Today’s news bulletin is that Oprah Magazine editor-at-large Gayle King has been enlisted to interview Barbra Streisand in Tuesday night’s keynote reception.
App-ly Now
<img align=”right” src=http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/icon.png width=”80″ border=”0″ alt=””>
We’ve had a lot of enthusiastic reactions to yesterday’s launch of our handy, feature-packed convention mobile web app, Publishers Lunch: BEA To Go. Load it into your mobile phone so you’ll be all set next week. Plus, I think you’ll find that our customized slicing of the complex BEA schedule makes it easier to plan your show time now than burrowing through the official BEA site.
We’ve separated out the Main Events, Big Ideas Conference, ABA/Bookseller events, Librarian events (including non-official programs from LJ and SLJ), the IDPF Digital Book conference, all the Author Stages programs, the top 50 or in-booth author signings, and the Spain-focused Global Market Forum events in separate views, plus there’s a master day-by-day schedule.
For iPhone OS and Android, use your mobile device to visit:
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/bea
and click the ” + ” to install our launch icon.
For Blackberry and most other mobile browsers, visit this link and just bookmark it for future reference:
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/bea/bb
Photos and Videos
Once again we invite you to join in the coverage by sending in photos. We’ve given up on the cumbersome and spam-laden Flickr approach. This year, put:
post (AT) pmphotos.posterous.com
into your camera phone address book or use it to e-mail regular photos as an attachment. The subject line becomes the title of your photo; the body of the mail is the caption.
This year we’ll have our own photographer roaming the floor, filling our App’s photo section (and PublishersMarketplace) with a live stream of photos.
PLTV returns again for our fourth year of extensive show-by-video coverage. (Last year we posted over 40 episodes, with well over 15 hours of convention events.)
Parties
As usual, we’ll share our Party Planner line up soon. If you’re having an event and “forgot” to tell us, now is the time to tell us.
All About the Buzz Books
So here’s our next big announcement. As regular readers know, every year we struggle with the appropriate way to cover the books that win the Buzz Panel slots. That dilemma got even more confusing last year when we agreed to join BEA’s Conference Advisory Board to help structure and plan the panels themselves. Last year we drove many thousands of page views for “mini-sites” we built on the Buzz books, but this year I think we have a much better idea.
We’re launching Publishers Lunch First Look Reviews, for the first time (that we know of) bringing an independent critical assessment of the books given these high-profile slots. These are signed, full-length reviews from an impressive roster of established reviewers, and I’m honored that we’re able to draw on the talents of Edward Champion, Michele Filgate, Scott McLemee, Bob Minzesheimer, Jacob Silverman, Sarah Weinman, and others. We think everyone’s evaluation of these heavily “buzzed” books will be richer for the inclusion of a first read from these savvy reviewers.
For the YA Buzz panel, we’ve added a different twist, commissioning reviews from teens themselves (and they’ve been doing a terrific job).
Since there are so many galleys and other buzzable forthcoming books on display at BEA, we have even extended the circle one step further, putting together an unofficial buzz collection of our own that spans emerging novelists (Bo Caldwell, Benjamin Percy, and Scarlett Thomas), anticipated works from Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Franzen, and two high-profile YA books, James Frey/”Pittacus Lore’s” book, and a release-day look at John Grisham’s Theodore Boone.
We’ll have selections from the First Look Reviews soon, but for an early look, you can read the first eight reviews now through our Publishers Lunch: BEA To Go mobile app and see which Buzz panel novel “must be considered one of the most anticipated novels” and which YA contender had our reviewer say she “could not put the book down from start to finish and the cliffhanger ending left me eager for the suggested sequel.”