The Alabama Book Festival promotes literacy and celebrates books and reading. Each year we invite writers who have published books within a year to 18 months before the festival to talk about their work, either individually or on a panel, and we ask that presenting authors also be available after their presentations to sign books.

We focus on authors and topics with a connection to Alabama, but we also include a wider range of topics and authors without a connection to the state. We aim for the best fit and variety for our audience of enthusiastic readers from Alabama and neighboring states.

The genres of books we consider  include poetry, fiction, narrative nonfiction (essays, history, memoirs and biographies, travel, the arts), cook books and food-related narrative, and children's and young adult fiction and nonfiction. Because we're promoting literature and reading, we do not consider self-help, medical, how-to, religious, or books whose primary focus is academic or religious

We do consider self-published books (that is, books that are published by the author or through joint-venture, vanity, or subsidy publishers or print-on-demand services) in most of the same genres as for traditionally published authors; however, we do not consider self-published poetry collections.