Current mood:

tired

Books, Glorious Books...
I got the chance to attend the coolest event today - it'd be a book lover's paradise, if only the average book lover could get in to see it.

This weekend at the LA Convention Center is BookExpo America (BEA), an annual event put on by and for the publishing industry. It's a place where publishers, librarians, booksellers, writers, and other folks involved in the publishing industry get together and discuss the latest trends, hear from bestselling authors, and learn about and make deals for the latest books. I was able to get in as a representative of Blondie's book selling business (Blondie sells books, among other things, on the Internet, and BEA's willing to be a little flexible as to who a "bookseller" is as long as you pay the registration fee), and I was absolutely amazed.

First off, BEA is huge. I'm talking every bit of exhibition space in the Convention Center is being used and people are calling the size of the event "modest" huge. Every major publisher is there, most minor publishers are there, a lot of independent publishers and self-published authors are too. They've all got samples of the books they're going to be selling or currently have on sale, they have authors available to sign books and speak to folks, and of course they have sales and publicity staff available to make deals to get those books in the store. You could easily give yourself a hernia just trying to pick up everyone's catalogs, as I quickly learned as I made my way through the place.

But it's not just the catalogs some publishers give away. If an author is there for a signing at the publisher's exhibit, the publisher provides the books for the attendees; titles they're particularly interested in building a buzz about are also offered as freebies to the attendees in some cases. This can cause a bit of confusion for the first-time attendee (that'd be me), as publishers also tend to put copies of all their books on display; fortunately, you learn the difference quickly by trial and error, and the publishers' reps are relatively forgiving (although I'm sure the minute you make this mistake they've pretty much got you pegged as a newbie).

The list of authors attending this event is astounding - we're talking hundreds of them. A lot of big names are among them - today, for example, they had Anne Rice, James Patterson, Alec Baldwin, Dean Koontz, T. Jefferson Parker, Ernest Borgnine, Salman Rushdie, Hugh Hefner (okay, he didn't write the book, but he attended with Steven Watts, who wrote the book about him), Mark Spitz, and William Shatner, just to name a few. No, I didn't get to talk to all of them. (Actually, I don't think I talked to any of them. I was too entranced by being able to walk around and see more book titles than I'd ever seen in one place to want to stand in line to meet anyone.)

The attendees also have the chance to meet and get signatures from authors outside of the publishers' booths. BEA has an autograph signing area consisting of 24 lanes, each with an author at a table ready to sign for them; each hour, the authors switch out and an new group comes in, so there could potentially be hundreds of authors each day signing books. Many of them may not be well known, but some are; for the authors who are particularly well-known, attendees have to get tickets to get a signature. It's still part of the event, it's just to keep things under control.

You name the literary sub-genre, there's a section devoted to it. BEA had sections devoted to children's books, travel books, African-American books, audiobooks, cartoons/graphic novels/manga, cookbooks, and books in foreign languages.

I only arranged for a one-day pass to this thing, thinking that I might not find anything to see or do. Oops. I never made it off the exhibition floor, but each day of BEA they have panels on topics related to the industry (yesterday, they had a panel on the latest buzz-worthy books; today, they had panels on graphic novels, Latino authors, and relations between libraries and publishers. They also had special ticketed events (these require an extra fee besides registration) like breakfasts and lunches featuring panel discussions with the "superstar" authors. (Michael Moore, Magic Johnson, and Christopher Buckley attended today's special events.) If I ever get the chance to attend again, I'll have to plan to spend more time to see some of the panels and specialty events.

I'm exhausted from walking and standing all day, I'm sore in some unusual places from all the promotional material and swag I had to carry around, but I'm really glad I got the chance to attend. I think I'm actually going to be a little disappointed the when the next LA Times Festival of Books comes around - it's an amazing event, too, but BEA was even bigger, and I didn't think that was possible. Hmmm - I wonder if I could start my own bookstore on the side?