Becoming an author was such a thrilling moment. Aside from having a physical copy of my first book in my hands, I was also excited about the prospect of attending book singing events and as many other events I could get involved in as an author.
But not long after I published my first book, the world shut down, thanks to the pandemic. And so began the waiting game for when the world would reopen and book signing events would start up again. Unfortunately, as most industries experienced, there were a lot of false starts. So after losing count of receiving an official offer to be an attending author of an event, only to have covid shut it down a few months later, the frustration peaked.
After a few group chat discussions with a few author friends, we decided to channel our frustrations of the pandemic still causing problems, and organise the online book signing event - Ozzie Indie Book Fair - a.k.a "Oi! A BookFair".
We reached out to a few authors to generate some interest. At the time we weren't sure how many would be willing to get involved, and whether it would be a struggle or not to convince people to get involved with an online FaceBook event. Initially, we had thought we'd be more than happy to get close to 20 people involved. But to our surprise we were thrilled to have almost 40 willing souls jump on board. And what was initially going to be a one day event, turned into a weekend long event.
We were stoked. Author friends Nikki Minty, Liv Evans, and PA friend Treece Stubbs, helped out by working around the clock for close to three solid months. We did everything we could to ensure the event was a success.
It was a lot of work, and after many group chat discussions, and many hours of flexing our amateur event organisation skills, we were thrilled to deem the online book fair a success.
Through the process we've encountered so many new readers, authors, and other vendors, bookish creatives, and audiobook narrators. And we're even glad to now call a lot of them friends. Furthermore, now that the world has opened up again, and book events are finally happening again, it's been exciting to even meet a lot of our new bookish community friends in person. A huge shout out to Treece, Liv, and Nikki for all the epic work they put into organising the event. And a thousand thank you's to everyone who was willing to get involved to make an enjoyable and memorable weekend 💜