Chekhov's Mistress
BookExpo - The Movie
If BookExpo were a movie, my character (played by Matt Damon who would demand hazard pay for putting on the extra weight), would arrive at 11 am Friday morning at Union Station with exactly 9 1/2 hours to penetrate the Washington D.C. Convention Center and navigate the dizzying maze of publishers’ booths, stacks of books and publicizing hordes. Of course in the end I would have to save someone, maybe the world, and that didn’t happen; instead I ate a tuna sandwich and caught the 8:30 train home.
I would have stayed longer had it not been for some car problems earlier in the week, but somehow I think my time there was just right. My first stop was Sarah ”Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind” Wienman’s seminar on syndicating blog content. Despite one interruption by a young man who asked why he didn’t get a thank-you for once sending Weinman cookies, it was an interesting discussion. Unfortunately it was not heavily attended and bloggers nearly outnumbered publicists and authors. It’s a shame too – for all the excitement about the potential for blogs in selling books, people don’t really seem to be interested in learning about blogs and bloggers from a practical standpoint.
At Sarah’s seminar, I met C. Max ”The Millions” Magee, the prolific Carolyn ”Pinky’s Paperhaus” Kellogg, and Matt ”The Mumpsimus” Cheney, all for the first time. Ron ”Beatrice” Hogan and Ed ”Rants” Champion were there and the ever-on-the-move Mark ”The Elegant Variation” Sarvas dropped in for a minute. So what was the first place we all wanted to go? MOLESKINE! That was unanimous.
After descending en masse on the Moleskine booth, some of us went up to hang around the cool guys in the Consortium Book area. Dennis Johnson held court at the Melville House booth and I’m happy to report that Melville House has ramped up their catalog. I think it says something about the true demand for good books that a publisher that didn’t exist a few years ago can manage to put together an impressive catalog of twenty or so books a year.
Of course I was out glad-handing this year, talking about MetaxuCafé, which was actually kind of fun. I think the best way to “do” BEA is to have a purpose, to join the fray and sell something. I spent a lot of years in finance and generally behaved as a wallflower, but now, when it’s talking about books and these Websites, I really get excited and chatty.
I didn’t want to load up my bags with books this year, so I was quite careful about what I took with me. Philip Leventhal at Columbia University Press was kind enough to give me a copy of William Logan’s The Undiscovered Country – Poetry in the Age of Tin, which won the NBCC award for Criticism and which I’ve been coveting for a while.
Hanging out with Molly (whose husband Nick I met later at the LBC party) from Coffee House Press, I asked her what one book I should grab from her catalog. After describing my tastes, she recommended Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite, which I recall Matt Cheney having mentioned earlier. Matt’s one of those people who you always want to listen to when it comes to authors you might never have heard of.
Matt also introduced me to Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books (played by Jack Black in the movie) who is one of the most enthusiastic people in publishing. We talked for a long time at the LBC party and if it weren’t for my impending train and my strong mingle ethic, I could have sat around talking to Jeremy until I was just sloppy.
I picked up Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Anderson is the editor of Wired magazine and wrote an article about his idea of what is essentially niche marketing – that we are moving to a society where blockbusters aren’t the most important thing – that because of technology there are great markets in small, niche things. That’s a bad summary and I’ll talk more about it later, but if I got anything from talking to publishers last Friday, it’s that as difficult as it is, publishing is alive and well and there are readers and writers and publishers to bring them together.
comments
We are under no obligation to acknowledge your inaccuracies!
– ed (05/26 at 10:16 AM)
Well of course Matt Damn would play you. Who else comes close?
– Mary (05/26 at 04:36 PM)
Tunafish sandwich? That sounds like a Richard Prior bit. “I was walking along, eatin’ a tuna fish sandwich and God said to me...”
– birnbaum (05/27 at 05:22 AM)
The worst part is I don’t even know if the tuna was dolphin-safe, thus blowing my hero creds.
– Bud Parr (05/29 at 02:15 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: May 25, 2006
- Filed Under:
Reading Railroad: Events
- Comments:4
- Links to this Post: Technorati
