Send us your ideas for developing superb events with Salt Cellars
We need your help. We’re busy developing ideas for taking our Salt Cellars programme forward, but we want to open that out to our authors and our friends.
Booksellers, and especially independent booksellers, are central to the future of Salt Cellars. We’re looking for ideas to develop Salt events in collaboration with local booksellers. That could involve performances, workshops, interviews, performances, collaborations with libraries, schools, writing and reading groups.
Our main aim is to serve local book buyers with high quality Salt author events.
A little bit of context:
- The point of a Salt Cellar event is to sell great books with and through local booksellers. There are many events already which are about live literature, but ours will be about creating themed events which sell books to our readers.
- Events should be, above all else, entertaining; they should have diverse content; they are allowed to be fun. They might involve music and film, participation and audience involvement, and an element of theatre.
- No Salt Cellar event should be planned without the involvement of a bookseller, they can handle all the sales and everyone wins: author, publisher, bookseller and most of all, the reader. That means testing out ideas with a local bookseller early on, before spending any time and effort (and money) on an event. The bookseller will have ideas of their own, too.
- Where possible we think an event should be repeatable, and toured among interested booksellers within a given region.
- We strongly suspect events must have a single, cohesive, imaginative idea behind them — something that holds the bookshop event together and will bring in an audience; it must be well-branded and well-marketed.
- Everyone must work with the local media to bring in a decent audience. No stone must be left unturned in helping to create an audience (local radio, local listings mags, local newspapers, blogs and bulletin boards, even village notice boards, not to mention Facebook and Twitter).
If you think you have a strong idea and can pull the people together to make it happen, contact us now. You can email the Queen of the Salt Cellars, Sarah-Jayne Johnson at sarah-jayne@saltpublishing.com with your ideas.
Would be interested in setting something up in Manchester, with the focus on Northern writers, possibly through the Library and a local bookshop (either Waterstones or Blackwells.)
I know the Literature Officer for the county where I live was very interested in setting up touring readings coupled with open mikes in the further flung smaller libraries which don’t get to see many live readings. Salt readings coupled with open mikes marketed to local writers groups/schools/ etc and with even a local free writing workshop at a school or in the community might pull in punters and thus sales. Salt Poets (children and adult)and short story writers working as a loose group could provide a menu from which libraries or bookshops could pick which could broaden the appeal of such a community focused project. For instance one library of book shop may be more interested in child friendly readings whilst another wants a mixture of fiction and poetry and another just poetry. However I do think funding would have to come from somewhere ( Local Authorities are I know in the throws of huge cuts so that may be out as a source of income) as it is unfair to expect poets and authors to fund it for free ; time and travel costs are all expenses for the poet and kudos alone and book sales doesn’t pay the poet or writer’s rent. I know many poets and writers are happy to read and even travel for free and hope for a few book sales to earn them a crumb but if the bookshop sells the books the poet or writer then receives nothing for doing the event as the mark up on the book goes to the shop and not the writer but presumably there are deals that may be done about this with specific bookshops