Litfests - is this the end?

Private Eye had an interesting snippet on the future for literary festivals in the current economic crunch a couple of weeks ago.

Although some of the best known, longest running and most popular festivals (such as Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh) may be financially secure enough to survive, a lot of the others apparently depend for their existence on the attendance of authors who are paid (or at least heavily subsidised) to go along by their publishers.

The only trouble is, Random House have already announced they will no longer pay for author 'jollies' of this kind and other publishers are likely to follow suit. This could easily mean that the rash of literary festivals that sprang up in virtually every town and city (heavens, even Birmingham has one *g*) may find themselves at risk.

Has anyone ever been to a literary festival? I keep looking, but they all seem so dreadfully woolly - it seems virtually impossible to get details of exactly what's on when, and how you pay, and whether you can pay for the whole festival or only for individual workshops. As for accommodation and food, those have obviously never even crossed most of the organisers' minds.

It'll be interesting to see whether Private Eye is right, and the number of festivals falls off sharply during the next few months. In which case I might have missed my chance...