'Bruising scramble' for events producers over lockdown

Events organisers have revealed the “bruising scramble” of reorientating events for the online market, with plans hit again as lockdown easing is delayed.

At The Bookseller’s Marketing & Publicity Conference session "What Does Hybrid Mean for Author Events?" on Monday (14th June), the live panel was chaired by Madeline Toy, head of literature programming for Bath Festivals. She was joined by Serena Brett, producer at Fane Productions, Mairi Oliver, owner of Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh, and Jess Duffy (pictured), senior publicity manager at Bluebird. The group were speaking before Boris Johnson announced the lifting of the final phase of lockdown restrictions was being pushed back to 19th July.

Oliver said: “I am working remotely for the first time in my career as a bookseller, which has already been a really big shift for me, this idea that some of this work can be done at home rather than on the front-line of retail. Last year has been a scramble to turn things that make us ‘us’ into things we can deliver remotely. One has been events. In 2019 we did 189 events with our little five-person team; the week before we shut down, we did nine events.

“We lost that income stream, online became more expensive, we were able to lean into furlough, but it’s been bruising as a year in terms of trying to keep up and reinvent how we’re doing things.”

Brett agreed, saying: “Bruising and a scramble is a good way of summing up what it’s been like for us as well. We only did live events, so we lost 100% of our business overnight, lots of us were put on furlough, not knowing if the company would make it through to the other side. And when online events started we were quite skeptical: a lot of people were doing it on their phones for free, we wanted to make sure we could match the production values we did for our live events, so we didn’t do anything for a while, we just waited and watched to see what would happen. And then we decided we would do some hybrid events and some online-only events, but we didn’t have the skills or the kit, so we had to outsource a lot. We’ve got a lot better at that now and do it mostly in-house now.” The company produced around 300 events over lockdown and also “became booksellers” for the first time.

Brett said the situation has helped with brand recognition. “Normally when people book in a theatre they don’t know anything about the promoter but now people can book directly with us... we’re more in touch with our audience now.”

It also opened up the audience base across the world, with Fane broadcasting to 140 countries overall, Brett told the panel. “We recently did a survey of our database and a large proportion said they would never have considered attending a literary festival before."

However the government’s delay of lockdown easing means a further reassessment for event producers. “All our events we were hoping to do for full capacity we won’t be able to do any more,” Brett said. “So it’s constantly thinking on your feet and reassessing what we are as a company, all our jobs have changes. But there has been lots of pivoting and worrying.”

Duffy said: “There is more planning going into it than ever before. Whereas before we had two to three models of how an author tour would look, we now have 10 models of how it could go. There is also an assumption that online events are easier to do and this is just not true... they also take up a lot of time.”

She added: “It bought our digital skills forward five years.”

It also appears that some "digital fatigue" is setting in. Brett said: “We’re definitely seeing a drop-off in numbers, which we did anticipate with restrictions easing, and traditionally summer is a hard time to get people into venues anyway because there are so many sunny things to do.

“But our research showed that 80% of respondents said they would continue to watch events. It helps with accessibility for people who didn’t feel comfortable in that space or couldn’t attend for financial or other reasons—they will benefit from them being online. Sales are still strong for the autumn events which will have an online [element]. For the Stanley Tucci event in October at the London Palladium, we sold out the physical tickets very quickly but we’ve also sold 1,000 online tickets too.”