There is no shortage of book events in the UK. What there is a shortage of, for most independent publishers, is money, time and patience. A calendar full of fairs and festivals can look like a marketing plan and behave like a drain. The trick is not to attend more, but to attend the right ones for the kind of publishing you do.

This is a working guide to how the main types of event differ, which ones tend to suit small presses, and how to build a rhythm you can genuinely repeat next year.

Work out what you want the event to do

UK book events fall into three broad groups. Trade fairs exist so that rights, distribution and service deals can be made. Literary festivals exist so that readers can hear authors and buy books. Specialist fairs — crime, science fiction, artists' books, small press — sit between the two, with a strong community element. A stand that works at one can be a waste of money at another, so decide which of the three jobs you are hiring the event to do.

Before you pay for anything, ask the organiser:

• Who actually attends — trade buyers, librarians, teachers, booksellers, or readers who came for one headline author and went home afterwards?
• How many of those attendees are plausibly interested in what you publish?
• Is there a rights desk, a sales desk, or neither?
• What does the fee cover — table, chairs, power, storage, a listing in the programme, exhibitor badges?
• Can you sell on the day, or does a single official bookseller handle everything and take a cut?
• What happened to exhibitors like you last year? Ask for two names and actually contact them.

That last question is the most useful and the least often asked. Organisers will always tell you the event is busy. Exhibitors will tell you whether busy translated into sales, sign-ups or rights enquiries, and whether the aisles were full of people who read your genre or people who came for the bar.

It also helps to decide, in advance, what a good outcome looks like. For a poetry press, twenty copies sold and six newsletter sign-ups may be a triumph. For a rights-driven non-fiction list, one serious conversation with a foreign scout may justify the whole trip. Write the target down before you go, or you will measure the day by how tired you feel.

The three kinds of event, and what each is good at

Trade fairs

London Book Fair in March, Frankfurt in October, Bologna in spring for children's publishing, plus a handful of smaller rights-focused gatherings. These are working events. Nobody is there to browse. The atmosphere is carpeted, fluorescent and transactional, and the deals that matter usually happen in scheduled meetings booked weeks in advance.

For a small press, the realistic goal is not fifty meetings. It is three good conversations: a distributor who likes your list, a scout who wants to see your next catalogue, an editor at a larger house who might take a serious look at one title. If you do not have something specifically to sell — rights, co-editions, translation, distribution — a trade fair is an expensive way to feel like a publisher.

Literary festivals

Hay, Edinburgh in August, Cheltenham in October, and several hundred smaller festivals from Aldeburgh to Wigtown. These are reader-facing. The audience is self-selecting, engaged and often willing to buy, but they buy the book by the person they just watched. An author event is not a bookshop, and a shared stand in a festival bookshop tent is not the same as a table of your own.

Festivals suit publishers with authors who are good on stage and titles with a clear hook. They suit them even better when the publisher has a local angle, because regional festivals are often more generous to regional presses than the big names are.

Specialist and community fairs

CrimeFest in Bristol, Bloody Scotland in Stirling, Eastercon and FantasyCon, artists' book fairs, radical and anarchist bookfairs, small press fairs, zine fairs, comics conventions. The table fees are usually lower, the audience is narrow but committed, and the exhibitors around you will tell you honestly what is selling and what is not.

This is often where independent publishers get the best return per pound. You are not competing for attention with a wall of celebrity memoirs. You are in a room where everyone already reads the kind of thing you make.

Building a rhythm you can repeat

The mistake is treating the calendar as a list of invitations to be answered. Treat it instead as a season with one anchor event and a few smaller commitments around it.

• January to March: plan the year and confirm bookings. London Book Fair if rights are part of your business. Spring children's and academic events.
• April to June: the festival season opens. Hay, local literary festivals, crime and genre weekends, Bologna fallout and follow-ups.
• July to September: Edinburgh, Bloody Scotland, autumn catalogue preparation, and the specialist cons that draw your exact readership.
• October to December: Cheltenham, Frankfurt, the Christmas retail push, artists' book fairs, and a hard review of what actually worked.

Two or three events done properly will beat eight done in a fog. Choose one anchor, add one specialist fair, and keep one low-cost local event as a testing ground.

What it actually costs

The table fee is the visible part. The rest arrives quietly:

1. Travel, accommodation and subsistence, which for a two-day event outside your city can easily exceed the stand fee.
2. Stock: printing or shipping enough copies, and the cost of the ones that come home creased.
3. Staff time, including the days lost before and after to preparation and recovery.
4. Printed matter: catalogues, bookmarks, signage, a banner that will not fit in the car.
5. Card readers, cash floats, insurance, and the cut taken by the official bookseller.
6. Giveaways and postage for the follow-up mailings you promised yourself you would send.

Divide the total by the number of genuinely useful contacts you made, not by the number of people who took a flyer. That figure is your real cost per opportunity, and it is the number that should decide whether you go back.

If you cannot name the three people you want to meet before you book the stand, you are not exhibiting. You are decorating.

The follow-up that decides whether it worked

Most of the value of an event is created in the fortnight after it. The stand is the introduction; the email is the relationship.

• Write to every trade contact within three working days, referencing something specific you discussed.
• Add reader sign-ups to your newsletter the same week, while they still remember why they gave you the address.
• Log the event in a single document: cost, sales, contacts, what you would do differently. Future you will not remember.
• Note which titles moved and which did not. That is market research you paid for.

Do this consistently for two years and the calendar stops being a gamble. You will know which fairs bring rights enquiries, which festivals sell your sort of book, and which events you attend purely because you like the people — which is a perfectly good reason, as long as you have budgeted for it honestly.

Photo: DGlodowska / Pixabay