Reporting Alive, Well Mostly, From BookExpo America

Every year in May, I join twenty-five thousand of my closest book industry friends at BookExpo America. With over two thousand exhibits, five hundred authors in attendance and sixty seminars, BEA is the extreme event in our industry. Booksellers log dozens of miles of aisles of anticipated fall releases and bag hundreds of pounds of catalogues, books and other detritus. Searing foot pain, back injuries, carpal tunnel flare-ups and muscle cramps are common risks we booksellers are willing to take.
Publishers have devised various incentives to draw attention to their books, which have to compete with about fifty thousand other books any given season. Publishers sponsor luncheons, cocktail receptions, fancy dinners and even grungy parties showcasing particular authors and titles. Just in case, they also distribute advance reading copies, imprinted pens, pencils, key chains, corkscrews and canvas bookbags to hold it all. In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that these incentives have played a critical role in what I decide to order for Left Bank Books, much like those congressional golf junkets to New Zealand for senators deciding on critical health care legislation.
On my recent junket er…Book Expo visit, I lunched with ate lunch with novelist and former “Big Chill” actress Meg Tilley at Zola’s, shared cocktails at the Human Rights Campaign headquarters with up-and-coming novelist Abha Dawesar the night she won a Lambda Literary Award for Babyji, and nibbled asian-latin fusion fare at Zengo’s with Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) and Alison Bechdel, (Dykes to Watch Out For). I also enjoyed limousine service (ok, they were more like airport shuttle vans) to the Democratic Leadership Committee headquarters where I discussed election strategy with its president Bruce Reed and Representative Rahm Emmanuel. Their book, The Plan, debuts this September.
Did all this wining and dining really make up my mind on these various authors? Well, no. I already read Meg Tilley’s upcoming novel and knew I would stock it. The LBB Lesbian Reading Group has already read Babyji and enjoyed it. Given that Abha Dawesar is drawing comparisons to Phillip Roth, I have no doubt we’ll do well with her June release, That Summer in Paris. I think Alison Bechdel’s brand new graphic memoir, Fun Home, is absolutely brilliant and I plan to hand sell it to everyone. As for The Plan, I hope we can entice its preeminent authors to visit our fair city come election time. I didn’t need free wine and chocolate to commit but please don’t tell the publishers. I live on a bookseller’s salary and the free vittles are appreciated.
BookExpo America is more like a carnival with magicians, odd-looking people, and scam-artists than a high-minded literary event. Authors attending for their first time can easily be spotted by their bewildered, lost looks as they navigate the aisles of noise. There is something a little disjunctive about trying to find the line for the Margaret Atwood booksigning while making room for a Hostess Twinkie in a cowboy hat to pass.
But though it may have some Fellini-esque apsects, BEA is most definitely not a sideshow. At least not until this year, when recent developments in internet technology threatened to shunt the world of paper and its champions to the sidelines. This year both Google and Microsoft showcased their plans to convert every book in print to digital form and make that content available on the web. Naturally everyone in the industry—publisher, bookseller and author—is alert to this possibly devastating development. Some publishers are resisting negotiations altogether while others, seeing the handwriting fading on the page, are trying to come to terms.
Some advocating the plan to scan say it will result in one giant virtual book, where bits and parts of books could be reassembled in any order the downloader preferred. They see this as a good thing. But John Updike echoed the sentiments of many when he spoke to this issue at a BEA book and author breakfast. Calling the plan to scan a “grisly scenario” he heralded booksellers as “cathedrals of light that civilize neighborhoods” and called a time when authors lose the rights to their words as “a throwback to preliterate societies where only the presence of the author can authenticate a text.”
As long as this virtual library is still mostly virtual, we “bricks and mortar” stores are alive and kicking. After decades of shrinking membership, there are 195 new members of the American Booksellers Association this year. Besides taking author lunch junkets and picking up valuable plastic trinkets, we attended serious seminars on bookstore finance and management. We lobbied Congress on First Amendment issues like reader privacy. We took lots of anti-inflammatories. And in my case, I made a mental note to give John Updike’s new book, Terrorist, prominent placement on our website.
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