A Helping of Zwieback at Book Expo America 2015

Yesterday, I dropped by Book Expo America—North America’s annual get-together of book industry insiders, held this year at New York’s Javits Convention Center—to wander the aisles and check on the placement of my Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels, Blood Feud and Blood Reign, at the booth run by IBPA: the Independent Book Publishers Association (I’m a member).

Since I wasn’t able to attend either BEA or its spin-off festival, BookCon, as a publisher—the prices charged for exhibitors’ booths being insanely high—I settled for taking advantage of my IBPA member benefits by purchasing display-shelf space for the novels at the association’s rather large setup. The idea is that—as it does for all members who participate—IBPA will act as The ’Warp’s sales representative at the shows, take any orders they might receive from interested booksellers, and pass them along to me to follow up.

So what was BEA 2015 like? Let’s take a look…

I strolled in around 11:00 a.m., and the first thing that struck me was how quiet the place was: usually BEA’s first full day (Wednesday’s opening was a half day) is packed to the rafters with publishing folks—writers, editors, agents, librarians, bookstore owners—with the last two groups lining up to either attend author signings or snag the most-sought-after galleys, which are bound, uncorrected proofs of a book before it heads off for final printing; they’re also called ARCs, Advanced Reading Copies. (I don’t know if it was sought after, but I wound up with a galley of a YA novel titled A Blind Guide to Stinkville.) But based on a report from the magazine Publishers Weekly (the industry’s “bible”), half-day Wednesday was the crazy day, with attendees lining up along 11th Avenue a full hour before the doors opened. And if I thought the show was lacking in foot traffic, that’s only because I hadn’t stepped through the expo’s main doors—it certainly turned out to be crowded enough once I got inside!

It took a good deal of ducking and dodging around foot-dragging text readers (whose eyes were glued to their smartphones) and status meetings being held in the middle of aisles (because why stand to the side when you can be a human blockade?), but eventually I reached the IBPA area and quickly located the Young Adult book section where the Pan books would be located—and there they were, dead center on an eye-level shelf! Well, that was a much better placement than my previous attempt a couple years ago, when I found Blood Feud tucked away in a dimly lit corner of a bottom shelf. Good job this time, IBPA staffers!

It was while I was admiring how spiffy my books looked that I met my next-door-book neighbor, Hometown Media Productions author/publisher John P. Vourlis, who’d stopped by to check on the placement of his own book, Yoga for Freedom: a nonfiction account of the experiences of twenty American yoga students and teachers during a trip they made to Nepal. (John also has Time Spanners, a sci-fi time-travel comic, coming out later this year.) A real-life adventure side by side on a shelf with a couple of dark fantasy ones—where else but BEA? 😉

Pleased with the location of the Pan novels, I took off to wander the aisles and see what else was around—and ran into John Colby Jr., publisher of Brick Tower Press and owner of ibooks, inc., the publishing house I’d worked at for a decade as an editor, then as its editor-in-chief. He was promoting ibooks’ latest release, Escape From Plauen, a biographical account of a Holocaust survivor. We exchanged publisher stories and talked about the possibility of my doing some copyediting for the company, and then he had to rush off to a meeting. And I decided it was time to go. I’d seen what had been done with Blood Feud and Blood Reign—now it was up to IBPA to help sell them.

So at the end of the day, the question is, was the display-space purchase worth the expense? I won’t know right away—BEA ends today, and then BookCon runs this weekend, so both Pan novels will be available for order through Sunday. After that, I’ll just have to wait and see if any orders pop up. Here’s hoping for the best!

The next three for-real ’Warp appearances occur this fall, first at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 20, followed by the Collingswood Book Festival on October 3, in New Jersey, and wrapping up with the zombie-riffic Walker Stalker Con, on December 4–6, in Secaucus, NJ. Hope to see you there!