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Merits of Joint BEA/ALA Convention Weighed
The prospect of BookExpo America and the ALA annual convention being located in the same exhibit hall is being viewed warily by the different players in the publishing community. Those who appear the least enthused by the plan are the major New York trade houses with Penguin Group in the forefront.
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Books@Eight Regional Fall Shows New from ATL
Above the Treeline, the Ann Arbor company that's been providing business intelligence tools to the industry for more than eight years, announced Wednesday that they have partnered with eight of the nine regional bookseller associations to provide digital catalogs at this fall's trade shows this month and next. The digital catalog program is similar to ATL's Books@BEA initiative this past spring, which featuring frontlist titles displayed at the show by 300 exhibitors; it was accessed by 5,000 BEA attendees.
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Decatur Book Festival: PWxyz Was There
This weekend, authors and book lovers descended on Georgia for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival. Jonathan Franzen kicked off his Freedom tour at the festival, Confederacy of Dunces took to the stage and Lev Grossman talked fantasy, and that's just a bit of what happened. Former PW reviews editor Marc Shultz was there to cover the fest for PWxyz.
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Reed in Talks with ALA About Running Trade Shows
Reed Exhibitions, parent company of BookExpo America, is in discussion with the American Library Association about taking over the organization’s two main meetings--the June annual convention and the January midwinter meeting. The process is far enough along that Reed has talked to a number of the major trade houses about the prospect and about the idea of combining BEA with the ALA annual meeting. The two shows typically run about a month apart; next year ALA is set for June 23-28 in New Orleans while BEA is scheduled for May 24-26 in New York City. Although the New York houses appear cool to the idea, there is not sufficient opposition to stop the process from moving forward. If a deal is reached, Reed is believed to favor locating BEA and the ALA annual meeting in 2012 in Chicago, creating in effect two shows under one roof. It wasn't clear if the shows would move around the country.
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Brooklyn Book Festival to Take Place September 12
The Brooklyn Book Festival, which drew 30,000 people last year, is fine-tuning the 2010 celebration, which will take place on Sunday, September 12 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in and around Borough Hall and Columbus Park. In addition to an outdoor literary marketplace with 175 booksellers, publishers, presses, and organizations, over 200 authors will participate in panels and readings.
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Beijing 2010: A Busy Fair with High Optimism
The five-day Beijing Book Fair, running August 30 through September 3, is off to a great start. The mood is optimistic and the aisles at Hall 8 (for international publishers) heavily trafficked.
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Kentucky Author Forum Hits Sweet 16
Rare is the author who doesn't do a virtual author tour or video book trailer these days--yet the pleasure of hearing an author interviewed in-person is still going strong. The University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum, a nonprofit literary series that pairs (mostly) nonfiction authors with well-known personalities to interview them, is one such example.
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Frankfurt Book Fair Launches Two Dedicated Tech Programs
The Frankfurt Book Fair is going to the techies. At least it's trying to. This year's fair, scheduled for October 6-10, will feature an increased focus on technology with two programs geared at education and networking. The trade show is launching what it dubs the SPARKS initiative, which will feature two central programs, Frankfurt Hot Spots and Frankfurt StoryDrive. Through the Hot Spots program, six areas or "hot spots" on the fair grounds will be dedicated spaces for publishing professionals to network with people who work in the technology field. The StoryDrive program will unfold over two days in the Film & Media Forum, and will focus on the various ways narratives are being told and packaged across mediums like print, film, and gaming.
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Baltimore's Otakon Draws 28,000 Anime, Manga Fans
Despite a false fire alarm that forced an evacuation of the convention center, the 17th annual Otakon convention, held at the Baltimore Convention Center this past weekend, attracted more than 28,000 anime and manga fans along with about 1230 staff and dealer/exhibitors.
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Milo Manara at Comic-Con
Italian cartoonist Milo Manara is internationally known for erotically rendered graphic novels. The author of both slyly and blatantly sexual works such as Click, Butterscotch, Indian Summer and Trip to Tulum (with Frederico Fellini), Manara was visiting this year's San Diego Comic-Con to announce that Dark Horse is publishing his works in a complete multi-volume edition.
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Photo Mania: 7/27/10 SDCC 2010
The San Diego Comic-Con International 2010 may be over but we've brought back a host of images to remind us of just about everything that happened. From comics and cartoonists to movies and costumed fans, here are some of the images of this year's Comic-con.
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The Comic-Con Movie Freight Train Hauls Some Books
It's become a kind of broken record, but this year's San Diego Comic-con, like last year's Comic-con, was dominated by the hype and marketing machines of the Hollywood film and TV studios. From the buzz generating around the release of Universal's Scott Pilgrim film next month and, later this year, AMC's Walking Dead, to a bulked-up lineup of superhero movies coming next year--DC's Green Lantern and Marvel's Thor and Captain America films--Comic-con is the ultimate platform for hyping big budget film and TV projects, whether they're based on comics or not.
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More Monster-Classics Mashups from IDW
With an eye on the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con, comics publisher IDW Publishing is trying its hand at prose and plans to release an anthology of genre mashups called Classics Mutilated, featuring novella-length stories by a host of prominent horror and fantasy writers. To highlight the volume at Comic-Con, IDW is also making one of the book's novellas, Dread Island by Joe Lansdale available as a standalone preview show special, and also has plans to release it in multiple print formats.
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A Peek at the July 5 'PW'
The issue kicks-off with a look at how and why Barnes & Noble plans to transform itself into a major retailer of digital content and e-readers. B&N's makeover is not playing well on Wall Street however, and the company's stock was the biggest loser of all industry stocks in the first half of 2010. In all, the Publishers Weekly Stock Index fell over 14% in the six month period. Metadata is something publishers and others need to embrace and a piece explains why. Former NEA official David Kipen is preparing for his next act--owner of a lending library and used bookstore. The issue also features audio listing and an analysis of what higher unit sales but lower revenue means for the audio industry. Comic-con is around the corner and a feature examines what the prospects are for the giant gathering to remain in San Diego.
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Richard Brown's AAUP Presidential Address
A transcript of the Georgetown University Press director's speech.
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Facing the Facts: University Presses in the Digital Age
The future is now: That's the message university and scholarly presses received at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses held in Salt Lake City from June 17 to 20. The conference, titled "Toward a Sustainable Future," conveyed a sense of urgency in dealing with the changes now facing scholarly publishing.
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Schulz Buys Santa Barbara Writers Conference
The Santa Barbara Writers Conference has a new owner: novelist Monte Schulz, son of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. Schulz purchased the conference from bankruptcy and plans to re-launch it in 2011. The Schulz family has supported SBWC since its inception in 1972.
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Exhibitors, Attendees Upbeat at Las Vegas Licensing Show
Exhibitors and attendees at last week's Licensing International Expo in Las Vegas—including publishers, licensing agencies representing book-based properties, and retail book buyers—were cautiously optimistic that the licensing business may be about to turn a corner after a rough 2008 and 2009. As has been the case in recent years, much of the focus was on the tried-and-true, including classic properties, entertainment franchises, and retro licenses.
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Self-Publishing Expo Back in October
Self-Publishing Book Expo, which launched last November, will be back in October with a second event aimed at the rapidly-growing market of self-published authors.
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Fast-Growing Publishers Share Insights at IBPA's Publishing University
As part of the IBPA's Publishing University set for May 24-25 in New York, the heads of four houses that made PW's fast-growing small publishers list in 2010 will discuss the strategies that allowed them to grow during a recession.
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