After the Safer at Home orders shut everything down, the Pasadena Literary Alliance was forced to think of new ways to accomplishes its goals.
“We began to realize that we could either sit on our hands and not support these authors, which is our mission, or we could start these virtual recordings,” said Katie Poole.
Those virtual recordings with authors have become Open Books on Location, a live to tape recording, which means it is recorded in front of a small audience.
“We created a partnership with the Altadena Library District for the distribution of these videos,” Poole said. “They had a strong technical capability and the desire to really amp up their author visits. They really wanted to get it out to their community and they have a large digital online community. We put our heads together actually before the virus, we were trying to figure out what to do, and then this happened and we just looked at each other and said, let’s do this! They have just really risen to the occasion.”
Episode 3 of the Pasadena Literary Alliance’s Open Book on Location will be available June 26 at 5:00 p.m. at https://pasadenaliteraryalliance.org/open-book/
Guests include Cornelia Funke, one of the most famous and bestselling children’s authors in Germany, who has been called the German J. K. Rowling.
Patrick Rothfuss, an American fantasy writer best known for his ongoing trilogy, “the Kingkiller Chronicle,” and Leslie S. Klinger, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, H. P. Lovecraft, Frankenstein, and the history of mystery and horror fiction.
Building on the successful Pasadena Festival of Woman Authors event which has been presented annually since 2009, this new series provides opportunities for the community to enjoy authors of all kinds – both established and emerging, national and local, men and women, writers of fiction and non-fiction.
“We’re an audience of a few people, 12 people in the room, in the virtual room, and then we make it available yeah, and then we record it,” Poole said.
Poole said she was in the room for the recording and was captivated.
“One of the books that [Cornelia Funke] has written, I’m going to read it. With the bookstores suffering, how do these authors get their books purchased by people? That’s the real struggle and almost to an author they can’t do in-person author tours.”
Bookstores were forced to close when the pandemic began, although many of them were already struggling.
According to Time Magazine, Amazon now accounts for more than half of all book sales, according to the book audience research firm Codex.
“One of our interviewers showed me an interview that he had done that was with somebody who was in Australia under stay at home orders. And it just really made me realize that, of course we’d love to have the authors come to Pasadena. That’s how we’ve been operating for 12 years. But because of the stay at home rule, now all of these authors are at home and we can get them on the line. So it opened up a world, a world of authors. I think you’re going to be really interested in who’s coming up next.”
The group’s future recordings are already in process right now. And they just only get better and better in terms of names that people will be familiar with.”
Best selling authors Cornelia Funke and Patrick Rothfuss discuss fantastic fantasy fiction with Les Klinger in June 26’s Episode 3. Click here for more.
