A Huge Success For Writers, Libraries and Communities
On October 14th, libraries across North America celebrated the second installment of Indie Author Day: a day where aspiring writers, published authors, library professionals, publishers and literary marketers come together to create community around local, independent authors.
This year over 2,000 authors participated in nearly 200 libraries across 40 states and five Canadian provinces. Indie Author Day programming included sponsor-generated videos about self-publishing, book marketing, and genre-specific writing. These provided videos were played over 340 times, with the most views coming from New York, California, Ohio and Florida; the region with the most plays was Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Other IAD events included author discussions, book signings, and even an integrated yoga session!
Over 30 authors participated at Montclair Library in Montclair, New Jersey, including Philip Engsberg>, whose latest offering is a, “self-published a book of silly poetry and illustrations for young readers,” titled There’s A Lot You Can Do When There’s Nothing To Do And Other Short Stories.
“IAD 2017 was a great success, and I’m looking forward to another great one next year,” said Engsberg, who also enjoyed, “a fantastic presentation in PR and digital marketing by Mike Onorato from Smith Publicity.”
Libraries took the opportunity to highlight other writing avenues outside of eBook publishing, like a talk on screenwriting from Justin Wheelon, a multi-Grammy-winning director based in Aiken, South Carolina.
“It was great,” said Wheelon. “The people asked great questions and were super nice. Definitely want to help them however I can!”
Here’s what this year’s host libraries had to say about Indie Author Day:
“This is just a short THANK YOU for pushing me to hold our 2nd Annual Indie Author Day. It just concluded an hour ago and was a huge success. Thank you for taking care of the content with the short videos. Our group watched three and they generated a ton of discussion. As a result of this program, I now have two volunteers wanting to start a library writing group.”
– WT Bland Public Library; Mt. Dora, Florida
“Wanted to let you know how well our Indie Author Day went. The event was relaxed, with plenty of sharing and question asking. [We] had planned on an hour, give or take, and it lasted for almost 2 hours. Thank you for sharing the information about Indie Author Day. It was definitely a plus for us.”
– New Gloucester Library; New Gloucester, ME
IAD 2018 Date Announced!
Mark your calendars now: Indie Author Day 2018 has been announced for October 13! To inquire about participating in Indie Author Day 2018, click here. Registration officially opens in early 2018.
There must have been more than 2,000 participants at the 2017 even ts held around the world: by your statistics, that would be less than 10 per event and that makes no sense. We had four times that in our tiny town in northern Idaho. Could you give me a better number to use for publicity, please? Thank you.
This is just a statistic including how many authors were part of the events at the library (ie: on a panel, doing a book signing/reading, etc). This does not include all of the other attendees at each of the libraries as well.