Presenting at FoCo Book Fest is a chance to take the stage in front of curious readers and fellow creators by sharing your work, your process, and the stories behind the stories.

We’ll pair you with a supportive moderator, help shape the session so it flows, and create space for real conversation through Q&A and audience connection. It’s a great opportunity to meet new fans, sign books, and leave with relationships that last beyond the festival.

How book sales and signing work for presenters:

Presenting authors should also plan on a table in the book fair area to sell and sign books. Tables are a separate application with a $150 table reservation fee that covers both sales days. Submit a Table Application to reserve one. You may opt in to having The Crowded Bookshelf, FoCo Book Fest’s official bookseller, handle your book sales; coordinate that directly with them before the event.

• 95% to 5% Rule: 95% amazing content, 5% self-promotion (if any). Seriously: do not use this as a self-promotion vehicle. If you do, you will not be asked to speak again.
• Author Talk Attendance goes WAY up when there’s a sneak peak for a new work, a hidden story about a favored character, or something else that readers + fans wouldn’t get anywhere else.
• Panel Attendance goes WAY up when there is a VERY CLEAR take-away from the session: “by the end of this session, you will know how to _______”.
• Speakers engage their audience ahead of time via email and social media, promoting their own talk, and sharing out the FoCo BookFest social media promotions for their talk.
• Authors have brought (or partnered with us to bring) copies of their book in for folks to purchase.

We’re especially looking for workshops built for young creators: hands-on making, live demos, and activities where kids and teens leave with something they made themselves. Think zine-making, comics and character design, storytelling games, bookbinding, illustration demos, and more. If that’s you, choose Workshop as your presentation type and tell us about capacity, materials, and any help you’d need.

Handed Down is an invitation to explore what passes from one generation to the next: family stories, recipes, languages, land, grudges, and the books that shaped us. We’re looking for talks, panels, and workshops that show how stories carry inheritance: what we keep, what we change, what we refuse, and what we hope to leave behind. Every genre has a lineage, from the worlds fantasy writers inherit to the monsters horror keeps reinventing.