – it’s often the mid-list authors who are the most demanding and have the, “don’t you know who I am?” attitude. Very often the top-bracket authors are wonderful, brilliant, lovely human beings. And that’s part of the reason why they’ve made it to the to the top, because they’ve engaged their audiences really well and they’re nice to deal with. If they’re nice to deal with, I’ll invite them back to other festivals. If they’re a pain to deal with, I won’t, because why would I put myself through that?

Then there’s knowing whether the authors have any special requirements. There are some authors who are deaf in their left ear so you have to sit them on the “other” side of an interviewer to make sure they can hear the questions. Or they might have mobility issues. They might have a visual impairment so can’t cope with bright lights on stage. Do they have a nut allergy? Can they drive? Do they need help getting back home after the event because they’ve got childcare issues? All these things have to be considered with every author at every event. You need to know all of this background information about speakers. Publishers should tell you if there are special things people need, but publishers should also be making sure they aren’t putting forward authors who are not comfortable being on stage. 

Can you elaborate on some of the challenges more specific to publishers?

This comes back to, and this is a sweeping generalisation, a lot of publicists being terrified to send authors outside of London. A lot of big publishers have traditionally been based in London – that is changing slowly, and there is a definite drive to get offices outside of London for most of the major publishers. But a lot of the publicists don’t know where places are, and quite often the idea of sending authors outside of London terrifies them, because they don’t know how long it will take to get there, what it’s like at the other end, or whether they’ll need a car or a taxi to take authors from a station to a venue. Will it take long enough that they have to stay overnight? If so, they’ll need a bigger budget. But to answer that sort of, “it is okay outside of London?” question: it’s alright. People will be safe, and there are trains, and there are motorways, and there are hotels, and there are places to eat. So, working with publishers getting people out of London is often a challenge.

I think also publishing as a whole has done really well since the pandemic. Publishers’ profits are up more or less across the board, and every week in The Bookseller there’s a story about how well a particular publisher is doing. On the other hand, publicity budgets have been cut, so publicists don’t have the budget now to take authors outside of London, or they can cover travel but can’t cover a hotel, or they can cover a hotel but can’t cover travel, or they’ve only got the budgets take the author out of London once and not four times or whatever it might be. That’s a challenge. This needs to even up slightly from a festival’s point of view. Festival production costs have gone up between 40-50% since the pandemic. The build cost alone for one of my festivals has doubled and now costs more than £1 million to set up. That’s before you even pay any author fees. Some of that imbalance needs to even out and publishers need to start helping festivals pay for things so that we can promote some of the newer debut authors they want us to promote.

How does audio interact with a literary festival? Clearly, you’ve talked about doing festivals online during the pandemic, but I think myself and lots of other people don’t think audio really interacts with what you do. Is that the case?

Audio is interesting. I think the beauty of audio is that it’s a way for people to listen to or read books who are too busy to read. People will listen to an audiobook or a podcast when they’re driving, or on the train, or commuting, whatever. They’re absorbing content and they’re absorbing books – they’re just not reading the words. For me, that’s fine, because they’re still absorbing that content. And actually, if you’re tuned into listening to a book, that works hand in hand with coming to an event and listening to that author. It’s great. It has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Podcasters might come and record podcasts with a live audience at a festival. All of us do that now – we’ll all try and get a podcast or two recorded during our festivals because it’s a way of bringing audiences in who might not necessarily go to a standard book event.

But it’s also a way of bringing new technologies in to make festivals more relevant, I guess. I think it’s all good, and it also opens up the world of getting voice actors along who have voiced books – you can do events talking about the process of recording audio. I’ve done that at several festivals and they’re always popular. They shine light on people who I think often go quite ignored, but honestly bring the magic.

You’ve worked with some very high-profile authors, and also some very high-profile celebrities-turned-authors. Did you feel pressure early on in your career when you first met these people? Did that pressure slowly go away?

One of the reasons I’m very good at my job is that I’ve never, ever got starstruck. Yes, I have dealt with a lot of high-profile people, and most of the time the people that are the pain are their management teams. Once you get through to the actual people, they’re usually lovely to deal with, but that’s partly because they can be. They employ someone else to be the one that’s the pain, to do the hard work, so they can just give nice fluffy answers. That’s always quite entertaining and realising that, learning that, was interesting. Of course they’re lovely – because they can be! They’ve got someone else to be horrible for them. That was a lesson.

But I try to treat every author the same. Whether they’re a debut novelist, a multimillion copy bestselling author, or a celebrity, I will welcome them all in the same way. During the Cheltenham Festival for example, my job is to programme the events in the biggest venue, so I’m dealing with a lot of celebrities, a lot of management companies. But then also, during the festival, I run the writers’ room, which is effectively the Green Room where every single speaker comes before their event. Then they get put together with whoever’s interviewing them or the rest of their panel. It’s where all the author hospitality happens and then they come back to me after their event. So I’m virtually the only person at the festival that will welcome every single speaker.

That could be a thousand speakers, and it’s my job to say hello to every single one of them and welcome them in. I will do my best to make sure that everyone gets the same treatment. It doesn’t always work, obviously, because there are some that we have to treat slightly differently. And it’s because I don’t get starstruck that means I’m good at doing that. I don’t go wibbly-wobbly. It’s quite entertaining watching other people lose it, and they go, “Oh my God! Oh my god!” – just breathe, for goodness sake, breathe! I’ve seen quite a few people do that, but not me fortunately.

You’re clearly an expert – where do you think festivals are going to go? What do you think is going to stay the same? What do you think is going to change? What do you think festival organisers are going to capitalise on, or might have to stop?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. One of the things I know is that festivals do charitable outreach work. Quite a lot of literary festivals are charities and do a lot of work with local schools or book groups, all sorts of things. The Stratford Festival actually is a really good example. Throughout the year, they take authors into schools free of charge and the festival picks up the bill for the author. So, kids get direct access at school to authors of quality who will be doing everything from illustration to writing workshops to presenting books. Stratford does this for all different age groups, from primary right through to A-Level.

Stratford also runs three book groups a month for socially isolated elderly people. They mean that these groups of people every month get together and get to talk to somebody about something. I don’t think it’s really all about the book because, by that point, it never is, but it allows people something to look forward to every month, and quite often this will be the only thing those people are going to the whole week. They’re really important events socially.

And then the third thing that Stratford organisers do is throughout the year they run workshops in prisons – helping prisoners create and write bedtime stories for their children. The festival then produces professionally printed, illustrated copies of those stories which the prisoners can send to their kids. It helps those kids stay connected with their parents. It’s vitally important work because the kids are being punished (by not having a parent) because the parent has committed a crime. The children haven’t committed a crime, but they lose access to mum or dad and so the festival is helping these parents stay in touch by doing these workshops. All of that work is charitable work and with funding challenges for the arts, and particularly for book festivals, that’s the work that has been put in danger, because a festival funds it.

Without more help from government, grant-bodies, philanthropists, or investment companies, that outreach work can’t happen. There was a whole debacle last year with Baillie Gifford being targeted by protestors to stop them investing in fossil fuels. And, of course, as an investment company, it would be illegal for Baillie Gifford to just stop [investing in fossil fuels] because of all sorts of financial controls. They just couldn’t do it. So, what Baillie Gifford did was withdraw all their funding for all festivals, and I don’t blame them. The level of protests they were getting was ridiculous – festivals sponsored by Baillie Gifford were getting death threats from people for having them as a sponsor. It just got so out of control. And that is really frightening as a festival organiser because Baillie Gifford had sponsored book festivals for 20 years. They were a key arts funder, and now they’ve gone.

And the money to replace them can’t come from government, because there isn’t any, and although the government has announced further funding for the arts, it’s restricted to theatre, museums and libraries. So, that’s not helping festivals at all. Other corporate investors aren’t going to invest because why would they open themselves up to that level of scrutiny? And then private investors – there aren’t enough of them. So actually, I think the biggest challenge festivals are facing is funding – not to keep themselves going, because they’ll still happen, but to keep up the outreach work that they do. Every festival I know does outreach work. They’re all wanting to give something back, but that’s the bit that’s the most under threat.

Trying to finish on a positive note  – the audience numbers are up; they’re back up to pre-pandemic levels. People are loving what we’re doing. They’re loving coming to events, loving the opportunity to meet authors, to ask them questions directly, to get their books signed. Those are all wonderful things, and there is definitely a very strong market for that. So, festivals will continue, but they may have to drop their charity work – I really hope not.

Thank you for that. I’ve actually lied to you because I’ve thought of something on the last thing you said. So, audience numbers are up. That’s great. What I’m wondering is, do you see many young people at these festivals? Do you think that needs to be more of a focus?

One of the key targets for pretty much every festival is to attract a younger audience, and different festivals are employing different methods of doing that. The Cheltenham Literature Festival has a venue called the Voicebox. All the events in there are free to attend. A lot of the programme is curated by young programmers or young activists, or just young people. It’s aimed at the 18-25 audience. Because the Cheltenham Festival is so big, we have a vast number of speakers, and we have a very diverse range of speakers as well. So, we’ll ask people to come along and do their main event, whatever it might be, and then we’ll ask them to go and do a Voicebox event as well. We can get some really big names appearing there, having done their main event which people have paid tickets for, and then they do a second, smaller event in the Voicebox. That means we can get a younger audience in for those big names who don’t have the disposable income that older generations have.

We’ve had people like Tom Daly go in and do a talk about what it’s like to be a young sportsman, and how focused you have to be, and the sacrifices you have to make to reach the top of a sport. We’ll quite often make those issue-based events because young people do come out to talk about issues and things that concern them. So, we do a lot of research to identify what sort of subject areas people aged between 18-30 want to hear about and we will programme accordingly. At the Chiswick Book Festival, I’m working with a couple of radio DJs. I’ve got JoJo Silver who works for Capital FM and Fee Mack who does a Radio One show, and I’m working with them to programme some events that will attract a younger audience. There’s also a book group in London called It’s Hardback Out here. They are an 18-25 book group, and I’m working with them to programme a couple of events for their members that again will attract that younger audience.

Every festival is very aware that it’s a challenge to get younger people in. And it’s another of those areas that you really have to work at. You can’t put something in place in year one and expect it to work. You’ve got to put it in place in year one, then know that it’s going to be tough to get an audience, knowing that in year two it will be slightly less tough, then by year five you’re rocking. That audience will then feed that information to younger siblings, or whoever. You’ve then got a rolling programme that will have a rolling audience to go with it. But it takes a while, and you’ve got to invest knowing that you’re not necessarily going to receive a return for two or three years. It’s hard.

Bonus question. What is your favourite festival to work on, Jo?

My favourite festival has to be the Literature Festival at Sea. It’s totally bonkers – it’s a seven-day transatlantic crossing on Queen Mary II. I’m allowed to take 25 authors with me, and I programme and run an entire week’s worth of content with just 25 speakers. It’s insane. It’s really difficult to get the right mix of male, female, speakers of colour, different demographics, fiction, non-fiction, but they also all have to bond because they’ve got to spend an entire week together! It’s a fascinating process putting that mix of people together, putting the programme together, but then it’s just such fun on board. It’s absolutely brilliant. And we’re done by 6pm every day so we have our evenings to ourselves. We work hard but we play hard. It’s quite a trip!