THE biggest arts festival in the world, the Edinburgh Fringe, is to have a box office in Glasgow for the first time in its history.

Less than 3% of ticket buyers at the Fringe, which launched its programme in the capital yesterday, are from Glasgow. Director Kath Mainland has now decided to site a box office in the city's Queen Street Station from July to entice Glaswegians and those in the west of Scotland to the festival.

This year's Fringe is bigger than ever, with a 6% rise in the size of its programme of comedy, drama, theatre, music, and dance, with 2695 shows and a rise in the number of venues.

Ms Mainland said the Fringe, which has set up the Glasgow box office with the hope of making it an annual fixture in the train station, has used £80,000 of Creative Scotland funding to make its first concerted attempt to lure audiences from the country's biggest city to the annual arts festival.

By comparison to Glasgow, 22% of Fringe customers are from London, with Edinburgh providing around 50% of tickets bought.

The Fringe has for years lamented the comparative lack of customers from along the M8.

Festival-goers will be able to buy and pick-up pre-paid tickets from the box office, which will be open from 8am to 8pm and be sited under the station's departures board until August 27.

"We are doing a big marketing campaign in Glasgow with ScotRail, and it is our first-ever Glasgow box office from July 27," Ms Mainland said. "I think it is a good, well-known location, we will get commuters too. We understand there will be extra trains in August.

"Glasgow has never been a big percentage of ticket sales and we have never tackled it head-on. We have always wanted to.

"I think that we forget in Edinburgh about how the Fringe can be daunting: You have to navigate and plan, and if you are coming from London you are at least coming for two nights and you are potentially more relaxed, but if you are coming from Glasgow you need to know what you are doing, what are you going to buy, is there a ticket? There's more pressure for a single night out."

Ms Mainland said the Fringe had been in discussions with ScotRail about extra trains, in particular trains later than midnight – a common bone of contention for festival-goers.

"There are shows during the day and in the evening, the Fringe doesn't only happen at night," she said. "It is difficult for them to do later trains because of the infrastructure around the train stations, but they are working with us and I think, let's work with them and see how it goes this year, we are not just going to do it once and then go away."

A spokeswoman for ScotRail said: "There will be more trains and extra carriages during the festival, with an announcement of the enhancements to be made in the near future."

Last year the Fringe sold a record 1,877,119 tickets, up 2.57% on 2010. Ms Mainland said she would not anticipate this year's total, which may be affected by the London Olympics.

For the first time, Spoken Word is a separate category in the 373-page Fringe programme, including a number of poets and writers such as the nation's Makar, Liz Lochhead, who has a show at the Assembly Rooms.

This year the Fringe will host 42,096 performances of 2695 shows in 279 venues, with comedy taking up 36% of the programme.

An estimated 22,457 perfomers will take to the stage, with 814 free shows and 47 countries represented.