Staging the Boston Book Festival: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Boston’s Biggest Literary Event

By Jessica A. Kent
October 11, 2019

 If you’re anything like me, you mark your calendar for the Boston Book Festival as soon as the date is released, or even just keep your Octobers clear in anticipation. The biggest literary event in the area, the Boston Book Festival takes over Copley Square and a number of surrounding venues each year to provide a full day of literary programming: Readings, panels, discussions, talks, literary games, and workshops. There’s a street fair with organizations, MFA programs, lit magazines, and more. There are costumed characters and a number of events for kids. There are local bookstores selling presenter books. There are musicians and performances at a special stage outside. There are food trucks. There are walking tours of literary Boston. And there are thousands of people who descend upon Copley Square, the Boston Public Library, Trinity Church, Old South Church, and many more historic and contemporary venues in the heart of Boston to celebrate books, reading, and writing.

2019 marks the eleventh iteration of the Festival, and for the first time, it’s expanding from one day to two, with Sunday events in Roxbury. Attendance is anticipated to be 30,000, and the two days will feature 32 venues, 144 different events, and 350+ presenters.

And if you’re anything like me, you wonder how an event of such magnitude could possibly get planned, organized, and staged. Who’s behind it? What goes into it? I decided to find out, and reached out to Executive Director Norah Piehl. We met on a rainy Wednesday afternoon in Central Square, just around the corner from the Boston Book Festival offices, and talked logistics over coffee.

ELEVEN YEARS OF LITERARY PROGRAMMING

The Boston Book Festival was founded by Deborah Z Porter and held its inaugural event on October 24, 2009 in Copley Square. In a Boston Globe article that October, Porter stated that “Boston is the only major city that doesn’t have a public event to celebrate book culture. … This festival is meant to celebrate our literary heritage and what Boston still offers the world.” The first year attracted 12,000 attendees with award winning and bestselling authors, and though it took three years to get off the ground, once it did, it has soared and scaled ever since. It has also retained its mission to “celebrate the power of words to stimulate, agitate, unite, delight, and inspire.”

Since 2009, the Boston Book Festival has only increased: More venues, more presenters, more sessions. 2010 doubled the amount of presenters and attendees, and welcomed the live music stage and the inaugural year of One City One Story. 2011 saw the first Friday night pre-Festival session that continues today, 2014 saw the addition of Boston By Foot walking tours, and 2016 saw the launch of the inaugural Boston Lit Crawl on the Thursday before. Last year saw a citywide #BBFBookHunt social media campaign lead into the Festival weekend. And this year sees the expansion – a long-awaited one – of the Festival to two days.

A LEAN BUT MIGHTY STAFF

You may think an event of this scale requires a massive staff, but it doesn’t. There is only a full-time staff of one and a half: Executive Director Norah Piehl year-round (who joined in 2011 and served as Deputy Director under Porter’s lead until this past year), and Director of Operations Raquel R. Hitt, whose time ramps up and down as needed throughout the year. This year, anticipating the expansion to two days, local poet and educator Jennifer Jean joined as coordinator for the Roxbury portion of the Festival. The team will grow in the Summer and Fall to include three interns as well. There is always the Board and Advisory Committee assistance and oversight that’s available, as well as the contribution of various independent contractors. And founder and former Executive Director Porter still remains involved in various ways, and continues to chair the board. Otherwise, the team runs lean, wears an incredible amount of hats, plans for every contingency in logistics, and has been able to execute a massive event with multiple moving parts seamlessly.

When asked about those early days of the Festival, Piehl said that the scale crept up gradually. “I had to laugh when I opened up the schedule grid from my first year in 2011 and saw how many fewer columns there were. It sneaks up on you.” Still, she admitted that “a lot of our growth has been really exciting for me” and cited programming like the BBF Unbound sessions and the increased kids and YA sessions that have added real value over the years.

A reader and writer herself, Piehl admitted that while staging this event is heavy on event planning skills, “it would not be as meaningful if it didn’t have to do with books. Because that’s what I’m excited about.” She then detailed the one year cycle of how to stage the Boston Book Festival.

ONE YEAR OUT

Setting the Stage for Next Year

Once the Festival ends and excitement is at its highest, fundraising campaigns begin in the afterglow, and sponsorships are lined up for the next year (the Boston Book Festival is a non-profit organization). The slight downtime during the remainder of the Fall gives the team the chance to work on lower key projects they might not have been able to tackle previously (Piehl cited this as the time to get acclimated to new newsletter software). And the team doesn’t forget to write thank you notes to the presenters!

Additionally, the board and advisory committees plan a series of debriefs to determine what went well, and what could be iterated upon for the following year. Because it’s now in its eleventh year, there is a good framework that can be built upon annually, but there is also a push to grow and innovate, which is especially true this year as the Boston Book Festival expands to two days – Day One in Copley Square, and Day Two in Roxbury.

Once January comes around, the programming planning begins. Grants are written, agreements with the many venues are renewed, and the search for authors begins.

Discovering Authors

This year, there are six keynote speakers and over 350 presenters participating in the Festival, and the team is deliberate about who they target to be a part of the event: Authors with new releases in the Fall, or local authors with a new release in the past year. A list of authors is made from various sources, but in February the team takes a trip. “We go down to New York and meet with as many publishers as we can to talk with them about what’s coming down the road, who might you be interested in sending to Boston for the Festival,” Piehl explained. “We end up with this massive spreadsheet of ideas. We have program committees for fiction, non-fiction, and kids and young adult, and we circulate those spreadsheets and get their feedback.”

Except for the BBF Unbound sessions, which are pitched panels curated by authors themselves, the sessions at the Festival are all created by Porter (non-fiction) and Piehl (fiction, kids and teens). Participation is by invitation only, and while sessions are loosely planned beforehand, final sessions come together dependent upon the responses they get. “We start with the keynotes first. And then we generally – though not always – build sessions around a particular author. Sometimes themes will emerge too, and we’ll invite a whole group” said Piehl, likening the whole process to a giant puzzle that stays fluid through the Spring as things are finalized.

I imagined the team moving Post-Its around on a wall as they create the master schedule, so I asked if that’s how they did it. “We used to have this big magnetic board with little magnets on it. Now we do it more in Google spreadsheets.”

Summer Month Applications

BBF Unbound are sessions that are pitched by the community, and self-organized. Applications open in May, and the final sessions are determined over the Summer, which means that slots are kept empty in the master schedule in anticipation. One City One Story is an initiative that publishes a short story and distributes it free to the community to read together. The author then speaks about the story at the Festival. A call for submissions opens in January, with the story being decided in the Spring and announced over the Summer. The Boston Book Festival hosts over 70 exhibitors at their outdoor fair in Copley Square, and applications are accepted May through July – including applications from the fleet of food trucks that have begun frequenting the Festival.

Vendor Permits, and Other Logistics

Complimenting Piehl’s lead on big-picture overview, author and social media communication, fundraising, and session curation is Director of Operations Hitt, who handles volunteer recruitment and training, vendor applications and communications, and venue relations. She also scouts out new venues for sessions and renews agreements with existing venues. Additionally, the team works with an outside contractor who liaises with the City of Boston, obtains permits to shut down the streets, oversees vendor health code applications, and the like.

Keeping Track: Spreadsheets and Databases

Because I have experience in event logistics, I had to ask Piehl about the spreadsheets. How is all this information – author names, book titles, ISBN numbers, publicist information, bios, sessions, moderators, unique needs, and more – tracked?

It all used to be collected in a 50+ column master Excel spreadsheet (“The Omnibus,” Piehl called it), and it would take weeks to mail merge out information to the presenters, spending most of the time making sure all the data was correct. This year, the team has moved to a new database that will house information and generate emails, itineraries, check-in lists, and more in just a day. “When I started in 2011, we only had about 120 presenters. Now we’re up to 350. It doesn’t look that much different on the day-of, but behind the scenes, it was taking so much longer to handle all of those communication pieces. To be able to automate that a little bit more is really helping a lot.” Piehl believes that this one change in technology is going to make it easier for them to scale up going forward, but the learning curve this first year has been steep.

And all those furniture, screen, and microphone needs for each session? Another spreadsheet collects how many chairs, microphones, and other specific needs for the various venues are required, and that will be given to their AV contractor.

Additionally, yet another spreadsheet collects information for the hospitality suites where presenters check in the day of the Festival. As Piehl mentioned in our conversation, the team really does need to think through everything.

MID-YEAR INTERLUDE: Lit Crawl and Lit Trivia

Recently added to the Boston Book Festival menu are two mid-year literary events. The Lit Crawl is an evening program of literary events hosted in various restaurants, retail stores, and other “non-literary” locations around Back Bay. For the first two years of the Lit Crawl, it was held the Thursday before the Boston Book Festival as kind of a kick-off to it, but the Festival team didn’t officially run it – they didn’t have the bandwidth. So the Boston Literary District became the planners. This past year, Lit Crawl moved to June, and will come under the umbrella of the Boston Book Festival as a mid-year event to keep excitement and engagement in the city high. Additionally during the summer, the Boston Book Festival sponsors a special literary trivia at Trident Books, where teams compete for prestige and swag bags. And I found out some trivia about the trivia: Piehl, a big trivia fan herself, writes all the questions, and her husband puts together the musical hints.

ONE MONTH OUT AND COUNTING

I took a guess at what was left to handle one month out: T-shirts, programs, name tags, signage, bios, website? Piehl confirmed: “Yup. All of that.”

At one month from the Festival, the bulk of the scheduling is set, sessions and presenters are finalized, last-minute spots, or vacated spots, are being filled in, and much of the physical needs of the Festival – the aforementioned t-shirts, programs, signage, and more – are off to the printers. Moderators have been sent copies of the books for their sessions. The full presenter list, with biographies and headshots, goes live, and the full schedule launches on the website (the afternoon we met for coffee was the day the schedule went live).

Additionally, a call for volunteers goes out – ultimately they’ll staff up to 350 volunteers – and the training session is held two weeks out from the event. There, volunteers will receive their assignments for their sessions.

At one point during our conversation, Piehl pulled out a notebook to jot down a last-minute thought, yet clued me in on the to-do list that was there: VIP credentials was on it. The draft of the program guide, a full-color booklet, needed to be proofed, and its index needed to be created. Making minute by minute run-of-show cue sheets for each venue was on the list, too.

“And then that last week, it’s really just putting out fires,” Piehl stated.

THE FRIDAY IT BEGINS

Friday is the day that all the material items – author bags, volunteer bags, signage, merchandise, and more – have to make their way from the office in Cambridge and various storage locations to Copley Square. A truck comes around to collect the items and brings them down to Back Bay, where a team of volunteers sort piles for each venue being used the following day.

“It’s all very theoretical until you get there,” described Piehl. “I usually arrive the middle of the day on Friday before the Festival, and the tents are all coming up and the stage is being built. Up until now it was just spreadsheets, and now it’s a real thing.”

Sorting, carrying, and set-up happens throughout the afternoon, but stops at 5:00pm. That’s when the team transforms from work crew to hosts for the presenter cocktail party, held at the Boston Public Library. To illustrate, Piehl explains that “you’ve been running around like a crazy person all day, thinking through boxes and stuff and signage and setup, and meanwhile checking your email obsessively because you don’t know what else is happening out in the world. And then all of a sudden, it’s the cocktail party, and it’s go time, and then the train is on the tracks. One way or the other, it’s happening.”

IMPACT

During a few more stories of Boston Book Festivals past, Piehl continued to circle back to one thing: The ways in which the Festival itself provides connection in the community, and creates value for it. She mentioned overhearing a group at an adjacent table the night after her first Festival talking about the sessions they had gone to that day. She described the kids at the Rick Riordan keynote one year, enthusiastic and excited to see their favorite author. She talked about connecting with many people from the community, but also providing the opportunity and the space for them to connect with one another as well. And she’s excited what the expansion into Roxbury will bring in regards to engagement, outreach, experimentation, and community partnership.

So much goes on behind-the-scenes to stage the Boston Book Festival, but what happens in front of the scenes – the connection with each other over literature, the inspiration from an author talk, the opportunity to see a favorite writer, the ability to learn something new about the world – is execution gone right.

The Boston Book Festival takes places Saturday, October 19 and Sunday, October 20, with a kick-off event on Friday, October 18. All events are free and open to the public. More information can be found at bostonbookfest.org.