Byron Bay Writers' Festival (August 5-7) will announce its full program on June 15, and has already named some interesting names: New Yorker writer and surfer William Finnegan; Wild author Cheryl Strayed; African American writers Angela Flournoy (The Turner House) and Jeffery Renard Allen (Song of the Shank); Australian-born author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Dominic Smith; children's authors and illustrators Peter Carnavas, Nick Falk, Anna Fienberg, Tony Flowers; and locals including Charlotte Wood, Magda Szubanski, Damon Young, and the inseparable pairs Janet Hawley and Wendy Whiteley, Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales. Tickets at byronwritersfestival.com.

Canberra is holding its first full-scale writers' festival on August 26-28, with guests including British philosopher AC Grayling, political thriller writers Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlmann, fantasy writer Isobelle Carmody, memoirist Richard Glover, novelist/novella-ist Nick Earls. Winter and spring will also see smaller NSW festivals at Bellingen, Whitsunday (Airlie Beach), Wollongong, Mudgee, Batemans Bay, St Albans and no doubt others, so you are likely to find one near you.

UPS AND DOWNS FOR TINY PUBLISHERS

After last week's good news of literary publishers appointed at Picador and Xoum in Sydney came the sad news that the small Melbourne publisher Sleepers is closing - another casualty of Australia Council funding cuts. Run by Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner for 13 years, Sleepers published books by writers such as Kalinda Ashton, Steven Amsterdam, SJ Finn, Balli Kaur Jaswal, Eleanor Limprecht and David Musgrave, as well as the periodical Sleepers Almanac. Swinn told Undercover: "Sleepers has always been a labour of love, and we have been reliant on Ozco funding (usually about $4000 per book, which we apply for on a per-book basis). The last grant we applied for, for three books, we didn't get, but we went ahead and published the books anyway. So it's gone from something that broke even to something that basically runs at a loss, and it's too hard for us to justify."

But there's also good news for new writers from tiny publishers. The Lifted Brow has not only published its 30th quarterly journal of new writing but has begun publishing books under Sam Cooney, who had an Australia Council grant in 2014 to see how the US journal McSweeney's had expanded into books. The first Lifted Brow book coming this year is Briohny Doyle's debut novel, "a postmodern science fiction tale in the vein of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq" set in a dystophian future filled with natural disasters and on-screen relationships (or is that the present?). Similarly, Seizure magazine, co-founded by Alice Grundy and part of the Xoum family, will publish novellas following the success of its novella competition.

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF AMERICAN BOOKS

The latest Nielsen report on the US publishing industry shows print book sales increased almost 3 per cent in 2015 while ebook sales dropped 13 per cent and their share of the total market fell to 24 per cent from 27 per cent in 2014. Use of most electronic reading devices slipped but ebook downloads to smartphones almost doubled. The fastest growing genres were art and design, house and home, crafts and games (mostly adult colouring books, which rose from 1 million to 12 million copies), self-help, science fiction, classics, graphic novels, and children's non-fiction.The year's bestselling book was Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, which sold 1.6 million copies, followed by Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School by Jeff Kinney, Grey by E.L. James, The Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, and All the Light We Can See by Anthony Doerr - all above 1 million sales. The sting in the tail is that the proportion of Americans buying books has fallen by 6 per cent since 2011.