Wednesday, January 14, 2015

What the what?!?!

If What the what?! is not a familiar phrase, for brevity sake, I lifted that from Tina Fey's character on 30 Rock (the fantastic Liz Lemon).  Considering that Tina Fey was a BookCon last year, I figured that was a good start.  I love that phrase and led me to share What the What is going on these days with BEA.

Traveling some covered ground, but worth refreshing:  BEA is fully reinventing itself from the ground up.  Starting with the launch of BookCon last year, which sold out 10,000 tickets and is expanding to 2 days and expecting 15,000 to 20,000 consumers for 2015 and already has 40 guests in its line up (ranging from Sherman Alexie to Nndedi Okorafor).   The reinvention of BEA is holding BookCon close, creating a totally unique B2C event, but also leaving BEA intact exclusively as a trade only B2B event.  BEA will now run Wednesday - Thursday - Friday while BookCon runs on Saturday & Sunday.

Digging in more on BEA had our first official event announcementNational Book Award winner and #1 bestselling author Jonathan Franzen will appear at BookExpo America (BEA) on Wednesday, May 27th at 12pm at the Jacob Javits Center. Mr. Franzen will be interviewed by Laura Miller, the noted book critic and columnist who co-founded Salon.com.

We will be announcing the breakfast line-ups in the coming weeks as well, pending confirmations and knowing the alternates, no one will be disappointed as the BEA Book & Author Breakfasts will boast the usual star-literary-luminary power that makes these such incredible events for the trade.

Noting preparations with China continue ramp up as the featured guest of honor for the 2015 Global Market Forum (GMF) program.  There will be a number of panels under the GMF banner that will offer insights and networking to different areas in the Chinese market. There will be 1-2 GMF programs a day that will look at topics ranging from investing in China, the Education and Digital Markets as well as Children's publishing.  There will be a host of cultural events and more than anything there will be more than 500 publishing professionals from China at BEA looking for opportunity.

The new format of BEA being 3 compact weekdays will be a dynamic and jammed event, cutting the chance for downtime but eliminating wasted time.  Every minute of BEA will be as precious as it is productive, the biggest winners will be those that plan their time well. Lot's more to come and looking forward to what will be the most interesting and dynamic BEA in many years.