After hearing the big build-up for WineLibrary TV founder Gary Vaynerchuk I have to admit I found his Saturday BEA panel underwhelming–more beaujolais nouveau than aged vintage wine if you will. Vaynerchuk may be the first Web 2.0 motivational speaker, and as he let us know repeatedly, his simple but enthusiastic message is apparently in demand from a variety of companies. (I’ve never heard the expression “have the chops” repeated so many times.) And at least some booksellers in the audience at his BEA panel certainly seemed to be nodding along with his advice. Tailored as an independent wine dealer […]
Book Fairs
Don't Let That Fool You, It Really Is BEA
Apologies in advance for the slightly self-serving nature of this Day Two Dispatch from BEA. It did come to a close for me, after all, with the end of the joint interview I conducted with James Ellroy and Colin Harrison at the Uptown Stage. If you want to know how it went, better ask somebody else – live interviews put me in a fugue state that I can’t shake off completely for a few hours after it’s over. But I can say the mental gymnastics of the role of interviewer turned around what was something of a frustrating day, this […]
More Day One Highlights: Giving It Away, Musical Keynote
Late Thursday morning, Simba’s Michael Norris introduced “Giving it Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense And When They Don’t” by citing, as all ebook-related panels seem to these days, with some statistics. According to a survey Simba recently published about ebook buying and reading habits, 8% of the US adult population bought at least one book in 2008 – but 15% of them said they had read an ebook. Discrepancies between what people buy and read are common, but for the purposes of this panel, it was a natural segue to talk of whether giving books away for free online […]
Conroy Cancels BEA Appearances
The biggest surprise in the lead-up to Book Expo America was news yesterday that author Pat Conroy had to cancel his two planned appearances at the show. Via his agent Marly Rusoff, Conroy communicates that he is recovering from surgery, and “otherwise he would be at BEA, which he has always loved attending. He especially regrets being unable to sign with his daughter, Melissa Conroy, who has her first book out, in which he is a character.” (Her picture book POPPY’S PANTS publishes in September.) Doubleday will still have copies SOUTH OF BROAD, his first novel in 14 years, at […]
Shatzkin's New Big Ideas for Publishing's Future
This morning’s biggest Big Idea presentation came from consultant and publishing theorist Mike Shatzkin, who expanded his previously-presented master thesis that general trade publishing will fade and “the future means ‘vertical’ and ‘community'” to look more broadly at what publishing will look like in 20 years. Perhaps the biggest extrapolation was this: “Something we don’t pay enough attention to is that anybody with a web site is a publisher. Not all publishers are content creators, but they need content. That is the big unfolding opportunity for publishing and the people in it over the net 20 or 30 years.” Put […]
The Ties that Bind: ABA Opening Keynote Session
It took quite a while for the ABA’s opening keynote to get past the preambles and underway. Roughly a half hour into the allotted time, R.J. Julia owner Roxanne Coady explained that the panel’s purpose was “to talk a little bit about the partnership between authors and booksellers – formerly the bedrock of our literary landscape” at a time of “extraordinary disintermediation.” There’s an assumption about independents, she explained, of a “Mom and Pop/Apple Pie theory – that we have to exist”–but she suggested it’s more a matter of the “cute pet theory – we want them around, just not […]