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…
BEA19
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…
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…
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…
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…
Less Imagined, It’s Book Expo Time
Last year Reed Exhibitions made an energetic effort to position Book Expo as fully “reimagined,” focused in particular on the needs of the small but valued bookseller audience. But those efforts yielded fewer booksellers and retailers at the show (about 17 percent fewer); fewer librarians as well (with attendance down about 18.5 percent); and therefore…