YALC 2026 - Thoughts from an Indie Author

A rising tide lifts all ships

As an author, I love going to book fairs and events. It’s great to meet new people and potential readers and it gives me an excuse to come crawling out from behind my desk and venture out into the real world from time to time.

I was particularly looking forward to YALC (Young Adult Literature Convention) in London this year as I’d been the previous year and had a really good experience. I wrote about it here, discussing all the many lessons I learned! This time, Showmasters had cancelled London Winter Comic Con at Kensington Olympia, so YALC - which usually runs alongside - was held in a new venue, the Hilton Metropole hotel on Edgware Road instead. That was OK with me. It seemed easy to get to and in a nice hotel so I decided to take the train and book an overnight stay at the venue rather than commit to the four hour round trip to and from home each day.

As an author, I love going to book fairs and events. It’s great to meet new people and potential readers and it gives me an excuse to come crawling out from behind my desk and venture out into the real world from time to time.

I was particularly looking forward to YALC (Young Adult Literature Convention) in London this year as I’d been the previous year and had a really good experience. I wrote about it here, discussing all the many lessons I learned! This time, Showmasters had cancelled London Winter Comic Con at Kensington Olympia, so YALC - which usually runs alongside - was held in a new venue, the Hilton Metropole hotel on Edgware Road instead. That was OK with me. It seemed easy to get to and in a nice hotel so I decided to take the train and book an overnight stay at the venue rather than commit to the four hour round trip to and from home each day.

I was sharing a booth with a collective of indie authors called Indie Rebels. Kiera Nixon (who I had the pleasure of meeting at YALC in 2025) contacted me earlier in the year telling me that along with a few others, she was putting a group together with the hope of tabling at the 2026 event, and asked whether I’d like to take part. I thought about it for maybe a fraction of a millisecond before responding with a full-blooded “Yes-please-take-my-money” reply. And so I found myself a very willing member of the Indie Rebels.

Month’s passed, planning happened, others were recruited, and suddenly we found ourselves converging on the London Hilton Metropole on Halloween weekend 2026, with bags full of books, art, merch, branding, and several years’ worth (at normal consumption rates) of chocolate and sweets.

We’d all been speaking on Zoom or via WhatsApp for months, so when the time came to actually meet in person, it already felt like we knew each other well. For me, it was particularly great to see Kiera again, and to meet Sarah Edwards who I’d known for so long online but never met in person. We’ve done lots of beta reading for each other over the last couple of years, and she’s become a trusted friend. If something I’ve written is bad, Sarah will tell me in a way that makes me want to fix it instead of burning it all to ash - a function I hope I perform for her too - so it was great to find out that she’s every bit the star in real life as she has been online and over email.

Before the event started, I think we all had high hopes of a good sales weekend. For those of us who have tabled at YALC before, this has usually been the case. YALC has been a fixture in the industry for a long time now and has a way of attracting real readers, and Saturday morning saw a similar, initial rush of activity. There was a great buzz around the table with lots of interest and conversation around all our books.

However, by lunchtime, things seemed to change. Queues at the big publishers started to form, giveaways and proofs started to be handed out, and footfall past the indie, small press and artist tables began to fall away.

This isn’t new at YALC. Proofs are - and always have been - a big thing and many people go for the chance to get their hands on advanced copies of new books from their favourite authors, and for the publishers, it offers the chance to create hype and publicity around a new release ahead of time. I’d expected this, but I’d also hoped that once the queues had died down, we might get some respite and periods where footfall to the rest of the convention floor would pick up. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to be the case this time. For the rest of the first day, queues would almost constantly form, one after the other and simultaneously, to the point where footfall for the rest of us stopped almost completely for large periods of time.

The room in which we were situated was almost constantly full, but everyone was in queues. The same occurred the next day where from the moment the doors opened, queues formed, and again, it stayed that way for most of the day.

But it was towards the end of Sunday where things turned particularly uncomfortable for me.

In the last couple of hours, the discounts began. Then ramped up and up and up. Half-price hardbacks, £5 each, three for £10, until some stalls were literally giving away books for free in the final thirty minutes.

As an indie author, I can’t compete with that. I understand that there’s a trade-off between marketing and selling books. I too give away a certain number of ARC copies of my new releases to get some early reviews and word-of-mouth traction, and also to say thank you to those that have shared part the journey with me. But I can’t go to an event and just give out free books to everybody. They cost me a lot of money, money that I have to work hard to get back in sales.

Books, like all art, have value. A huge amount of work, money and emotional energy goes into the writing and production of a book and I find it difficult seeing so many thrown around in an essential free-for-all. I’m a big supporter of libraries and will happily donate my books for free to any cause, it if opens people up to the joy of reading who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity or the means, but this felt like a frenzy, of people discarding things for convenience or a dopamine hit. It was a little uncomfortable to be around, and I left on Sunday feeling a strange mix of elation with the people I’d met and the relationships I’d formed, but also unease at some of things I’d seen.

Now I’m home and I’ve unpacked, got some sleep and decompressed a little, I’ve been reflecting on the experience as a whole.

To be clear, I really enjoyed the weekend. I got to spend time with a wonderful group of fellow writers, all of whom now feel like true friends. I also met some great readers, some of which were even kind enough to buy my books. For an indie author, these things are genuinely priceless.

I’m also convinced that this is only the beginning for the Indie Rebels. I have the feeling we’ll do much more together in the future and develop the Indie Rebels banner further, and I hope I can be as much a part of that as possible. Kiera and Roxan especially, did an incredible job of organising us all, one which I feel indebted to and immensely grateful for.

But as enjoyable as the weekend was, I can’t escape the fact that financially, I made a loss. My first thoughts are (and should be) what can I personally do differently next time? How can I make my work better and stand out more so that I can continue to attract more readers? There are no free lunches in this industry and it is on all of us to do the best work we can to get ahead. We need to write our best stories, commission the best art we can within our means, create the best possible product in order to stand side-by-side with the big authors and publishers and compete like-for-like with their offerings, and to attract readers based on merit.

Every indie and small press I saw this weekend - without exception - was doing exactly that. Sometimes, that will be enough, and sometimes it won’t. There’s a lot about book events that’s completely out of our control and no matter what we do and how good our products are, sometimes it just won’t connect with the people there, and that’s just life for whatever reason.

But I do feel that we can - and should - expect that the industry plays its part. For every book we under charge, we devalue everyone’s work. For every book that’s thrown out for free, we give the impression that the work isn’t worth a thing.

A rising tide really does lift all ships, from the very smallest to the very largest alike, and we should all be working to raise that tide together. As a reader, I should expect and demand to pay a fair price for a book. One that I can afford, but one that also allows the author to keep creating the stories we all love. If we only accept freebies, or only wait for massive discounts, then we risk cannibalising the very industry we all love, and the only people who benefit from that are the very biggest companies.

If you can do that, then my commitment to you will be this: you will always get the very best that I can offer you, executed to the very best of my abilities. It will be unique, and it will be a part of my soul, a part which you can keep forever.

And I can only hope that that’s enough.

Alex

Mask of the Hare: A Folk-Horror Novella is out now in paperback and ebook from all the usual places. The signed special edition hardback is available now only at www.darkfellwrites.com