Here, as promised, is my post about BookCon 2017, with
emphasis on exhibitors, to be followed in a week by another on attendees. First, what is BookCon? Advertised as being “where storytelling and
pop culture collide,” BookCon is an annual book fair, usually held in New York
at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center following BookExpo. So what is BookExpo?
BookExpo and BookCon
BookExpo is an annual event, held this year at the Javits
Center on Thursday, June 1, and Friday, June 2, where the book trade talks to
itself. The public is excluded, for this
is a gathering only of those involved in the book trade, meaning publishers,
authors (especially bestsellers), agents, and librarians, as well as filmmakers
looking for the next blockbuster book that might be made into a blockbuster film. It’s all about networking, keeping in touch
with old contacts and developing new ones, and sniffing out the latest in
publishing trends. It is most definitely
not about finding an agent or publisher, and to approach someone on the floor
with this in mind is to brand yourself a pushy newbie and suffer the
consequences.
BookCon, which only
dates from 2014 and follows hot on the heels of BookExpo, is an event where the
book trade welcomes consumers (hence “con”) with open arms, and feasts them
with titles old and new, author talks and signings, giveaways, and geeky
book-related products. This year it was
held at the Javits on Saturday, June 3, and Sunday, June 4. So if the trade excludes the public for the first two days, it then repents of its action,
rediscovers readers, and throws its gates wide open. And the event is BIG: held last year for a
single day in (to the dismay of many) Chicago, it expected and presumably got
10,000 visitors. But this year, held for
two days in New York, which likes to do things BIGGER THAN BIG, it anticipated
25,000, of which I was one.
Into the labyrinth
So ill informed was I, as a very small published author,
that until last winter I had never heard of BookExpo or BookCon, and had never
set foot in, or even glimpsed from a distance, the Jacob K. Javits Convention
Center (named for a deceased but well remembered U.S. senator from New York) at
Eleventh Avenue and West 34th Street, on the booming west side of
Manhattan. What alerted me to these
events was an unsolicited e-mail offer from some outfit I’d never heard of,
promising – for a tidy sum – to get me into the book event and connect me with
an agent. Though I was justifiably
skeptical of the offer and deleted it, it occurred to me that maybe I should
look into the matter myself, with the result that, after much time spent
online, I enrolled in BookExpo as an author to the tune of $400, which I
thought a bit steep, since other participants got in for less, and without
authors there would be no such event, no publishers, and no agents either. Then, poking about further online, I realized
that BookExpo was not for me, since what I needed at the moment was readers,
not contacts with agents and publishers, who today couldn’t be bothered with
small fry like myself. Result: I got my
$400 refunded and, by forking out a mere $2,000, rented a 10' x 10' exhibitor’s booth for
BookCon. Sheer folly, of course, since I
had no idea what I was getting into. But
it would look good in a query letter to small publishers, who want to know an
author’s marketing plan, and it would satisfy
my modest appetite for adventure. So began the BookCon for Dummies phase of my adventure.
By way of preparation, I saw on an online plan of the show
floor that my booth #2876 was in the BookCon section -- the section for small presses and indie authors who wouldn't attend BookExpo -- way up in the northwest
corner of the floor. I wondered if visitors
would find their way to me in what looked like a remote backwater, but when I
learned that the famous Strand Bookstore would have a big booth right next to
me, I breathed a sigh of relief: they would draw traffic into my
aisle. On the BookCon website I also watched two videos showing hordes of visitors swarming into the one-day 2016 show in
Chicago, and informing me that attendees were 52% female millennials, the rest
being older women and, in smaller numbers, men.
A problem: these young women read genre fiction -- romance, sci-fi, fantasy,
young adult, horror, thrillers -- which I
don’t do. So could I entice them into
historical fiction and nonfiction? KNOW
YOUR READERS is standard advice to authors these days, so for each of my three
offerings I tried to do just that.
Know your readers
The
Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press,
2011). New York, late 1860s. A respectably raised young man decides to
become a male prostitute, servicing the city’s elite, then falls in love with
his most difficult client. Gay romance,
if it must be labeled. I decided to put
out 20 copies. Probable readers: older
gay men, as I had learned in hawking it at the Rainbow Book Fair five years ago. Not a likely hit for BookCon, alas.
Yet the reviews of it on the Goodreads website have all been by women, which gave me pause for thought. (Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)
No Place
for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (self-published with Mill City Press, 2015). An award-winning selection of posts from my
blog, with such subjects as Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade,
alcoholics, abortionists, grave robbers, peyote visions, my mugging in Central
Park, steamboat wars on the Hudson, and an artist who made art out of a
blood-filled squirt gun and a blackened human toe. Again, 20 copies. Probable readers: anyone who lives, has
lived, or would like to live in New York, and anyone who is visiting, has
visited, or would like to visit the city.
Pretty broad, perhaps, but the best that I could do. (Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)
Bill
Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary
Press, 2017). New York, 1870s. From his cell in the gloomy prison known as
the Tombs, a young street kid turned pickpocket spills out in a torrent of
words his career as a thief who wants better, his numerous prison stays
(escaping once in a coffin), his forays into polite society, his testimony
before an investigating committee, his hate of snitches and bullies, and his
stay in a lunatic asylum, from which he emerges to face death threats and
possible involvement in a murder. Forty
copies of this one, since it was the most recent, just hot off the press. Probable readers: anyone interested in
history, especially history of New York, anyone interested in action adventure
and crime. Again, pretty broad. Maybe older males. (Available from Amazon.)
And how many books did I hope to sell? Not many, by bestseller standards, since
female millennials were probably not my audience. I hoped for 40 or more sales, would consider
20 disappointing, and decided that 30 would be minimally acceptable. A modest projection,
I thought, though I didn’t dismiss the grim possibility of my sitting glumly in my booth, totally neglected by the multitudinous swarm of young women hurrying elsewhere.
Such were my assumptions about readers and sales. Regarding readers, I was completely and
outrageously wrong.
Next, learning who some of my future neighbors in the
BookCon section of the exhibit floor would be, I contacted them by e-mail and, being in the BookCon for Dummies stage, asked if they had any advice for a newbie.
They were all delighted to hear from me and offered lots of advice.
Put out lots of swag
Attendees love swag, meaning free stuff, so put out
lots. I decided on candy and at first
thought about Hershey’s Kisses, since everyone loves chocolate, and the double
entendre possibilities were endless: “Would you like some of my kisses?” or
“Don’t leave without a kiss,” and so on.
But then I thought about fingers smeared with chocolate getting near my
beloved books and opted instead for hard candy, specifically, lollipops with
lots of colors. A big heap of it in a
bowl on the table in my 10’ x 10’ booth.
Gotta have a gimmick
Everyone agreed that you had to hook the attendees’
attention, get them to notice your modest little booth among those many others. Possibilities: a big colorful banner, free
bookmarks, anything to catch their eye.
My solution -- a series of bold-face signs:
BOOKS ARE SEXY
BE WICKED: READ BOOKS,
YOU READ? I
LOVE YOU
YOU’RE AWESOME / so am I
I would present them on a bookstand on the table and at intervals remove the top one so as to reveal the next one, and then, if I heard
music from a distance and began to pulse with it, climax them with
GEEZERS ROCK
I would probably be the
oldest exhibitor there and meant to play it to the hilt.
Polish your spiel
Some attendees would want to read the blurb and decide on
their own, but others would ask what it was about, so
exhibitors should be ready with a good spiel to snag their interest. So I worked up a
pitch. Example: for the New York stories: “All about the good side and the bad of New
York. My mugging in Central Park was
definitely not good, but it made me a real New Yorker – I had joined the
club.” Hopefully it would get a laugh or at least a smile.
Don’t do it alone
I had thought it might be cool to handle it all
myself, but who would cover for me if I ran to the john or went out for
lunch? And how would I get all my books
to the Center? So I asked my young
friend Silas Berkowitz, whom I had met a year before at a college alumni gathering, and
he jumped at the chance, seeing it all as an adventure. He works for Microsoft, has a flexible
schedule, and is tech-savvy, so he seemed a perfect fit. His knowledge of tech would let him handle
credit card payments and do something called lead retrieval, scanning
attendees’ badges to obtain their e-mail addresses for future
contact. And for all the years between
us, we laughed at the same things, and our interests overlapped. With me at 88 and him at 26, we would be an
odd couple, though “couple” is hardly the word, since we were not in the usual
sense of the word (honni soit qui mal y pense)
a couple, just friends.
 |
| The odd couple. No need to say who's who. (Unless otherwise attributed, all the photos in this and the next post are Silas's.) |
Make it fun
Of course, that goes without saying. But from my experience at the Rainbow Book
Fair in 2012, and stories my artist friend Henry told of dealing with potential buyers,
I know the woes of hawking your wares in person: someone shows an
interest – even a keen interest – in what you're offering and then, having fueled your hopes
of a sale, they walk blithely away. But
BookCon is a festival, a fun time, so you have to squelch any feeling of annoyance or disappointment and
hope for better. Sour looks and frowns
are taboo. So flash your signs, offer
them candy, smile, and have fun yourself; it will (hopefully) communicate.
Know the lingo
I picked it up online.
You’ve got to feed the buzz. You
want to be one of their faves, one of their besties. You want to geek out. lol
So much for advice.
But how to get my stuff to the show?
Getting there
Exhibitors coming from a great distance contract with
Freeman, the exclusive provider of freight services for the show, to ship their
books and other stuff to a warehouse in Maspeth, New York, for later delivery,
or they schedule the delivery so it arrives at just the right time at the
Center. But one reason the show had
tempted me from the start was that, living in the West Village, I was only a
short ten-dollar taxi ride from the Javits.
The move-in for BookExpo, with all the big publishers bringing hundreds
of books and all kinds of stuff for their lavish displays, would be a frenzied horror,
but the move-in for BookCon, the venue for small presses and indie authors like
me who eschewed the delights of BookExpo, was very precise and limited: 5
p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, June 2, immediately following the close of
BookExpo.
So it was that Silas and I stacked three cartons of books in
my aging laundry cart, plus more books in our shoulder bags, and through the
wonders of tech (his idea, of course) summoned a car by Lyft to my very
doorstep in the Village, and took a quick ride up to the Javits at Eleventh
Avenue and West 34th Street.
When we got out and made for the entrance, we took a quick glance around
us and saw towering high-rises under construction nearby, dwarfing by their
height the massive glass box of the Javits.
The Hudson Yards just to the south of the Javits were definitely “hot”
real estate; the whole West Side was booming.
 |
| The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center Eden, Janine and Jim |
Inside, we found ourselves in a vast airplane hangar-like structure
with huge stretches of space, big signs overhead announcing future events, and
another giant sign, which we reached after a walk the equivalent of four city blocks, welcoming us to BookExpo and BookCon.
We went at once to the registration counter and collected our red-ribboned
exhibitor badges, without which we couldn’t get in, and hung them around our
neck. But we had arrived a little before
5:00 p.m., when BookExpo ended and our move-in began, so we sat for a while
nearby and met a couple visiting from China who wanted to see the U.N.
building; the wife spoke English, so Silas gave her directions and we wished
them well – a reminder of the international attraction of this city and the
Javits.
At the magic hour of five we entered the huge exhibit floor
and trudged this way and that until we saw a distant overhead sign that said
2800. Since our booth was #2876, we headed
that way and found a vast lot of ... nothing. Right where
we thought we should be located: nothing!
At least, nothing that looked like our little section of BookCon. So Silas took off to find the office of Reed
Exhibitions, who were running the show, to learn what the problem was;
returning, he said there had been a little error, but the booths would soon be
installed. Exploring further, he found a
very empty booth numbered 2876, but no table or chairs, and most of the nearby
booths likewise empty. I in turn scurried
off to query Reed and was told: “No need to worry. The tables are on their way.” So we waited in the empty booth, screened in
back by an eight-foot black curtain, and on either side by a low three-foot black
curtain. Not that the place was
deserted; beyond the end of our aisle there was a wide entrance to the loading
docks, and fork-lifts came from there lumbering down our aisle like looming monsters, carrying huge
cartons to other distant booths with displays far more elaborate than
ours. Finally, about 6:00 p.m., workmen
began arriving with the missing tables, and once ours was installed at the
front of the booth, similarly draped in black, we felt that the booth, though still
minus chairs, at least existed.
Wanting to get a good night’s sleep, we decided to go home, hoping that
the chairs would also arrive. Which they
did, for we found them there when we arrived on Saturday morning.
 |
| Me in the booth, with the Strand postcards and magnets close by. |
Fellow toilers in the vineyard
Once we had installed our books, signs, and candy on the
table, I took a quick look around at our neighbors. Just next to us was the Strand Bookstore
booth, selling everything but books: postcards at a dollar apiece, magnets to
be mounted on a refrigerator door or any metallic surface, T-shirts, totes, and
even socks with brief messages like “ I love New York.” The
postcards were mounted on stands right next to us, so we could feast our eyes
on their messages:
FOR MOST OF HISTORY ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN
KEEP CALM AND CALL MOM
MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN
GAY RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED
A WELL-READ WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS CREATURE
I couldn’t resist buying one:
New York-er
noun – a fast-walking, fast-talking person who lives
in the best city on earth.
ex: “Get out of my way, I’m walking here.”
This is
the abrasive image that New Yorkers themselves like to project, but I would argue that New Yorkers
are in fact less aggressive, less rude, just direct and to the point.
And right next to the postcards were
the magnets, with similar messages:
WE ARE EACH OF US A LITTLE UNIVERSE
BORN TO READ / FORCED TO WORK
YOUR GRAMMAR MAKES ME (SIC)
I AM A CRAZY CAT LADY AND PROUD OF IT
How
“with it” can you get? I predicted that
the Strand products would fly off the shelves and the racks.
Just across the aisle from the Strand
was Book Beau, advertising itself as “the best way to love your books.” And what did it offer? A water- and stain-resistant "sleeve" (thin bag) to protect books and make them look beautiful; there were many patterns,
and they were indeed beautiful.
Next to Book Beau and just across from
us was Kirin Rise Studios, with a big banner showing a young woman, maybe
Asian, who was evidently the heroine of a novel by an author named Ed
Cruz. Later I would learn that she lived
in the year 2032 and used martial arts to fight bravely against government
corruption and corporate greed – something we could use in 2017. But just what the booth was selling was never clear to me.
Next to Book Beau was what Silas and I
came to refer to as the “mystery booth”: a booth at first empty, with a sign
reading TRADE SECRET TRILOGY / 13 CUTS,
which meant nothing to us. Later an
African American family with a young child came to occupy the booth, but what
they were up to baffled us. They were
evidently presenting a series of books, but by whom and about what was not
apparent. Later I learned that the
author was “DOJ,” which hardly cleared things up. And a small card that we retrieved from their
table had texts in such small print, and in such fancy type, that their
enterprise remained shrouded in mystery.
And this right across from the flagrantly and deliciously commercial
offerings of the Strand!
At the magic hour of 10 a.m.
on Saturday, June 3, the gates to BookCon 2017 swung wide open and hordes of
female millennials, plus assorted others, began pouring onto the exhibit
floor. We saw the first arrivals in the
distance, some of them hurrying in our direction. Our adventure was at last beginning. “Two against twenty-five thousand,” I said to
Silas. “How can we lose?”
Coming soon: Part 2 of BookCon, focused on attendees, plus notes on two of my BookCon neighbors, authors Jill Hynes and David Mammina. Who were the attendees, where were they from, what did
they want, how did Silas and I interact with them, which books sold, and who were the
buyers? Surprises galore; I would never have guessed.
©
2017 Clifford Browder
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