Wi12 Education: Take Your Show on the Road — Managing Large-Scale Events

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The Winter Institute 12 education session “Take Your Show on the Road: Managing Large-Scale Events” provided booksellers with strategies and insights for staging large-scale off-site events, including tips on securing a location, working with venues, marketing, ticketing, and event logistics.

Wi12 logoThe panel of booksellers, who each hailed from stores that regularly produce large off-site events, included Robert McDonald, event coordinator at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, Illinois; Lynn Pellerito Riehl, events manager at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, co-owner and events and marketing director at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. Annie Philbrick, co-owner of Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, and Savoy Bookshop and Café in Westerly, Rhode Island, served as the session’s moderator.

Large-scale events in general can be a way for bookstores to make a name for themselves. Staging large-scale events can give your store more credibility as a business and create a shared legacy between the store and the community, McDonald said, adding that customers still reminisce about the time J.K. Rowling visited The Book Stall in the early 2000s.

“If you host a really big event, either off-site or in your store, it gives you something like a history that you and your customers can hold onto,” he said.

The Book Stall’s procedures for ticketing large-scale off-site events include “bundling” tickets and books so the purchase of a book is required to secure a ticket. In this scenario, every person admitted to the event represents one book sold.

Last October, The Book Stall rented out Chicago’s Music Box Theatre for an event with comedian Nick Offerman for his book Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Workshop (Dutton Books). The theater’s cache was such that it only required a few well-timed tweets and a post on the theater’s events calendar for it to sell out quickly.

When renting out a space, said McDonald, a traditional performance venue is usually ready and able to sell books and is fine with requiring a book purchase to enter. However, bundling books and tickets when partnering with an institution can entail some negotiation, as they tend to prefer public entry not be conditional. However, there are other advantages to teaming up with an institution: they will usually take care of outfitting the auditorium and setting up audiovisual technology, like microphones, speakers, and video.

Another benefit of doing a large-scale event with an institution is that they tend to provide a built-in audience. For an event for Offerman at the Minooka Library, “the library brought us their audience,” said McDonald. “We didn’t have to bring one; they brought the party to us.”

The Books Stall has also had partnerships to sell books on-site at conferences as well as at church and school events, he said. While income from large-scale off-site events has been vital to the health of The Book Stall, McDonald advised booksellers to think carefully about whether they can commit to the hard work and the time they take.

“These huge off-site events take a lot of time and also what we call psychic energy, so really think about it if this is something you want to do,” he said. “There will be sleepless nights and long days; there’s a lot of planning involved.”

Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor partners with the Michigan Theater, a nonprofit film and performing arts center, to stage large-scale events, said Riehl. The partnership began when the bookstore offered to sponsor the theater’s “Not Just for Kids” program, which features hour-long shows geared toward family audiences.

Marketing for literary events that the store brings to the Michigan Theater is handled entirely by the theater, including creating and disseminating press releases that prominently feature Nicola’s name. The theater, which sells tickets through Ticketmaster, also provides tickets to Nicola’s to sell at the store, thus eliminating the surcharge; these tickets are sold to customers bundled with the book. After the event, the store and theater split all costs; after those are paid, profits are split 50/50. 

“Sponsoring a program for the theater gives us a bigger foot in the door,” said Riehl. “Now they allow us first refusal whenever they bring anybody in who has a book to sell. The theater asks us if we want to be the vendor. It also keeps a good, fresh relationship with the venue.”

Riehl said that Nicola’s relationship with the theater is such that when the publisher grids come out with author tour schedules, she texts her contact at the theater to see whether an author would work for the theater space. After that, she will reach out to the publisher.

“It all comes down to getting that request in: you have got to impress the publisher, especially if they are doing a national tour,” said Riehl. “Why are they going to come to the Midwest, the flyover zone? How can we get them off the coast? You have to thrill them with your proposal.”

In Stockton Bagnulo’s opinion, the work that goes into creating large-scale events is worth it because the result is usually a one-of-a-kind, memorable experience. Greenlight hosts a lot of parties in-store that draw hundreds of people, as well as a popular poetry series and other events, but a much larger venue can release a store’s potential even more.

“If you’re able to put together a really great off-site event, you can do stuff that you could never pull off in your store,” said Stockton Bagnulo, who noted that Greenlight also serves as the book vendor for conferences, expos, markets, and other large events.

In 2011, Greenlight signed on to be the official vendor for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s (BAM) on-site merchandise kiosk, which sells books based on the center’s performances, said Stockton Bagnulo. That agreement ultimately turned into a programming partnership through which the store now brings literary events to the venue and partners with BAM to present them.

BAM has theater spaces ranging from 200 seats to 2,100 seats, said Stockton Bagulo, and the store’s Unbound series with BAM has included guests like John Cleese, Lena Dunham, Neil Gaiman, and Elizabeth Gilbert. Greenlight sells both bundled and unbundled tickets through BAM’s box office, and the venue buys books from the store in bulk. For bundled events, Stockton Bagnulo said Greenlight brings in the books the day of the event to distribute to ticket holders.

Greenlight also partners with St. Joseph’s College, a small liberal arts college in Brooklyn with a 350-seat auditorium, to present the Brooklyn Voices series. The store uses the performance space for free, and the school, which has a new MFA program, gets the benefit of marketing St. Joseph’s as a literary destination.

“We’ve done very few events where we’ve actually rented a space. If you can find a venue that you can partner with where they are getting something out of it other than you paying them, that is the number one way to control costs,” said Stockton Bagnulo. “If the space doesn’t actually cost you anything and you are just paying for labor and for books, that is ideal. And the more collaborative marketing you are doing, the less you are paying in terms of resources to put into marketing.”

Greenlight sells tickets for St. Joseph’s events through the website Brown Paper Tickets, which doesn’t require a fee to post events. In addition to the ticket price, the buyer pays $0.99 + 3.5%, which includes delivery and credit card processing. Tickets are bundled with the book, said Stockton Bagnulo.

For a summary of best practices for staging large-scale off-site events, booksellers can refer to Greenlight’s guide to large-scale event procedures.