BEA show director Steve Rosato announced the first set of changes to the 2015 schedule to deal with the needs of the now clearly separate trade show and Book Con constituencies. For the trade, BEA will be held on weekdays only, avoiding the problem created this year by trying to convene regular convention business on a Saturday (while launching BookCon on the same day). BEA will run Wednesday May 27 through Friday May 29 — but the trade show floor will not open until 1:00 PM on Wednesday. As Rosato notes on his blog, “We will face some challenges with […]
Book Fairs
Beyond BEA, Digital Book World 2015 Announces First Keynotes
Looking a few big events down the road, our conference partners at Digital Book World have officially opened for registration the sixth annual conference, to be held January 13 – 15, 2015 in New York. Today’s announcement includes some of conference’s broad themes, as well as the first group of timely keynote speakers. Already on the docket are top CEOs — Brian Murray of HarperCollins (which recently announced their planned acquisition of Harlequin) and Linda Zecher of recently-public Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (the first part of an expanded look at ed tech and other education-related issues) — and two top authors, […]
BEA Planning
With Book Expo just a week away, we have updated our comprehensive, all-in-one-spreadsheet master schedule with still more author signings and event details. Use publun.ch/BEAschedPM to view it and simplify your convention planning. A variety of “special events” are marked in bold to help you find some of the more notable sessions. While author Walter Isaacson‘s Friday morning conversation about his forthcoming book THE INNOVATORS with Jacob Weisberg has been on the schedule for some time, earlier this week BEA officials declared him a “keynote speaker.” Breakfast speaker Neil Patrick Harris is covered this morning at E Online for the […]
Frankfurt Confirms Moving English-Language Publishers to Hall 6 in 2015
The Frankfurt Book Fair has confirmed in public what fair officials have been discussing privately (and thoroughly) with some of their biggest customers since the October 2013 show: The current English-language exhibition space, Hall 8, will be abandoned as of the 2015 fair, and those publishers will move into the multiple (but smaller) floors of Hall 6. That hall will also continue to include the busy Agents Center — though the agents and scouts will move up to the fourth floor (6.3). Recently, they have been on the ground floor. Note clearly that these changes will not affect the upcoming […]
Fiction Leads Rebound in Pre-LBF Dealmaking
As promised on Friday, we now have complete comparison statistics on the pre-London Book Fair dealmaking. Overall deal volume in the five weeks prior to the international fair (through the Friday before the event) has continued its growth for the second year in a row. Deals with US print publishers have increased to their highest level since 2010, now well above the low point in 2012, and deals with digital-focused publishers continue to add modestly to the totals, as show in this chart: Publisher investment continues to lag behind 2010, however, though it too has […]
London Book Fair Dealmaking Preview
As usual, our deal reports continue to swell in advance of next week’s London Book Fair as primary deals are lined up and announced to spur further rights sales. We’ve already posted 191 deals since Monday, with more to come throughout the day. We will run our comprehensive evaluation of dealmaking trends in next Monday’s Publishers Lunch (and will try to post to PM over the weekend). For now, we offer the first two glimpses. For the five weeks prior to LBF, counting through the Friday before the show (except for this year), dealmaking volume is fairly steady year over […]