The Occasional e-Clare: BookExpo America

This is my first BEA, and I have all of five hours on a Saurday afternoon to devote.  How do I do it, much less do it justice?  Well, I can’t, but here’s the overview.

BEA, as BookExpo America is familiarly called, is four days long, but it’s the North American opportunity for those who have book-buying in their job descriptions to see and be seduced by the newest titles.  There are over 1,500 exhibitors, largely publishers and related entities, and every possible style of book is represented.  If you can stitch a label onto it: self-help, history, biography, memoir, fiction of every cut and color, health, finance, politics, travel, graphic novels, children’s, young adult, it’s there somewhere being hawked by creators or enthusiastic advocates.  I understand there will be interviews and mass autograph signings and giveaways, casual get-togethers and larger-scale presentations.  Thanks to BookSpot Central, I can sign up for a press pass, so I’m universally welcome to drop by and report upon all these worthy efforts.  After my registration, the online blasts began, the modern equivalent of carnival barking.  Starting weeks in advance, new e-mails arrive from organizers and publicists announcing when authors will be available in person and why the opportunity should compel me.

I’ve been to the Javits Center before, most recently New York’s Comic-Con, so I’m expecting trade booths with folding tables, a confusion of block-lettered signs, and ubiquitous blue draping.  Rather than the muddied dust of market day, I anticipate acres of bland cement and industrial carpeting.  Our open-air will be conditioned beneath a single glass and steel superstructure on Manhattan’s West Side with convenient bus shuttles from local hotels and Penn Station.  These logistics have timetables and route numbers, and they’re way easier than managing a caravan of temperamental dromedaries, though publicists might argue that handling authors is similar.  The show program is the size of a small regional phone book and replete with alternately categorized lists and maps.  I know I’ll miss the costumes, but I wonder whether I’ll also miss the tang of adolescent fandom.

From the BEA website, I download and study a 6-page schedule of events encouragingly named At A Glance.  I notice there’s a mid-day session on the Uptown Stage with the John Ringo and China Mieville.  Mieville says that his latest novel, The City and The City, is both dreamy fantasy and police procedural, which locates it in the crossover hinterlands I love.  There, one destination decided.  Further glancing, which feels more like poring, shows Scott Westerfield, whose inventive YA Uglies I loved, will be at the same stage in the late morning discussing alternate history (his next is Leviathan) with Cassandra Clare, whose YA Mortal Instruments series I haven’t read, but whose name alone bodes well for her genius. Okay, two events chosen.

These sketched intentions mean, if I arrive just when the doors open—with coffee pre-infused to plump my veneers of civility and alertness– I can scope the overall scene like a caffeinated hummingbird, attend two sessions while note-taking like a methed-out stenographer, race a final lap around the expo, just so Serendipity can catch me if she’s in her sneakers, then amscray for the train home, arriving just in time to finish this post and scrub the toilets for my incoming houseguests.  Easy, peasy, mac-and-cheesy.

When I arrive, I realize that NYComic-Con has ill-prepared me.  Everything is bigger, grander, and way more polished.  In the exhibition hall, big exhibitors have laid their own cushy carpet or faux wood floors to complement the designs of their custom habitats.  There a few mere booths around the edges of the hall, and later, I will make an effort to visit these smaller exhibits on the periphery, because I think standard bunting shouldn’t doom anyone.  However, the biggest displays have lots of central acreage that professional designers have obviously conceived as commercial mingling space, crass signage replaced with ever-changing LCD screens hung beside soothing expanses of paneling. Because of this year’s feature on Arab publishing, there are genuinely lovely display spaces, mini literary museums really, hosted by various mid-east Ministries of Youth and Culture.

Here’s the quick list of what else I see:  E-publishers and self-publishers, satellite radio, used book and remainder sellers, music and greeting card publishers, IT outfits handling production and inventories and distribution, writing organizations, bloggers as the new reviewers, translators, and other international book publishers.  There are loads of religious publishers specializing in Christianity, mainstream Judaism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, plus the positive thinking of Napoleon Hill and the pulp fiction of L.Ron Hubbard.  Everyone has genial faces on, but none of them are here for me, not exactly.  They’re here to court the professionals of book buying and selling.

Attending librarians are plentiful, they’re the ones dressed as casually as I am.  It’s great to see such a variety of small town names on their badges, because they’re so frankly celebrated here and good for them.  During signings by the more famous authorial draws like James Patterson or Candace Bushnell, attendees wait in line, but they’re treated cordially as they wait for their free books to be autographed. People are generally patient and friendly, perhaps because there are sample titles available all over the place.  I overhear there are fewer free books than other years, but I don’t know the difference.  It seems like a good amount of swag to me, and I get that people need to examine what they’re considering ordering.  Because such a variety of freebies are available, a few intrepid souls are toting big-wheeled crates with handles, though free tote bags are also ubiquitous.

Also notable to me are the numbers of inviting tables and lounging areas that dot the publishers’ plush alleys.  At several of them, serious business is being done, reps and customers discussing orders and trends over their binders of reports and forms.  I overhear talk about the trouble with hardcovers, affirmed by some and refuted by others.  Depends upon the title and venue, I guess.   Finally, I head for my first session at the Uptown Stage, happy to have somewhere to belong.  When I’m done with that one and the one mid-day, I’ll take another walk around, but I still won’t fill my empty tote bag. [The panel write-ups will be in later posts.]

As I leave with just four freebies, I feel simultaneously overloaded and very restrained.  I’ve seen and overheard more than I know what to think about, but I’ll write about two of the titles, so the printing materials at least won’t be wasted on me.  For BEA veterans, this may have seemed a tiny, gloomy show in comparison to the glories of previous campaigns.  For a newbie like me, it offered unexpected splash and dazzle amid the (apparently) grim business of modern books.  Ignorance is bliss.

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