Ohioana Book Festival Appearance
Posted on April 2, 2009 Posted by John Scalzi 9 Comments
This May 9th, I’m going to be a featured author at the Ohioana Book Festival, in Columbus, which is a festival dedicated to showing off the literary talents of Ohio’s resident authors. In addition to the featured authors (which aside from me include R.L. Stine, Margaret Peterson Haddix and seven others), there will be an additional 60 or so authors on hand, including current Hugo nominee CC Finlay, 2007 Hugo and Nebula nominee Paul Melko, and genre favorite Lucy Snyder. The whole list of featured and appearing authors is here. At the Ohioana Festival I’ll be participating on at least one panel and will also be doing either a reading or a Q&A session. And, I suspect, signing lots of books.
How much would you pay to attend a festival with dozens of authors, all waiting to talk to you (yes, you!). However much you’d pay, don’t bother — because the Ohioana Book Festival is free to attend. Bring yourself, bring your loved ones, bring the whole family. Heck, bring people you hardly know. It’s free, man. Mark it on your calendar. I’ll see you there.
My sister’s an MLS student in Columbus and will be working the festival in some fashion. I told her to be sure to say “Hey!” to you.
Oh sweet… one of the names on the list sounded familiar, and I clicked through and she’s a professor at my school! How cool!
I love a FREE book festival, are you kidding! It doesn’t get any better than that. Thanks for the tip.
Cool. It’s on my calendar. I’m looking forward to meeting you.
Paul Melko should be on the Featured list! I just read his latest and thoroughly enjoyed it.
“Ohioana” needs a couple more consonents. How exactly do you say that? Ohio-ana?
(I can pronounce Oaxaca, but Ohioana? Maybe not.)
Cool. I was unaware of this. I just added it to the convention finder. Is anyone else aware of any Book Festivals (Cons, etc.) in their areas?
Oops. The url is wrong: convention finder/
Free book festivals that cover all the genres are definitely good things. The recent Tucson Festival of Books in Tucson, Arizona, did quite well. Our booth promoting Tucson and Phoenix science fiction conventions got a lot of traffic and we handed out a lot of flyers. The turnout of local SF/F authors was good and they brought in a few others from outside the area such as Charles de Lint and S.M. Stirling.
I would recommend that local SF Cons make it a point to get a booth at a local book festival to help get the word out to people that may not know you exist! Tucson in mid-March is a lot nicer weather than Ohio, so maybe a certain Scalzi might be talked into appearing there next year….