BEA Roundup

  • I am currently surrounded by many boxes, which arrived today. I cannot recommend FedEx Home Delivery enough, should you decide to move cross country. My trusty desktop computer, the box I’ve deemed the Command Center, is almost hooked up. (Apologies for grammatical gaffes to those who have been kind enough to point them out. The laptop, which I’ve been using for pretty much everything in the past week, is very much the secondary computer.) And I’ll be very close to boogeying here once the desk arrives this week. In the meantime, here is a roundup of BEA reports.
  • The Literary Dish serves up The Unofficial BEA Story, covering the African-American publishing end of the conference. (I don’t know if this content was aggregated from somewhere else, but I’m glad it’s posted somewhere.)
  • Patrick Carbidge has Part I and Part II.
  • Vegan Cupcakes.
  • Megan Sullivan is convinced that it’s all about long days and long nights. Plus, she managed to meet Philip Roth.
  • Critical Mass has posted a report on the crisis panel.
  • Buzz Girl has pictures. As does Mary Reagan.
  • Detailed diaries from Dan Wickett.
  • Jim Winter confesses he’s a trade show virgin.
  • World Unleashed’s list of hot galleys.
  • A BEA Omnibus from Mark, with links elsewhere.
  • Russell Simmons even showed up.
  • David R. Godine avoided conversations about baseball.
  • There are apparently budget hotels that are iPod themed. Whether podcasts were siphoned into each room through hidden speakers is anyone’s guess.
  • The Post BEA (Sausage) Links Edition.
  • Lou Anders: “BEA is lived on your feet, fueled by Starbucks, and endured by great conversations….”
  • I did notice more comics booths this year. The Beat has a roundup on that end.
  • More links from Oxford University Press.
  • I will try and go through upcoming titles at some point this week or next. This year, instead of interviewing publicists at the big publishers, I opted to spend most of my floor time around the smaller publishers. On Sunday, I grabbed every catalog I could. I now have half a suitcase filled with them.
  • The number of overly safe titles and lackluster galleys really surprised me this year. Perhaps it’s the shakeup from the Perseus restructuring or declining sales, but, while there were galleys that excited me (and I had no idea that I was as much of an enthusiast of Richard Russo until I saw the galley of his next book), there weren’t many that wowed me the way they had in previous years. Of course, the proof is ultimately in the books. I will say, however, that, of the larger houses, Bloomsbury and Grove/Atlantic seem to have the best pickings. And it was great to see Small Beer maintaining a booth this year.
  • More later.

One Comment

  1. We also sold a lot of books, besides riding the subway and not talking about baseball! Did I not mention that?

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