The entrance to Children’s Booktown at Clunes – the wardrobe into Narnia.

Back from Clunes Booktown Festival, which seems to get bigger and better every year.

An estimated 15,000 book lovers descended on the historic gold mining town on the weekend to fossick for books at over 20 locations, including the Clunes Library, site of the new-look Children’s Booktown. That’s where you would have found the Wilkins Farago stand.

As a book publisher, there can be a lot of intermediaries (distributor, bookseller, librarian etc) between yourself and the people who actually read your books. We returned from the Clunes Booktown Festival with renewed energy, after talking about our books to many parents, teachers and librarians and, most encouraging of all, watching kids paw over them enthusiastically.

Children’s Booktown was buzzing all weekend. The colouring table we set up (with illustrations from Lila Prap’s Why?) was a big hit, we ran a competition to win a copy of Waiting for Mummy for Mother’s Day and the Clunes storytellers read some of our picture books to enthralled youngsters.

We must thank the festival’s organisers and the staff and volunteers at the Clunes Library for making us feel so welcome.

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