ABA to BEA
and Beyond
By Laura Fillmore
Back when BookExpo America
(BEA) was the American Booksellers Association (ABA) Convention
and Trade Exhibit, this was the biggest, most lavish book conference in the
country, where the publishers introduced their fall lists to the bookstores.
Filled with marketing hype, lavish parties by wholesalers and distributors like
Ingram and B&T, private hospitality suites for the big publishers to
celebrate headliners on their fall lists, the show travelled to a different
city each year. It’s been at the Javits in New York City for some years now, which is a
protean venue, shrinking or expanding to accommodate whatever size show comes
its way. This year was a fairly small show in comparison to earlier years.
We went to hold a book signing
for our author Anne Wyman and
her new book, Kipling’s Cat, looking for software
vendors and distributors for our clients, to sell rights to our titles, and to
attend sessions to see where things are headed. We took a $400 table at the Rights Center
to conduct this business. The Rights
Center is a fine place to
meet people privately, and a place to stash your booty from walking the floor,
but there is little walk-through traffic, unlike on the show floor itself. You
do not need to bring a staff to have a table at the Rights Center,
or pay for an exhibit. If you do your homework ahead of time and schedule
appointments every half hour, you can maximize the value of your time there and
get a lot done, face to face, which I find the best way to work.
For me BEA is always a good way
to touch in with existing clients and partners, see old friends, identify new
business, and check out where the industry is headed in the various sessions.
In these regards, it was a very successful show for us. The book signing was
well organized and very well attended.
I dropped in on a session about
the new agency model in publishing, chaired by Scott Lubeck of the
Book Industry Study Group (BISG),
which I found unsettling, in that it appears to be driven in large part by the
Google Book initiative, representing a fundamental reversal in control of
content valuation. With the agency model, value floats, with software vendors
and conduits trimming their cuts off the top of every transaction, leaving the
publisher, not to mention the author, in the back seat, in reactive mode,
almost a minority partner in the transaction. The other session I attended was
about new book apps, specifically for the iPad. One featured a talking
children’s book, where a mother could read the book once, record right into the
iPad, and then forever after the child could scroll those pages electronically,
touching the screen, hearing mommy’s digitized voice. Felt kind of hollow
walking out of that one.
The show has changed over the
decades I’ve been attending. I found this year’s show had an unusually large
number of remainder houses, and the biggest presence of self and sponsored
publishing I’ve ever seen, right out front. The lines are blurring between what
used to be called “gray publishing” and traditional publishing stovepipes like
trade, academic, scholarly, professional. Software companies, suppliers and
distributors held prominent booth space near doors and at the end of aisles;
many larger publishers either didn’t attend, or had private curtained rooms at
the side of the show floor. I hadn’t seen that hideaway routine at earlier
shows.
Some university presses joined us
up in the Rights Center,
overlooking the Hudson River, many for the
first time; several told me they expected to go back just one day next year, if
at all. Up until this year, the show ran for four days, over Memorial Day
weekend; this year we were there for one day of sessions and two show days,
mid-week. I like this mid-week show better; seems more humane than having it on
a holiday weekend.
During the ’80s I went to ABA shows looking for
book packaging business, and in the ’90s, as an Internet publishing pioneer,
planning to meet with clients and to look for software development, help
publishers make the leap online. We brought the first Internet link to the ABA in Miami
in 1992, in a collective stand we organized called “The Internet Start-up
Booth” sponsored by O’Reilly, ATT, Sprint, the Internet Society, and MCI and
PSI. Very few publishers had seen the Internet and we were the only booth with
a dial-up connection and online publications. Our 10 x 10′ booth was
overrun; the most frequently asked question was “What is the Internet?” I can
remember staying up all night in our hotel, looking at all those business cards
from CEOs, rehashing questions, so excited by what promised to be a great new
sea change for the industry.
New media took off in the ’90s,
in the form of CDs mostly, and at the Chicago
show, in the mid 1990s, the show was so huge that we “new media” types were
relegated to the North wing all to ourselves, and the small presses had a floor
of their own, as I recall. In this year’s show, the show floor was all on one
level and quite walkable; it doesn’t seem to make sense to have a new media
section anymore, because almost everything is new media these days, as
information and ideas, intellectual property, rather than books, becomes the
stuff of publishing. I think this kind
of show is enormously valuable to us as our industry grows and changes, giving
us an opportunity to meet and talk and keep human hands holding on to those “e”
books.
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Laura Fillmore is IPNE's Vice President and owner of Open Book Systems and Protean
Press