Guest Post – #BEA15 – Day One

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.

Alright, on to more relevant matters.

 

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.

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.

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.

Related Posts