About a year ago, I was asked to participate in a local book festival. It was a trial “pop-up” event – twelve booths attached to an existing farmer’s market. There were about twenty authors there, and although it was never really busy, we all sold a decent number of books. It was clear that there was a hunger for this kind of event here in Sacramento.
Flash forward to today. We’re a month-and-a-half out from launching our second annual Sacramento Book Festival on May 31st, and this one’s gonna be way bigger – 140 authors, bookstores, local writing and literacy organzations, panels, and even a kids zone.
I joined an ad-hoc group of volunteers after the 2024 Festival, and after a series of unpredicted events, I am now acting as the Event Lead for this amazing venture.
As we were working on building this event, I started wondering if there’d ever been one before.
It turns out there was another attempt to create a local book festival back in 2014 – I found a reference to it in an old newspaper article, and was able to unearth the website via the Wayback Machine. They went big in their first year, and too few people showed up to justify the expense. It provided a valuable lesson – start small and grow organically (which my husband Mark was suggesting all along) – and it informed how we decided to launch this one.
We learned a few other things along the way:
- Keep it manageable. We started out with a ton of ideas for this year’s festival, and had to force ourselves to slim it down. We’re a team of five volunteers putting on a ginormous event, and at some point you just have to say no. “That’s a 2026 idea” became a regular refrain in our meetings, and we concentrated instead on getting the things done we’d already committed to.
- Maximize your resources: We are using just about every square inch of our venue. Table maps were created and recreated, and several walk throughs opened our eyes to the potential for different spaces. At one point, we found room for an additional 14 tables, which paid for itself (the additional table and chair rentals) and then some.
- Minimize your expenses. Instead of buying certain materials – donation buckets, sign placards, traffic cones, etc), we are reaching out to other local organizations to see if we can borrow theirs. And when we needed prizes for our scavenger hunt, we contacted local businesses and got donations in return for sponsorship recognition on our fliers and at the event. We’re running this festival on a shoestring budget, and every penny counts.
- Learn from other events. We contacted the Tucson Book festival and the Great Valley Book festival and received a ton of great tips and information on how to run an event like this. We implemented a number of their suggestions, and put the rest in our back pocket for 2026. I also picked up tips from other Sacramento events I attended… our scavenger hunt, to build up the mailing list and get folks to visit every part of the event; a thank-you bag for attending authors to make them feel appreciated; and even the length of the event, adding an extra hour and ending before dinner time.
- Value your team. We got lucky. We have a great team of core volunteers who are running the event, and are putting their hearts and souls into it. Each and every one has stepped up and put in so much time to make this an amazing (and hopefully continuing) event.
- Organize the hell out of things. Google Sheets has been my best friend throughout the whole process – we have at least 20 sheets covering a wide array of moving parts for the festival, including media and promotion, attending authors, venues, volunteers, prizes, and much more. Using Sheets allows everyone on the team to access the information.
- Remember – this is supposed to be fun. We do this for the love of books and reading, and although it can be stressful at times, it should also be fun, for us and for the authors and readers participating in the event.
The last thing I remind the team of almost every week is that we will make mistakes. They’re inevitable in a complicated event like this. We can try to minimize them with advanced preparation, but ultimately it comes down to how we respond when they happen, and how we learn from them the next time around. Each one is an opportunity to learn something new and do things better the next time around.
It’s been an amazing experience putting this event together (and it should look good on the resume LOL). But the true test will be how it all rolls out on May 31st.
Stay tuned.