Organizers Reed Pop announced Tuesday the end of Book Expo — as well as Book Con — which they are “retiring.” Last year’s show was cancelled due to the pandemic, and a 2021 show would have been hard to pull off on the normal schedule as well — particularly since the show itself had diminished steadily for years. Event director Jenny Martin explains in the announcement, “The pandemic arrived at a time in the life cycle of BookExpo and BookCon where we were already examining the restructure of our events to best meet our community’s needs. This has led us […]
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Once More, Book Expo Reverts to A Two-Day Show
Book Expo continues to adjust their chairs, announcing in a letter to exhibitors that the 2020 show will — yet again — return to a schedule featuring one day of programming and education (on Wednesday, May 27) and two days only of trade show exhibitions, on Thursday and Friday (closing at 3:00 PM). For the past two years, the show had a hybrid schedule with at least some of the exhibition floor opening on part of Wednesday. “The goal was to give everyone additional time on the floor to discover and connect,” event manager Jennifer Martin writes to exhibitors. “Though […]
Booksellers Discuss Health Insurance, Wage Pressures, Direct Publishers Sales and More
The American Booksellers Association’s annual Town Hall meeting at Book Expo always provides an interesting window into the issues on booksellers’ minds, and this year’s version was focused squarely on practical matters. First and foremost, booksellers wanted to know what happened to two promised initiatives from the past: Affordable group health insurance for booksellers and their employees, and the launch of a US version of Batch, the UK’s centralized digital invoicing and payment system. ABA ceo Oren Teicher said, “There is nothing more that I want to get done while I’m still at ABA than for stores to have access […]
Representation and Hope for the Future at the Children’s Author Breakfast
Book Expo wound down on Friday with Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush moderating the children’s breakfast, and promoting their new picture book Sisters First. Barbara told the audience that they conceived of the picture book before their 2017 memoir of the same name, but that that “after waking up the day after election night 2016” they wanted to put the book for adults out first to inspire women and “celebrate sisterhood.” The conversation again turned to representation in publishing when Tomi Adeyemi (Children of Virtue and Vengeance) took the stage. Adeyemi spoke about the narratives she’d loved as […]
Book Expo Panels: Retailers, Breakfast Authors and More
As predicted, this year’s Book Expo is effectively a one-day show played out over three days. After a quiet start on Wednesday, today at least has attendees filling the very wide aisles, spacious lounges, empty booth slots and open meeting rooms at a convention that is more profoundly than ever a downgraded, modest shadow of its former self. (It’s very sustainable, though; exhibitors are using generous lengths of plain pipe and drape, rented chairs, and simple printed panels over fancy fixtures and displays.) With a generally quiet line-up of panels as well, one Thursday afternoon that still offered some substance […]
Books Are Sidelined at the Expo, But ABA Membership Has Modest Gain
The AP runs their traditional Book Expo preview, and they concur with our advance piece on a quiet show that has a reduced profile for books, authors and publishers as “the sideline part of the business will be a main attraction.” Designed to appeal to a portion of the 1,000 or so booksellers who will attend, the AP underscores that sidelines comprise about 20 percent of store sales. The ABA will report annual statistics at the show. They have modest gains, adding a net 52 members to 1,887 in all. Member stores now comprise 2,524 locations, compared to 2,470 in […]