⁂Early membership by invitation · Est. 2026
LITfest
Built for you, on your own name. Everything a reading needs behind it.
A member’s site: ivypochoda.com
The argument
You read for forty minutes, sign twelve books, and go home. Somewhere a number moves. You are not told which one, or by how much, or whether the drive was worth it.
That number decides things. Editors weigh a writer’s sales history when they decide whether to buy the next book, what to advance against it, and how much of a campaign to put behind it. A thin history is an immediate pass. The house has the figures. The writer gets a per diem and a guess.
LITfest is the other half of that arrangement. Not a marketplace, not an agency, and not a website builder with a bookish coat of paint. It is a site built for you, on your own name, and the working end of a writing life behind it.
Contents
Six things, a seventh on the way, and no dashboard to learn.
- I
The Site
Yours. Built for you by a person, not picked from a template: six editions, five ways to open, set by hand to your books. On your own domain, so ivypochoda.com is Ivy Pochoda’s site and not a page on ours. Your old links keep working. Everything changes from one place, and every publish is kept.
Your domain. No template. No hosting bill. - II
The Events
A page that keeps itself. Your events come from the calendar you already use. Add a reading on your phone in the green room and the page has it before you sit down. Each date carries directions, a way to pass it on, and “I’ll be there,” so you know how many are coming before you walk in. Past dates stay, greyed, as a record.
Reads your calendar every ten minutes - III
The Press Kit
It answers first. Festival programmers and journalists want the same five things and always in a hurry: a bio at one exact length, a headshot at print resolution, the book facts, the photographer’s credit, how to say your name, who to write to for what. They help themselves. You stop being the bottleneck between a festival and its programme.
A page, and one archive to download - IV
The Code
On the signing table: a card beside the pile, printed in your own jacket art. A stranger points a phone at it and is reading your first pages within seconds. No app, no account, nothing to install. At the end of the sample: where to buy it, in the order you chose, reporting booksellers first.
One code per event, revocable - V
The List
Your mailing list, in your own record. Bring the one you already have, from Mailchimp or anywhere, and from then on it grows on its own: readers who want to hear from you give an address at the end of a sample or on the way to a reading, and it goes straight in. Consent is dated, leaving is one tap, and you get a note the moment someone joins. It downloads whenever you like, including away from us.
Export whenever you like. No hostage-taking. - VI
The Letters
Write to everyone on your list, from your name, and replies land in your own inbox. This is the mailing you were paying Mailchimp for, inside your membership: no second subscription, no template with someone else’s logo. Every letter says why the reader is getting it and how to stop.
One letter, once, to everyone who said yes - VII
The Merch
Coming soon. Totes, bookmarks and shirts in your own jacket art, and yours to decide how they move. Order a box for yourself and sell them at the table, or hand them out. Put them in a small store on your site and choose, item by item, how each one gets to a reader: printed and shipped on demand, shipped by you from the stack in the hall, or only ever in person. A bookmark is not a print-on-demand job; a tote can be. Later, for authors who sell their own books, the books too.
Coming soon · at the table, in a store, or both
Plate I · The table
A signing table that tells you something afterwards.
This is the part no website builder has, because it is not a website feature. It is what happens in the ninety seconds a stranger stands in front of your books and decides.
- i
She scans
A card on the table. Her own camera. Nothing to download.
- ii
She reads
Your opening pages, set properly, on the phone already in her hand.
- iii
She stays or she doesn’t
Past page two is the whole signal. That is a reader, not a browser.
- iv
She buys, somewhere real
Your booksellers, your order. The sale is hers and the shop’s, never ours.
Afterwards you know which rooms read and which rooms clapped. Two hundred scans at a festival where nobody got past page two is a different evening from forty scans where half of them finished, and until now no writer alive could tell those two evenings apart.
What we will never pretend to measure
A tap through to a bookseller is a tap through to a bookseller. Whether she bought is between her and the shop, and we have no way to see it. Anyone selling you that number is guessing.
Colophon
What LITfest will never do.
- †Take a penny of a book sale. Not a commission, not a cut, not a finder’s fee.
- †Write a word of your book, or offer to.
- †Train anything on your pages, your list, or your readers.
- †Stand between you and a publisher, a festival, or a brand. They write to you.
- †Keep your list if you leave. You take it with you.
- †Put you in a template. Every site is set by hand, and no two are the same.
We charge a membership and nothing else. It is the whole business model, deliberately, because the moment a platform earns from your sales it starts having opinions about your career.
Early membership is by invitation.
For now there is no sign-up form, and that is on purpose. If a writer sent you here, use their name.