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 [...]]]>


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.

I’ll be exhibiting some of my poems and photographs on Friday evening (26th March) from 6-9pm at the Ruskin Gallery, ARU, Cambridge. Click here for more information.