Edinburgh Book Festival: Funding Challenges & Future

Edinburgh Book Festival faces funding cuts, sponsor changes, and rising costs (visitor levy, author lodging). Seeking author contributions for sustainability. Focus on train travel.

Niven composed: “Guide Event is a charity, and in 2025 we spent around ₤ 200,000 on suiting our event. Our company believe that this makes us an outlier in terms of similar sized celebrations in England and Wales, who generally do not cover these lodging expenses. This is the very first time that we have actually made such a request.”

The festival will certainly remain to make various arrangements, including ensuring authors are booked into celebration partner resorts, at the most effective prices readily available, co-ordinating an autonomous fee structure so all authors and chairpeople are paid the same, supplying warm meals, co-ordinating publication sales and complimentary tickets to name a few points.

Rising Costs and Savings

Niven defined how the year-on-year rise in cost “will certainly not offer us the cost savings we require to deliver a celebration that is outstanding, and also lasting” and that “Edinburgh City board is likewise introducing a 5% visitor levy from July 2026, which we are not presently excluded from”. She added: “We are proactively lobbying the Council about this, and any type of advantage to this will certainly be to all of our advantage.”

Sponsorship Impact Review

EIBF and Baillie Gifford finished their longtime collaboration in May 2024 complying with debate around the property management firm’s relate to fossil fuels. This year, Niven reviewed the influence: “While we’re delighted to maintain some really long-standing sponsors and bring new ones into the event, we’re certainly having to spend even more time and sources cultivating relationships and seeking means to stabilize our funding. The effect of that itself is considerable.”

Author Contribution Request

The festival is asking for a payment of 50% from each author (or imprint, if suitable) for accommodation prices, to be invoiced at the verdict of the 2026 festival, which balance ₤ 330 per evening throughout the event dates, so 50% expense per evening is ₤ 165. In regards to travel, Niven requested “ongoing assistance to bring your authors– by train when possible– from within GB, and for contributions to take a trip from authors who are additional afield”.