Melissa from Burton Book Bash

So, as I said, last year was very much a trial and error, you know, an experiment to see whether Burton needed a book bash, whether there was enough of an interest in it.

And obviously we were, we were blown away, you know, and we only had a very, very short lead time.

You know, it was only, you know, a couple of months, not even that from then.

me deciding to have this crazy idea to Nick going full steam effect into you know organization and planning mode um and as I said like a few weeks beforehand we'd only had like 30 40 tickets claimed and When they're free tickets, you've always got the risk of people claiming a ticket, then not turning up on the

day.

But as I said, we had over 100 people through the doors throughout the day.

And a lot of people, you know, had really, really good feedback on, you know, things they enjoyed, things they'd like to see slightly different.

So within 24 hours of that one ending, we were immediately going, OK, we need to be more prepared this year.

which is almost a swear word to me because me and the word prepared just doesn't really fit well.

But luckily for me, I have a Nikki.

And as I said, she is the engine behind everything that happens.

So immediately we were looking at how it could be structured, how we could reach more people, how we could make it more accessible and inclusive as well.

Obviously, we'd made sure that the event was free, but that didn't mean that it was completely accessible.

That didn't mean that everyone knew about it.

It didn't mean that... you know, there weren't things that we could improve upon.

So with the way that the reading world has developed over the last sort of five, ten years and the increase in popularity and a lot of self-published authors and self-published books and indie books and, you know, a lot of those authors don't get the same platforms and avenues as traditionally published authors.

Yes, that's right.

I think there's still a lot of taboo around it.

And the thing that I like to challenge as an author myself is the fact that, you know, you can have a self-published book that is absolutely terrible that someone has kind of what I call a weekend writer they've written it on a Friday and they've uploaded it to Amazon on a Monday and to me that breaks my heart because they're not doing themselves justice and they're not doing their book justice you've got other self-published authors that their books can sit along any other on a shelf and you wouldn't even know they were self-published and yet you've got traditionally published books that you look at and go how did this ever get from editorial you know how did this ever end up on a shelf so you know there's such a stark contrast in quality and variation in books and I think there's no right or wrong answer on whether a book should be traditionally published or self-published or hybrid published.

There's so many different routes that are relevant to people depending on what their aims and objectives are, depending on what they want to get from it and what a lot of people don't realise is traditionally published books may have that kind of old-fashioned stamp of authenticity because they've been for a publisher and You know, they've been given that seal of approval.

But a lot of time, the income and revenue stream for a traditionally published author, especially in the last five, ten years, is actually less than a self-published author.

You know, the average author from an RRP book will make a maximum of 35, 36 pence.

If that book's then sold in the supermarket or gone to a remainder contract with the works, you can earn anywhere from five pence down to half a penny per book.

So for a traditionally published author, that revenue and income stream and advances aren't what they used to be five, ten years ago.

Celebrity authors are now getting the limelight and the priority because they bring more sort of revenue to the publishers that they then say enables them to publish more books.