MORE than 300 shows at the Edinburgh International Book Festival have sold out in a buying spree fuelled by the internet. But tickets for some of Scotland's biggest literary names – including James Kelman, the Booker Prize winner, AL Kennedy, the recent Orange Prize winner, and Irvine Welsh – were still available yesterday.
The book festival's sales are running 8 per cent up on this time last year, ahead of its Saturday launch. Internet ticket sales are up 33 per cent.
The book festival released a list of some top names still available yesterday but Catherine Lockerb
ie, its director, said many more authors would sell out in coming days.
"Irvine never sells out by this stage because his readers don't book so much in advance – they come on the day," she said.
Like Kelman, Welsh already has good ticket sales and tickets will rapidly go, she said. "We just wanted to point out that some interesting names still have tickets available at this point, but won't nearer the event."
The growth in festival sales will tail off as the event continues. The number of shows and seats are only marginally higher than last year in the festival's base in Charlotte Square.
The book festival is beaming the author Sir Salman Rushdie live to Melbourne in a new exchange with Australia's leading literary festival.
The writer, whose book Midnight's Children was recently voted the best Booker Prize winner, will field questions from the Melbourne Writers' Festival during his Edinburgh appearance.
In the satellite link-up, the Melbourne event is broadcasting an appearance by the young Vietnamese writer Nam Le to Edinburgh.
He is published in the UK by Scottish publisher Canongate.
"There are a number of respected book festivals in the world and Melbourne is the only one that overlaps with us," said Ms Lockerbie. "It's quite tricky because of the time difference."
Last year Norman Mailer was beamed live to the book festival from the United States. The appearance from the ailing but still feisty author was a festival highlight. He died months later.
The writer Margaret Atwood also road-tested her LongPen device for signing books at long distance in Edinburgh.
The festival is keen to cultivate links with Melbourne. The city is now poised to join Edinburgh as a Unesco World City of Literature.
Edinburgh became the first to win the title in 2004 and a network of literary cities is taking shape, with Calcutta another in line. Melbourne is expected to be the first to follow Edinburgh's lead.
Ms Lockerbie said of the exchange: "It's not exactly symmetrical. We are sending a major world writer to them, we are taking an interesting new writer from them." Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia and his book The Boat is his debut short-story collection.
Such shared broadcasts are about keeping events intimate but accessible, Ms Lockerbie said. The book festival's star attraction – Sir Sean Connery appearing with his book Being a Scot, co-written with the film-maker Murray Grigor – is set to be filmed for its website.
Ms Lockerbie refused to comment on the Fringe's problems with its box office. "I don't want to make any invidious comparisons," she said.
"Our online ticketing system is working perfectly. It tells us that people's behaviour is changing a lot, that there are more international bookings, because obviously it's the folk in the States that are doing that."
