BEA has announced the fall books to be featured on the convention’s three Buzz Books panels in May. The adult panel is evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction. There’s one debut novel (from Stegner Fellow and Paris Review Plimpton Prize winner Ottessa Moshfegh); one adult debut (YA author Ruth Warburton, writing as Ruth Ware — for the debut title from Gallery’s Scout Press); and one novel that’s been buzzed since it was sold in fall 2013, from Garth Risk Hallberg, already promoted as a Winter Institute buzz book and now back for more: Adult City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (Knopf) […]
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Professional Attendance Slides At BEA, As Reed Commits to the Con
BEA announced preliminary attendance figures for the 2014 show and, consistent with the pattern from previous years, results were stable but slightly down. “Professional attendance,” the category that comprises everyone except exhibitors, was 10,965 people, down by 129 from the final count of 11.094 people in 2013. Total attendance, with exhibitors included, was down 619 people or 3 percent, at a preliminary total of 19,860 people. Various initiatives have come and gone over the past years that had kept the attendee numbers higher but may not have changed the core business-to-business experience, since they involved the BlogWorld and Power Readers experiments. At […]
Teens Help Make Book Con A Hit; Aims to Expand to Two Days
After two years of well-intentioned but powerless experimenting with inviting “power readers” to BEA, Reed Exhibitions got it right by turning over the reformatted Book Con to their pop-culture unit. Now the questions are how far can they take the consumer show, and how can the BEA part keep up. Saturday’s Book Con ticket sales were capped at just over 10,000 to keep from completely overfilling the allocated space and the show was declared sold out. The most powerful readers were the ones with strong, healthy lungs: The secret behind the show’s success was teenagers (who sometimes allowed their parents […]
Booksellers See HRC
One prominent event at Book Expo on Friday was unlisted appearance by Hillary Clinton in advance of the June 10 release of HARD CHOICES. Hosted by Simon & Schuster, she addressed a group of about 120 booksellers. The publisher says that Clinton “spoke briefly about her experience writing the book, and some of the issues that matter most to her, then posed for pictures with attendees.” Here she is with Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp at Javits. Separately, it’s the darndest thing, but someone interested in Clinton’s public image helped Politico “obtain” one controversial chapter from the embargoed book: […]
Reed Aims for Two-Day BookCon In 2015 (and Four-Day BEA)
With strong ticket sales heading into the inaugural BookCon on Saturday as we reported Friday morning, Reed Exhibitions is engaged in a process to expand the consumer show to two days in 2015 — and would stretch the BEA exhibition floor to four days along with that if it goes forward. Currently BEA is scheduled for Thursday, May 28 through Saturday, May 30, 2015 in New York. (The show moves to Chicago in 2016.) The company said in a statement provided to us: “The move to 4 days with 2 days of BookCon is certainly being considered for 2015. Our […]
Upcoming: The Book Con, and the Copyright Com
As of Friday morning, Lance Fensterman at Reed Exhibitions told us they have sold approximately 9,000 tickets to consumers for Saturday’s inaugural Book Con, with more sales expected on site tomorrow. “There is no science to estimating walk up,” Fensterman said in answer to our query, “but we are prepared to continue selling a couple thousand tickets and then at that point it will be a sell out.” Looking ahead to next week, the House Judiciary Committee is coming to town. As part of ongoing efforts to reevaluate the nation’s copyright laws, the committee is holding a hearing on Monday at the […]