Big News a Brewin on the West Coast - Selecting Authors for BookExpo

I'm mogging (mobile blogging - sorry for the typos and lack of links) from L.A. Where we are holding our annual author selection meetings. By Friday evening we'll have a good idea of who we'll be inviting for the big breakfast and lunch events at BEA this June. Cool, huh?

Its pretty simple, we get some booksellers together and comb through all the submissions from publishers and the group advises us on who they like.

For the first time ever this year we've invited some librarians to participate and some of the chain stores as well. We've got about 100 pages of adult and children's author submissons to comb through and gather feedback on. Between us, I've picked my panels, but the whole point is to get guidance from the experts, so I'll keep my fool mouth shut - mostly.

The other great thing about the trip is we conduct the meetings at the Hotel ABA for 2008 so its a great chance to see the neighborhood and hotel (which by the way is already more than 60 percent sold out!). I gotta say, its awesome. Its right at the corner of Hollywood Blvd, so you get to see first hand that Journey really does have a star on the walk of fame. Kidding aside its a great hotel and the neighborhood is funky - yeah there's a big mall next door, but Hollywood Blvd is a great mix of weird tatoo parlors, head shops, plus t-shirts joint, little resaturants and bars. Perfect for indy booksellers - except the only bookstores I spotted were two Scientology reading rooms, but the did have Booksense displays (sorry bad bookseller humor).

I've also got a couple of NY ComicCon related meetings out here that are both big, or could be big. Ok, I know this whole post is a tease because I can't say anything yet, but the NYCC stuff would be huge and for BEA we've got a pretty good crop of authors to choose from and an even better crop of people to help us choose.

Stay tuned, we'll have big NYCC announcements coming soon and for BEA we've got our Saturday Night and Conference Keynote pretty much locked up. Stay Tuned in deed!

Goodnight from LaLa Land......

-L
Lance Fensterman
Industry Vice President
BookExpo America
New York ComicCon
Blog:

www.bookexpo-lance.blogspot.com

203.840.5507 (o) 203.417.3607 (m)
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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld - Please excuse any typos!