BEA 2012: Official BEA On-Site Addendum

BEA 2012: Pretty Crafty

BEA attendees can’t miss the oversize shocking-pink Sock Monster at the C&T Publishing booth (3758), thanks to the handiwork of Stash Books author Brenna Maloney, who will be signing copies of Sock It to Me: 16 Projects Sewn from Socks—Creepy, Crazy & Strangely Appealing (Aug.), the third release in her Socks series (Socks Appeal and Sockology), on Wednesday, 2–3 p.m. An oversize grasshopper—also completely made of socks—accompanies Sock Monster, “for people that want a more insect feel to their horror,” laughingly explains Amy Marson, publisher for C&T. Sock Monster is here all three days of Book Expo, “unless he decides to go crazy and run off,” adds Marson.

BEA 2012: NYRB to Launch E-book Line

The venerable magazine New York Review of Books (booth 4044), which already has two book imprints, NYRB Classics and NYRB Children’s Collection, will announce at BEA the launch of NYRB Lit, a new, select e-book series to be edited by Sue Halpern, a longtime contributor the New York Review.

BEA 2012: More Books for Amazon

Amazon Publishing has significantly increased the size of its publishing program, acquiring publication rights from Avalon Books to more than 3,000 backlist titles. Founded in 1950 by Thomas Bouregy, Avalon Books has specialized in producing books in such major genres as mystery, romance, and westerns. The titles, none of which has been released in digital formats, will be published by Amazon in e-book and print editions under its Amazon Publishing, Montlake Romance, and Thomas & Mercer imprints.

BEA 2012: The Russians Are Coming

Russia, the guest of honor at BEA this year, opened with a panel on its book and publishing market, introduced by Vladimir Grigoriev, the deputy director of the Russian Federal Agency of Press and Mass Communication. Grigoriev was joined by colleagues Oleg Novikov, CEO and founder of EKSMO, Russia’s largest trade publishing house, and Yuri Deikalo, CEO of AST/Astrel, one of the largest publishing groups in Russia.

BEA 2012: IDPF 2012: Experimenting Is Key

The imperative to develop a connection to readers and communities of “passion,” the institutionalization of self-publishing, and the transformation of book publishing from a “product lottery” to an industry delivering “services” that create new revenue were just a few of the themes bouncing around the morning session of IDPF’s Digital Book 2012, held at the Javits Center in conjunction with BookExpo America.

BEA 2012: Russo Takes On Amazon At ‘Why Indies Matter’

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo defended independent bookstores at BookExpo America, saying "the Amazon threat is real."

BEA 2012: Audio All Day

With the growth of online sales and digital formats, the way consumers discover and create buzz about new audiobooks is changing, said Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler in his keynote address that kicked off a busy Audio Publishers Association Conference at the Javits Center on Monday.

BEA 2012: Disease, the Israeli Army and Supernatural Wolves at Editor's Buzz Panel

In a packed room at the Javits Center Monday afternoon, booksellers, editors, publicists and journalists got together for what BookExpo America show director Steve Rosato rightly called the one of the fair's "marquee events."

PW BEA Show Daily June 5, 2012

Read the complete June 5, 2012 BEA Show Daily in this Scribd reader to keep up with all the goings-on at Book Expo America!

BEA 2012: Russo Makes the Case for Indies

The American Booksellers Association couldn’t have chosen a better spokesperson to launch its new campaign on Why Indies Matter—or to get more than 250 booksellers to the Javits Center before lunch—than Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Russo.

BEA 2012: Stackpole Spotlights Three Authors

With more than 80 years of publishing books about outdoor sports, nature, crafts, and military history, Stackpole Books could feature any number of its authors at BEA, so as publisher Judith Schnell says, they easily chose three of their bestselling authors—Ralph Peters, Lefty Kreh, and Pete Dunne—to spotlight. To celebrate them, Stackpole will be raffling off signed copies of their forthcoming books daily in booth 3452.

BEA 2012: A Secret Society for Booksellers

Robin Sloan, media inventor (more about that later) and author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct.), has established a secret society of booksellers—the Unbroken Spine—and will be recruiting new members throughout BEA. Smartphone users can join up by going to www.robinsloan.com/bea, where, after answering a series of questions, you’ll be rewarded with a password. Stop by the Macmillan booth (3358), give them your password, and you’ll receive an official Unbroken Spine badge and be entered in the grand-prize drawing for a $200 dinner-for-two gift certificate. And three lucky booksellers will win a free social media consultation for their bookstores from Sloan. Left home without a smartphone? Simply come by the Macmillan booth, and they’ll set you up.

BEA 2012: ‘SNAP’ It Up at Qbend

Customizing course books and course packs is getting easier, cheaper, and more secure, to the delight of course creators and publishers both. Now you can pick several chapters, or individual sections from various chapters, assemble them quickly into various formats, including print, and voila!—course-specific custom textbooks made easy and painless. And thanks to Dubuque, Iowa–based Qbend’s new drag-and-drop interface, appropriately named SNAP (Search, Navigate, Assemble, Publish), creators can chose from a list of text and cover designs to lend the customized book a consistent feel. With secure access, built-in templates, and dashboard to monitor the customization, SNAP enables publishers to move to a digital-first workflow as well as to repurpose existing content for multichannel delivery.

BEA 2012: MPS Ltd.’s Unlimited Services

Visitors to MPS Limited’s (booth DZ2412) are going to see something familiar yet totally new this year. For chairman Nishith Arora, integrating many of the company’s tools and products that were built in the past and expanding them to create a digital-first workflow makes perfect sense. “This publishing solution can be used to paginate, publish, and distribute books for on-demand printing, online retailing, the Web, and mobile devices. As cost and time-to-market become ever more critical, we expect to see a part of the publishing world migrating to this platform soon,” says Arora, whose team is leveraging on MPS’s established experience in book production, digital services, and publishing to develop the end-to-end digital-first workflow for content production and distribution. He counts Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Wiley, McGraw-Hill and Wolters Kluwer among his major clients.

BEA 2012: Timely Topics at CRP

Booksellers and journalists at BEA should take note of Central Recovery Press’s latest offerings at booth 3830. The Las Vegas publisher of books about addiction and recovery and other behavioral health topics is promoting four titles this week that deal with issues very much in the news—including a title timed to be released in e-book format just as jury selection for a trial certain to garner national headlines is scheduled. Today, CRP is releasing Echoes of Penn State: Facing Sexual Trauma by Jennifer Storm, a 2002 graduate of Penn State University who is the executive director of the Victim/Witness Assistance Program in Harrisburg, Pa.

BEA 2012: No Baker’s Dozen for Twelve

Twelve, an imprint at Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, got its name from its publishing mission: to turn out 12 books a year—one book each month, no more, no less. Each Twelve book would be carefully chosen and would receive “boutique” attention by all on staff for one full month. Twelve books would be given the best chance possible to succeed in the competitive, cutthroat bookstore world.

BEA 2012: BEA Jersey-Style

Long before The Sopranos, Jersey Shore, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey embarrassed the Garden State on television, Mark Di Ionno, a veteran journalist and award-winning columnist for the state’s premier daily newspaper, the Star-Ledger, knew that New Jersey’s infamous happenings were fodder for national attention. So for about the past decade, between writing columns, Di Ionno labored over a work of fiction befitting his home state and its history.

BEA 2012: Top 50 from America’s Indies

When a customer asked Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber’s Books in St. Paul, Minn., to name 10 of his Top 100 books, he started pulling bestsellers off the store shelf. “No, I mean your personal top 10 favorite books,” she said. And with that simple request, Micawber’s Top 50 was born. Last summer Weyandt asked hand-selling friends at independent bookstores from Alaska to Florida to contribute lists of their own 50 favorites, which he began posting on his blog and on Facebook.

BEA 2012: Gross’s Cop Encounter Inspires 15 Seconds

What’s the worst thing that can happen to an author on a book tour—a talk-show host who can’t remember your name? Bedbugs in your hotel room? How about being handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car? That’s exactly what happened to New York Times bestselling author Andrew Gross while on tour in 2010 for Reckless. Driving to an appearance at Murder by the Book in Houston, he was pulled over for making an illegal U-turn, and what should have been a routine traffic stop turned into a terrifying interrogation. Luckily, Gross was let go with a warning—and in enough time to make it to Murder by the Book—but the experience left him thinking about how even the most fortunate of lives can be destroyed in an instant. And how that experience might just become his next novel.