Two book festivals. One weekend. Has a new West Coast-East Coast rivalry emerged?

This weekend, an estimated 160,000 people will pour into the USC campus to attend the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books.

At the same time in New York City, some 20,000 people will gather at the Javits Convention Center in Hell’s Kitchen for BookCon, a tradition that dates back to 2014—and typically takes place in late spring.

Is this the beginning of a classic bicoastal rivalry? Are there enough authors to go around?

As BookCon marketing manager Fallon Prinzivalli tells it, the event landed on this weekend simply because it was “the closest that we could get” to the traditional late May/early June slot.

She also said tickets for BookCon sold out within hours.

“We knew we had an audience for it,” she told LAist. “But I do think the speed at which we sold out was very surprising, even to us.”

The L.A. Times festival, composed of outdoor and indoor events, was launched in 1996.

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Courtesy Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

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Mattie Schaffer, the driving force behind the L.A. Times’ festival, said she’s not worried.

“I think BookCon is such a different event,” she told LAist. “There's obviously a little bit of crossover in audience and authors, but I think there's enough room for multiple literary events. I kind of see it as a sign of how vibrant the book world is. It's giving opportunity for folks on both coasts to celebrate reading.”

What book lovers can expect  

On top of panels, workshops and the chance to have their books signed by their favorite writers, book lovers in NYC can expect “ immersive, fully built sets,” Prinzivalli said.

“People love a photo opportunity,” she added. “And, obviously, with the rise of TikTok and Instagram prioritizing reels, video content is also really important. So we want to provide those areas for our fans.”

The New York event will also feature book swaps, where readers can find texts with little notes from their former owners. At Indie Alley, they’ll have a chance to check out work by independent authors.

The L.A. Times event will also feature author panels, local booksellers and the chance to learn from the newsroom’s journalists. Outdoor events will be free to the public. Indoor events will require buying tickets.

“This year, we're really leaning into podcasts and audio books,” Schaffer said. “As people continue to listen more and more to books and podcasts on their phones, we're trying to meet them where they are.”

It’s not known how many authors were invited to both events, but despite a lack of public competitiveness between organizers, some authors have had to make a choice. And an LAist review of each guest list revealed little overlap among the scores of panelists, save for about half a dozen writers.

Julia Whelan’s Coachella   

Julia Whelan is one of the few panelists at both events—a renowned author, screenwriter, actor and audiobook narrator.

Book festivals are her Coachella, she said. “You can just go meander from rockstar to rockstar to rockstar.”

Whelan—whose debut novel, “My Oxford Year,” is now a movie on Netflix—will start her weekend at USC with an 11 a.m. panel titled “Masters of the Mic: The Narrators Defining the Sound of Modern Storytelling.”

After that, she’ll take a red eye flight to New York, where she’ll be part of a panel titled “Narrating Blockbuster Audiobooks.”

Whelan—the recipient of Spotify’s 2025 Narrator of the Year Award (meaning she was the most listened-to narrator globally) and many other prizes— is also the founder of Audiobrary, an audio publisher that aims to ensure artists are properly compensated in the industry.

She’s not looking forward to bouncing from one coast to another, she told LAist. But she is excited for the panels.

“I just can't say no to being able to preach the gospel of audiobooks in front of very keen and excited readers and listeners,” she said.

Which is why the two simultaneous events don’t faze her; the more opportunities to celebrate books and the institutions that serve them, the better. Before and after the festivals, she’ll crisscross the country to speak at various libraries.

“ I have a little soft spot” for the L.A. Times Festival of Books, Julia Whelan (left) said. First-time readers lined up to have her sign her work there in 2018.

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Courtesy Julia Whelan

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Whelan, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Middlebury College in Vermont, said she “graduated with a certain idea about what constituted ‘good literature,’ with a capital L.”

Narrating audiobooks “very quickly de-snobbed me,” she added. “Suddenly, I was reading books across all categories and genres that I would've never picked up on my own as I would walk through a bookstore with my nose in the air.”

Now, Whelan said, she reads everything. “I'm interested in every type of storytelling.”

 If left to her own devices at a bookstore—or festival—she said, “I will always find myself in romance, because that's just my happy place. But I love historical fiction. I love historical nonfiction. (I like a lot of dad literature.) . . . I will truly pick up anything.”