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Gollancz Festival
Sep. 18th, 2016 11:45 amOne of the people I spent time with at Nine Worlds mentioned that she was going to the Gollancz Festival this weekend, and as T was going to a 50th birthday do which meant he'd be away from Friday to Sunday afternoon I thought I'd go along for the morning and afternoon sessions yesterday.
It was an enjoyable though rather tiring day out (I got the 7:45 train to London and had booked on the 19:35 home; in fact I would actually have been able to make the 19:05, but hadn't wanted to take the risk of missing it given that I was buying super-cheap advance tickets and if I'd missed it I'd have had to buy a new full-price ticket); it was great to catch up with people and spend the day listening to conversations about books. I also spotted on Twitter that a university friend I hadn't seen for about 25 years was there, replied to him and got to catch up at the mid-session break*. I bought several paper books, and later several more in the festival ebook sale**. I did find that after spending two three-hour sessions sitting in rather uncomfortable chairs which were packed closely enough together to leave very little leg or elbow room, even for someone as short as me, I was quite achy and very happy to be able to relax into a comfortable train seat, and the auditorium at Foyles was also mostly uncomfortably hot, but those were minor irritations.
Less minor was the fact that the panels were firmly set on "transmit", with no opportunity for audience questions ("Why?" called one inspired heckler after a panel chair explained that he'd been told that they couldn't take questions), so as well as being six hours of sitting in uncomfortable chairs in an over-hot room, it was also six hours of being talked at; unlike something like Nine Worlds, where the membrane between audiences and panels is fully permeable, here it was very clear that they were the experts and we were the audience. Also, because the panellists were all authors, there was a tendency for them to talk mostly about their own work and not more widely about books in general, and I never find authors talking about their own work as interesting or helpful in terms of getting recommendations as people talking about other writers' work they've enjoyed.
More serious, though, was the lack of diversity among the panellists. In the morning, of 17 people on stage, 6 were women (including one moderator); in the afternoon, there was one female panellist and one female moderator out of 16 people. The table of books for people to buy and get signed also skewed heavily male, even given that it was necessarily a reflection of the authors there, as there were multiple books there from several of the male author while I didn't see more than one from any of the women; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, when the panellists did mention the work of other authors very few of authors mentioned were women. There were also no BME or visibly disabled panellists. C and I both tweeted about this repeatedly during the afternoon using the festival hashtag, with no response from Gollancz (though C, who also went this morning, has tweeted that one of the organisers did acknowledge the issue when she mentioned it in response to being asked how they were finding the festival). I realise that because this is a publisher-organised event the list of potential speakers is going to be restricted to Gollancz's authors, but it does rather suggest that they aren't very good at publishing women, BME and disabled authors.
I also thought that the organisation of the festival into completely independent sessions wasn't ideal from a logistical point of view. I can see that it would have made setting up the booking system much easier to get people to book for each session separately, but it meant queuing up multiple times to have our names checked off the list and get into the room, and, because each booking entitled the attendee to a goody bag, people attending more than one ended up with multiple identical bags, and while the bags themselves were great (nice sturdy canvas totes), the contents mostly consisted of promotional postcards and book samples, the vast majority of which have just gone straight into my recycling bin. I couldn't help feeling that it would have made more sense, at an event where a lot of people were going to multiple sessions, to have devised a system with multi-session bookings, and only offer one goody bag per person. Or even put different things in the bags for each session; I might still have recycled a lot of the samples as not really looking like my kind of thing, but I'd have felt better about it if I wasn't recycling two of some things.
*Not that there's actually that much you can say to someone you haven't seen in 25 years in a 15-minute break, because where do you even start? But it was really nice to see him again. Surprisingly, he didn't look that different, and I can't have changed that much either because he realised I was sitting two rows in front of him. I suspect that if we hadn't each known the other was there we'd just have thought "that person looks vaguely familiar" rather than "oh, hello long-lost friend!", though.
**Two of the three paper books I bought turned out to be in the 99p ebook sale, but as they were the ones I thought I'd really like to read, rather than "I'll buy this because it's cheap and might be worth reading", I don't really mind. I still love my Kindle, but I love paper books too.
It was an enjoyable though rather tiring day out (I got the 7:45 train to London and had booked on the 19:35 home; in fact I would actually have been able to make the 19:05, but hadn't wanted to take the risk of missing it given that I was buying super-cheap advance tickets and if I'd missed it I'd have had to buy a new full-price ticket); it was great to catch up with people and spend the day listening to conversations about books. I also spotted on Twitter that a university friend I hadn't seen for about 25 years was there, replied to him and got to catch up at the mid-session break*. I bought several paper books, and later several more in the festival ebook sale**. I did find that after spending two three-hour sessions sitting in rather uncomfortable chairs which were packed closely enough together to leave very little leg or elbow room, even for someone as short as me, I was quite achy and very happy to be able to relax into a comfortable train seat, and the auditorium at Foyles was also mostly uncomfortably hot, but those were minor irritations.
Less minor was the fact that the panels were firmly set on "transmit", with no opportunity for audience questions ("Why?" called one inspired heckler after a panel chair explained that he'd been told that they couldn't take questions), so as well as being six hours of sitting in uncomfortable chairs in an over-hot room, it was also six hours of being talked at; unlike something like Nine Worlds, where the membrane between audiences and panels is fully permeable, here it was very clear that they were the experts and we were the audience. Also, because the panellists were all authors, there was a tendency for them to talk mostly about their own work and not more widely about books in general, and I never find authors talking about their own work as interesting or helpful in terms of getting recommendations as people talking about other writers' work they've enjoyed.
More serious, though, was the lack of diversity among the panellists. In the morning, of 17 people on stage, 6 were women (including one moderator); in the afternoon, there was one female panellist and one female moderator out of 16 people. The table of books for people to buy and get signed also skewed heavily male, even given that it was necessarily a reflection of the authors there, as there were multiple books there from several of the male author while I didn't see more than one from any of the women; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, when the panellists did mention the work of other authors very few of authors mentioned were women. There were also no BME or visibly disabled panellists. C and I both tweeted about this repeatedly during the afternoon using the festival hashtag, with no response from Gollancz (though C, who also went this morning, has tweeted that one of the organisers did acknowledge the issue when she mentioned it in response to being asked how they were finding the festival). I realise that because this is a publisher-organised event the list of potential speakers is going to be restricted to Gollancz's authors, but it does rather suggest that they aren't very good at publishing women, BME and disabled authors.
I also thought that the organisation of the festival into completely independent sessions wasn't ideal from a logistical point of view. I can see that it would have made setting up the booking system much easier to get people to book for each session separately, but it meant queuing up multiple times to have our names checked off the list and get into the room, and, because each booking entitled the attendee to a goody bag, people attending more than one ended up with multiple identical bags, and while the bags themselves were great (nice sturdy canvas totes), the contents mostly consisted of promotional postcards and book samples, the vast majority of which have just gone straight into my recycling bin. I couldn't help feeling that it would have made more sense, at an event where a lot of people were going to multiple sessions, to have devised a system with multi-session bookings, and only offer one goody bag per person. Or even put different things in the bags for each session; I might still have recycled a lot of the samples as not really looking like my kind of thing, but I'd have felt better about it if I wasn't recycling two of some things.
*Not that there's actually that much you can say to someone you haven't seen in 25 years in a 15-minute break, because where do you even start? But it was really nice to see him again. Surprisingly, he didn't look that different, and I can't have changed that much either because he realised I was sitting two rows in front of him. I suspect that if we hadn't each known the other was there we'd just have thought "that person looks vaguely familiar" rather than "oh, hello long-lost friend!", though.
**Two of the three paper books I bought turned out to be in the 99p ebook sale, but as they were the ones I thought I'd really like to read, rather than "I'll buy this because it's cheap and might be worth reading", I don't really mind. I still love my Kindle, but I love paper books too.
