Howard Kingston, co-owner of Books Along the Teche, is hard at work preparing for the Books Along the Teche Literary Festival in early April.

With the Books Along the Teche Literary Festival just a week away, Howard Kingston is feeling the burn.

As part of the organization that helps put together the festival, he is tracking down loose ends and making sure all of the arrangements for the annual event are squared away. His personal bailiwick, making sure everything is arranged for the visiting authors and the sidewalk book sale, involves a lot of last-minute planning.

Luckily, it’s not his first rodeo — or even his first book sale. As co-owner of Books on the Teche bookstore on Main Street, along with his wife Lorraine, the literary festival and the challenges it would cause for a less experienced hand are no obstacle for Kingston.

We caught up with him Wednesday afternoon at his store as he laid out his schedule for the next few days.

So how long has the festival been here?

This is the fourth year, and Lorraine and I have been involved from the beginning. It started out as the Dave Robicheaux-James Burke fest, but we talked to a lot of people and told them what we wanted to do. I always wanted to make sure the literary part didn’t get lost, especially for the local authors.

How important is the festival for local authors?

We have quite a few local authors, but they are mostly self-published, so they don’t have a lot of promotion or a lot of money to spend on promoting their books. The festival and the book sale are a way to get their names out there.

Do the authors take advantage of the festival?

Yes. We had 50 sign up last year, and we have 40 so far for this year. I’ll keep signing them up until the last day, so I imagine we will end up with at least 50 for this year.

What kind of response have you received from the authors?

They are pleased. They can’t do a lot of promotion themselves, so this is a venue for them. We have one author who comes in from Texas who grew up in south Louisiana and uses this area as a setting for his books. I get good feedback from them all. They can get a table for $20 for the book sale, which is almost nothing. Then someone picks up one of their books and tells someone else about them. They get exposure.

So how much lead time do you need to get this together?

We’ll have a meeting right after the festival and talk about how it went, what we saw that worked and what we can improve. Then we will take a few months off and then start meeting every month. I start getting busy in February, calling authors and starting to get the map together. I put a bunch of numbers in a jar and draw them out to make the map for the book sale. We have authors from Iberia Street to Julia Street. Then I put together the map.