Texas Book Festival 2009: The Envelopes Please

Austinist sat down last month with Clay Smith, the literary director of the Texas Book Festival to talk about this year’s lineup. Although the selections had not yet been finalized, we wanted to peer behind the curtain and talk about what he did and how the process worked. As you might expect, his office, on the second floor of a building off Brazos, was filled with books.

Austinist: You’ve been around books and authors now for over ten years, and you’ve been here since 2002. Talk to me about your approach to each year’s festival.

Clay Smith: The festival has always wanted to take the most recent books. And I may have pushed that a little more than people in the past. This year, for a number of reasons, it’s a very literary year: it’s not an election, the Obama administration is new so there is not yet much to write about, and publishers held over their big hitters to this year. The festival tends to reflect what is going on in the national, and certainly the state, publishing scene. I want to say to the public that these are the newest, hottest ideas.

Austinist: And where do these ideas come from?

Clay Smith: Mostly it’s the committee and my brain. We have a committee made up of writers who read each book. We meet earlier in the year to talk about the ideas that are happening in the culture and what we think we want to present. So part of it is we are reacting to what is published in any given year and part of it is we are looking for books based on ideas we think are relevant not just to the people in this state, but in this country.

Austinist: Could you describe the selection process?

Clay Smith: Starting in February, we meet regularly; more so early and around now when we are finalizing the selections. In terms of submissions, there is both a push and a pull: an author or publisher can submit a book and then we might also seek out certain authors during our annual spring trip to New York City. The only rules we have is that we don’t do spirituality and we don’t do self-help or self-published books. Somewhere around 1200 books (not including children’s book) are submitted and around 200 are selected.

Sometimes a writer might ask me why their book was not chosen. A writer may be a great stylist, his or her plot may be really engaging, I may think that the book would connect really well with readers, but that does not necessarily mean that it will be accepted. The book, in additional to words on the page, has to work in the program at large. It’s not just about literary achievement; it’s about the ideas we are presenting that year.

Austinist: Do you ever reach out to authors directly?

Clay Smith: Sometimes we do. Say we decided to put on a health care panel. We often receive books by doctors, say on the residency program; it’s pretty intense and can be dramatic. I might contact the author to determine if he or she would be willing to speak to issues that are broader than the book, perhaps an aspect of health care. But for the most, we take a book based on what’s between the covers - the words on the page.

Austinist: This is quite a bit different from your former job as a book editor at the Austin Chronicle. Do you like it?

Clay Smith: I do. One of the strange things about my job is that I am working year-round for a two-day event. The Capitol is a great venue and we use it for a totally different purpose - the conversations are invisible and they disappear after the festival is done. My hope is that the festival has a life that resonates throughout the culture for longer than those two days. If I didn’t believe that, I would probably go batty.

We don’t have the biggest festival, but we have a good track record of being a popular event - we’re free and open to the public and we have great writers. It’s never been my intention to have as many writers as we can; it’s been my intention to have the best.