Record ticket sales on opening day

After much anticipation, our tickets went on sale on Friday 28 June and we have been thrilled with the response to our 2013 programme. Thousands of people booked by phone, on the website and at our Box Office counter at the Roxburghe Hotel in Edinburgh - in fact we sold more tickets this year on our opening day of sales than we have ever done - proving that literature has Wembley Stadium-sized rock-star status in the hearts and minds of anyone who loves a good read, doesn't mind dipping their toes into the unknown and enjoys being part of a great discussion - whether serious or not.

Competition for tickets was fierce: the first customers in the queue for the Box Office at the Roxburghe Hotel arrived at 3.10am and by the time we opened at 8.30am there were already 286 people waiting.

Our new strand of Reading Workshops across both the adult and children’s programmes has proved popular (although they aren’t all sold out yet so have a look at availability) as have talks featuring Caitlin Moran, Andrew Marr, Robert Peston, Kate Atkinson and Rupert Everett, which all sold out quickly. The Independence Debate with Kirsty Walk, the Celebration of Iain Banks and The Phoenix Comic Workshop in the Stripped programme also sold out.

There are literally hundreds of events which haven’t sold-out though – as you would expect with a programme of over 700 events and 800 authorsso plenty of tickets still available for all sorts of wonderful authors, poets, illustrators and graphic novelists.

Here’s a link which you can use to check what’s sold out:

http://online.edbookfest.co.uk/soldout/

This is an active link which updates automatically so you can use it from now until the end of the Book Festival.

A few tips for browsing online:

Have a look at the themes pages – they are a great guide to broad subject areas and give you a good idea of the shape of the overall programme.  

If you just want to know whether we have any events with a focus on a particular subject, for instance ‘Russia’, ‘birds’ or ‘classic novel’, simply type it into the keyword search box.

And use the drop-down category search menu for finding events on a whole variety of subjects such as music, health, science, education, politics, European Fiction, Free events, debates and so on.

And of course you can always just search for a particular author too by using the Author A-Z.

We hope you enjoy browsing the programme – if you prefer to flick through a paper version of the brochure we’d be happy to send one to you, simply email mailinglist@edbookfest.co.uk.

Or you can browse the digital edition of the brochure on screen instead.