Guest Post – #BEA15 – Day One

Posted May 28, 2015 by Whitley B in Promotions | 6 Comments

My first BEA adventure technically started yesterday, when I left the house.  No, this isn’t a story about how long and arduous my travels were (though they were).  It’s an excuse to show you my dog.  This sweet little thing came to see me off at the train station.  It was almost enough to make me try and fit her in the suitcase.

How could I not share that precious face?

Alright, on to more relevant matters.

The tiara has a story behind it. Two stories, actually.

 

Behold the entrance hall, in all it’s glory.

Once I finally got to BEA, only a few hours late, I headed off to the Book Blogger’s Conference.  It was not as populated as I had expected, and I later found out that was because a vast number of bloggers were elsewhere, waiting in line for the exhibit hall.  Apparently it’s not normal to have the Blogger Con and the opening day of BEA going on at the same time, and I can see why.  Some of the especially hot books of the day are given away right at the start, and they go fast!  Tickets for the Truthwitch signing were gone in about two minutes.  I wasn’t particularly hot and bothered for any of the books that were up for grabs right out the gate, but if I had, I probably would have camped out at the front of the line as well.

It’s really a shame, because the Blogger’s Con was pretty interesting.

The panel for “Tactics to Create Killer Content Fast”

There were two main ‘tracks’ – “Blogging At the Next Level” and “Building A Better Blog,” each with four panel sessions.  Basically intermediate and beginner blogging, respectively.   The panelists all had some impressive (almost intimidating) credentials, and they had lots of good tips to share.  I wish they had gone into some of the more technical aspects — a lot of things discussed were very general and easy to find by googling the class titles — but still.  A good overview, and there were plenty of people asking followup questions at the end, which satisfied my need for details a little.

After the last panel I wanted, it was off to the event hall to valiantly try and track down people I knew from Twitter and attempt to figure out how this whole ‘get books’ thing works.  At first I just wandered around, keeping any eye out for giant piles, which I quickly realized meant anyone could just take one.  Then I started stalking displays, waiting for someone else to take books off it and clue me into whether or not I’d be stealing if I did the same.  Finally I got up the courage to just outright talk to the people working the booths, and they were (usually) happy to hand over books, take my info to contact me later, or let me know when the next ‘big pile ‘o books you can take’ drop would happen.

These are, thankfully, separate lines and not all for the same author.

The signing tables took me a while to find, and that was a trip.  Half of them were so full they were turning people away, and the other half had staff members standing at the ends, hawking their authors, asking “don’t you want a copy of this book?  You do, I know you do.  Look how shiny it is!”

Overall, it was a pretty chill day for me.  (Not so for pretty much everyone I met, though; they were frazzled right from the start!)  I got to ease my way into things, look around, get the lay of the land.  It helps that I wasn’t super attached to anything going on today and today only.  No, that pleasure is reserved for Friday.  Sigh.

Alas, I do need to work on my envy.  All these years and I envied people going to BEA, and now I’m here and envying people who get invited to the cool parties or publisher events.  It’s a never-ending cycle of “damn, I want that.”

And now for some random pictures.

Sitting in line for Tonight The Streets Are Ours
The absolute prettiest book I picked up today.
I don’t know who he is but check out that coat.
I don’t know who he is but check out THAT coat.
Jennifer Donnelly signing copies of These Shallow Graves
Book haul for day one!


Tagged: , , , ,

6 responses to “Guest Post – #BEA15 – Day One

  1. Sigh. Oh BEA. Glorious, magical, bookgasmic BEA. I convinced my superior that someone on my staff had to attend this year and like a dope I was all like, “Oh no, not me. It really should be my librarian who orders adult and teen fiction.” So yeah. Wendy sits at home. Staring at her TBR when she could be staring at shiny, shiny ARCs. Oh well. I’m the world’s most awesome boss. That’s something….I guess.

    • Why teen/adult? The children’s authors and books were phenomenally popular. I lined up for Sandra Boynton half an hour early and there was already a crowd!

      • The short answer on that is staffing. We had a retirement in our children’s department and we’re still ironing out a full-time replacement.

        My employer hadn’t sent anyone to BEA in ages, and when I came on board it was one of the first things I “justified” to the higher ups. Given our travel budget – I was able to get one person this year. I’m hoping I can eventually squeak it up to sending two, but we shall see. My adult and teen fiction person pretty much knew she was going and representing the WHOLE department – so I expect a wide range of goodies to be shipping back 🙂

  2. I wish I could go to all of the conferences every year but my bank account just laughs and laughs and laughs. *sigh*

    It looks like you’re having an amazing time Whitley! I’m so jealous!

  3. Kate Tilton (Froze8)

    I’m glad you got to check out the Tactics panel, hopefully, you got some good info from it! I’m excited to see how they will change things up for next year. This is the first year I’ve been where BEA and the Blogger Con overlapped (last year BEA and BookCon overlapped, neither had great results). But it looks like you had a great time! 🙂

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.