BEA – Book Expo America 2010 – Damon’s View

This was not my first Book Expo, so I kind of knew what to expect from the show. We also had a team this year, which made my life a bit easier, as I wanted to cover more kids stuff for this site while the other two editors covered the event for BSCreview.  It mean that I did not have to be crazy in what I covered, but at the same time I felt that I did miss a lot of things.  I did not get a chance to sit through any of the panels, but I did notice that there was less of a Fantasy and SF presense at the event.  Heck, at some of the booths, I did not see any books from the publisher’s fantasy stable at all.  Also, some of the bigger publishers decided to either go with a small booth or no booth at all and just get a meeting room.  Oh, did I mention that the children’s books this year were on the same floor as everything else?  Yeah, they didn’t get their own floor like last year.  The economy had an effect on the event for sure, but BEA was still very informative and enjoyable. 

I took a meeting in the morning with Boom! Studios as they transition a new publicity person to the team, and we talked about trying to do some unique things with them in the coming year.  I hope it all works out, because I am a big fan of their work.  They did mention that the next Disney cartoon that will be making its way into comic form after Darkwing Duck will be Duck Tales.  After that I believe that they are in talks about Rescue Rangers.  All good news.

I do have some bad news to bring from the event, which is that Dot Lin will no longer be the publicity manager over at Tor, as she will be returning to school.  While I am very happy for her, I am a bit sad that we will not have her as a contact over at Tor anymore.  Out of all the publicity people I know, I would consider Dot one of my friends in the industry; she has been great for the site and has gone above and beyond her job description many times for us.  We wish her luck and will continue to keep in touch with her when she leaves the industry.  Dot did set up an interview with David Lubar for me, which you will see in video form on this site in the next few days.  I was impressed by David and his programming background, and I did just finish his latest novel Goop Soup, which I will review here, as well.  I also got a chance to meet up with Cory Doctorow, and he was a great guy–I can also now say that I bought him a cup of coffee!  I did finally get a chance to meet Justin (Tor publicity) in person and let him know that he has big shoes to fill.

While I did not get a chance to meet up with David Moench over at Random House this year (I am sure I will see him at NY Comic Con, though), he did go out of his way to set up some great interviews for Elena.  He has always been one of our favorite publicity people.

I also got to meet up with someone from Bookspotcentral and Heliotrope past, Pierce Watters from Paizo Publishing.  If you remember, Pierce is the one who let us use the cover for the fifth issue of Heliotrope when our artist fell through.  Paizo has some interesting news that I am very excited about, and we have a video but were asked to hold it for a week, so expect to see some information about it over at BSCreview soon.  Pierce and the Paizo team were very nice, and we look forward to working with them in the future.  While talking to Paizo the second time (when we shot the video), I was able to get a chance to talk to Archaia about Fraggle Rock, which we cover in previews at the site.  That’s a great project, and I am glad someone brought the Fraggles back into this decade.

So, continuing on with the theme of people in the book industry whom we like, I got a chance to really speak to Alex Lencicki while Elena was doing a video interview with Karen Miller.  We had a great converstaion while talking about the industry, web sites, traffic, and book bloggers.  Alex understands us more than any other publicity person, now that we’ve lost Dot, and I think we will have a much stronger relationship with Orbit going forward.  It should not only be stronger but also much more interesting, so stay tuned for that.  I also want to point out that this was the first time I got to meet Karen Miller in person.  Karen and myself had emailed each other when she first started becoming a famous author, and I can tell you with much sincerity that she is one of the nicest people I have had the chance to deal when it comes to authors.  Thanks go out again to Karen for the interview, which will be coming at BSCreview.  The person I missed at BEA this year, though, was Lauren Panepinto–hopefully we see her at NYCC.  Also thanks to the Orbit team for letting me have a copy of the next Markus Heitz book; I am stoked for that.

I also got a bit of a surprise at BEA this year:  there were some children’s toys that were tucked away down one of the aisles.  The first one was Zoobies, which is a plush, pillow, blanket sort of all-in-one.  I handed over my card, and hopefully we get one for review here at the site, because they were pretty darn cool.  I was told the Hippo was the best seller, but darn that Turtoise looks cute.  I also got a chance to chat with Lynn Araujo over at U.S. Games Systems Inc., and we really hit it off.  She went out of her way to make sure we got some product for review, and I am happy to say we have Banana Split Card Game and some of the Travel Talk Conversation Cards.  Not an hour after I got home, my wife had already taken the Travel Talk card deck and put it in her pocketbook to have ready for when she was out with the kids.  Stay tuned for reviews of those items.  Lynn was even nice enough to send home a gift for the kids, a morse code signal toy which made both boys turn into super spies.  I look forward to working with them.  Also, I wanted to mention that we got a copy of Onionhead cards for our children.  I think they are a great idea, and I am excited to see how my children react to them.

I also want to give a shout out to Eric Wight who writes the most awesome of children’s books, the Frankie Pickel series.  I will not rehash how much I love the books, because you can read about that in the review of the last book, but I wanted to say that Eric was nice enough to take the time out to meet up with me during the day, even though he was only at BEA for fun.  He really is a great guy and is one of my favorite authors; my oldest boy, who is 6, has also given his books the thumbs up.  I was on a mission for my boy, and Eric was kind enough to tell me he would send a sketch specificially for my son.  Great guy.  Well, in addition to meeting Eric, we got a chance to meet up with Adam Rex who happened to be talking to Eric when we met up.  Not only is Adam nice, as well, but the conversation that we all struck up on vampires was–well, both Elena and myself wish we had it recorded, it was that interesting (and amusing). We will be reaching out to Adam in the future for BSCreview, and hopefully for some of his children’s books for BSCkids.

The one book I would have liked to pick up that I could not was the Super Chicken Nugget Boy.  I am going to have to find a contact over at Hyperion and get this for me and my boys, it looked wonderful.  I also found out that they have books for each of the Disney Channel shows, so I will have to figure out a way to work them into my review schedule, as well.

Some quick touch points of the day were that we actually had a nice quick discussion with Harlequin, so hopefully we will start to receive some of their books for review now.   Last year I had no luck making a contact, but that seems to have changed this year.  I also learned a valuable lession while at BEA:  no matter how much traffic we are doing, we really are not on people’s radars, because they all underestimate the traffic that both of these sites do.  We really need to change that this year; it was interesting, when I told someone our numbers, they thought that I meant for the year when in reality I was talking about a month of our traffic.  So listen up all publicity people. 

I also want to point out that I finally got a chance to meet a bunch of the BSC Empire team in person.  We had dinner the night before BEA with B.T., Elena, Kelly (and boyfriend), and Lexie.  They are a great bunch of people, and the food was wonderful that night.  Over and out for BEA 2010, now just stay tuned for the interviews….