“Why the hell can Columbia, South Carolina, have a really decent book festival and Atlanta, Georgia, cannot?”
Decatur Metro | August 29, 2009Access Atlanta has a splendid article about the upcoming Decatur Book Festival with extensive interviews with festival founders Daren Wang and Tom Bell.
If you’re a book festival junkie, there’s probably not much in this article that you haven’t read before. However, my love of speculation requires that I point out that Wang and Bell state in the article that they can easily see the DBF attendance rate doubling before Decatur hits any sort of capacity.
That’s 150,000 people.
I have to say that the 150,000 number is Tom’s, not mine. I think it’s somewhere between 100,000 to 125,000. Tom, on the other hand, out optimists me, which most people who know me will say is hard to do.
One of the things that is very much on the board’s mind each year is how to balance the quality of the experience with the urge to grow the event. Book Festival attendees know there are often capacity issues at venues, and we need more and bigger venues to continue to grow and keep the quality of the experience high. The churches in town have been fantastic to work with, and have helped us address those issues up until now. But having your largest venues be places of worship causes you to restrict your programming in some ways. We do that as much out of respect for those congregations as for any specific prohibitions that the Churches have placed.
We have some good ideas for that in 2010, and we have grand dreams of someday lining S. Mcdonough with booths which would lead down to the Agnes Scott Campus, and all of its lovely venues.
No, we’ve never talked that over with Agnes Scott, and no, I don’t know where we’d put all the cars, and no, I don’t know where we put the porta potties. But these dreams seem far less crazy than the festival itself did 4 1/2 years ago.
I’ll post something on my own blog about this soon, but the article, in all its glory, gives short shrift to many of the people who have worked on the festival from early in the process. Bill Starr from the GCB, Alice Murray from the AJC, Linda Harris from the city and Richard Lenz and his team have all been essential to the success of the event, and they’ve all taught me a lot in the process. And Mary Flad continues to make so much of the festival work that it’s hard to imagine without her.
Why oh why is the Book Festival the same weekend as DragonCon?
** Shakes fist at the universe in frustration.**
And DragonCon was there first !
“When to hold the festival?” has always been a nightmare of a question. There aren’t just local Decatur conflicts (like Beer Festival and Wine Festival), but also industry conflicts (the Southern Independent Booksellers Association convention) and other book festivals (National, Miami, Southern(in Tennessee). If you schedule against those other events, many writers are going to go there instead of here. There is no perfect weekend, and we just had to bite the bullet and conflict with something.
DragonCon is a great partner for us–we share talent with them quite often. But it does stink that most people can’t do both. I’d love to head down to the Stormtrooper parade myself.
We have a survey question on the questionnaire this year about the weekend, just to get a sense of how many people we’d lose with a shift of weekends. The idea of a date shift scares the bejesus out of me, though.
Same weekend as the VT-Alabama game, too, which has spawned an ESPN Gameday appearance and a free concert (Collective Soul, Drivin n Cryin) in Centennial park. Combined with DragonCon, there’ll be a very interesting dynamic downtown.
Shucks, I’m blushing.
It is safe to assume that all 150,000 will be visitors to our fair city because I’m pretty sure that all 18,000 Decaturites volunteer for this festival.