Ticketing! What a joy...

This morning at 9am tickets went on sale for our very first festival, and you cannot imagine the amount of excited squealing that has gone on as we see you all booking your tickets, and yet, as with everything events based in my experience, there have been a few little bugs along the way...

Instagram post detailing ticketing

Unfortunately, our website providers, who also provide the events system we are using, have, for reasons best known to themselves, decided not to include 'add to basket' as an option for their events (although they do on products...) thus meaning you have to checkout individually for each event you want to book tickets for. Frustrating, for sure! Probably, by our second year they will have resolved this, and we are looking to see if there is a workaround for this year, but for now please accept our apologies for this inconvenience - we hope you'll still book lots of lovely events over the festival weekend!

We had a lot of discussions about ticketing before we reached today. Whether to charge at all (yes, because our experience of creating entirely free events over the last 10 years of Bookshop Crawl UK is that less than 50% of people who book free tickets actually turn up, thus meaning the event is less worthwhile and less fun for everyone involved), how much to charge, how to ensure access for everyone, especially those who might feel like book festivals were generally inaccessible to them, and here is what we've come up with:

For all of our events, each ticket booked entitles you to one free accompanying adult.

Firstly, all of our schools events on Friday 11th July are totally free to schools, and funded by support from the wonderful folk at the University of Kent and Chapters Coffee and Books in Sturry. On Friday and Saturday we're also running several events at Canterbury Library, all of which are free or pay as you feel, although we still ask that you book space so we know how many people to expect. It's the launch weekend for the library's amazing Summer Reading challenge that weekend, and if you've got a Kent Libraries card you can check out lots of lovely free books while you're there (and if you haven't got one, just bring along a proof of address and you can register for one while you're there!).

In collaboration with the Canterbury Shakespeare Festival, the lovely people at Cut Out Theatre are putting on two performances of A Kidsummer Night's Dream on Saturday 12th July, and tickets for that are pay as you feel, with all donations going to support both festivals!

For the rest of our kids events, we're providing tickets on a tiered basis - £3 for unwaged (anyone on universal credit, jobseekers, PIP etc), £5 standard and £10 festival supporter. If you're able to purchase one or more of your tickets at festival supporter level we would appreciate it, as all of the money from ticket sales goes back into the festival to enable us to continue free and low cost tickets in future years.

There are a couple of events where ticketing is a standard price and each person attending must purchase a ticket. Currently these are The Big Kids Bookish Quiz for Adults and Storytelling Board Games at The Long Rest. This is because they are events where we expect that adults will want to participate too. Although we know you'll have an excellent time at all of the kids events, we also know that there's an element of needing to go along to supervise a child, and so we wanted to support that (as parents who have been in your shoes many times ourselves!), but quiz night? board games? Those are for everyone!

Watch this space as there is still more to be announced!