By invitation · Est. 2026
LITfest
Your publisher knows which rooms sell your books. You don’t.
The argument
You read for forty minutes, sign twelve books, and go home. Somewhere a number moves. You are not told which one, or by how much, or whether the drive was worth it.
That number decides things. Editors weigh a writer’s sales history when they decide whether to buy the next book, what to advance against it, and how much of a campaign to put behind it. A thin history is an immediate pass. The house has the figures. The writer gets a per diem and a guess.
LITfest is the other half of that arrangement. Not a marketplace, not an agency, and not a website builder with a bookish coat of paint. It is the working end of a writing life.
Contents
Four things, and no dashboard to learn.
- I
The page that keeps itself
Your events come from the calendar you already use. Add a reading on your phone in the green room and the page has it before you sit down. Past dates fall away on their own. You will not log in to fix it.
Reads your calendar every ten minutes - II
The kit that answers first
Festival programmers and journalists want the same five things and always in a hurry: a bio at one exact length, a headshot at print resolution, the book facts, the photographer’s credit. They help themselves. You stop being the bottleneck between a festival and its programme.
A page, and one archive to download - III
The code on the table
A card beside the signing pile, printed in your own jacket art. A stranger points a phone at it and is reading your first pages within seconds. No app, no account, nothing to install. At the end of the sample: where to buy it, in the order you chose.
One code per event, revocable - IV
The list that is yours
Readers who want the next chapter give you an address. Consent is dated, leaving is one tap, and the whole list downloads as a file you can carry to any mailing tool on earth, including away from us.
Export whenever you like. No hostage-taking.
Plate I · The table
A signing table that tells you something afterwards.
This is the part no website builder has, because it is not a website feature. It is what happens in the ninety seconds a stranger stands in front of your books and decides.
- i
She scans
A card on the table. Her own camera. Nothing to download.
- ii
She reads
Your opening pages, set properly, on the phone already in her hand.
- iii
She stays or she doesn’t
Past page two is the whole signal. That is a reader, not a browser.
- iv
She buys, somewhere real
Your booksellers, your order. The sale is hers and the shop’s, never ours.
Afterwards you know which rooms read and which rooms clapped. Two hundred scans at a festival where nobody got past page two is a different evening from forty scans where half of them finished, and until now no writer alive could tell those two evenings apart.
What we will never pretend to measure
A tap through to a bookseller is a tap through to a bookseller. Whether she bought is between her and the shop, and we have no way to see it. Anyone selling you that number is guessing.
Colophon
What LITfest will never do.
- †Take a penny of a book sale. Not a commission, not a cut, not a finder’s fee.
- †Write a word of your book, or offer to.
- †Train anything on your pages, your list, or your readers.
- †Stand between you and a publisher, a festival, or a brand. They write to you.
- †Keep your list if you leave. You take it with you.
We charge a subscription and nothing else. It is the whole business model, deliberately, because the moment a platform earns from your sales it starts having opinions about your career.
Members arrive by introduction.
There is no sign-up form, and that is on purpose. If a writer sent you here, write to us and use their name.