DC Out Of BEA; Expectations Down

PW comics culture blogger Heidi MacDonald caught something in one of that entity's newsletters which I'm grateful to have brought to my attention: BEA is shrinking in terms of exhibitors and attendees. That makes sense: the industry is shrinking, we live in a Internet-connected world that obviates the need for a lot of initial face-to-face meetings, and the religion of marketing has pretty much trumped any remaining belief in the industry structure, closed-door and personal connection idols of a previous civilization. Reviving useful structure would take way more work than one trade show is ever going to be able to muster, and might be a doomed game to begin with, so bringing on booth bunnies, cosplay and Colbert makes a kind of twisted sense.

The one thing I'd question is that BEA as currently constituted plays a significant role in building buzz, it's just that it's more the "Leonard Nimoy shows up in Austin to screen Star Trek" kind of buzz as opposed to the "people in the big exhibit hall going nuts at Comic-Con" kind of buzz. I'm not sure you can do both kinds under the same roof, and I'm not sure there's any way to replace the former once it's gone. It seems to me there's a sort of buzz that serves a book like Liar's Poker and a sort of buzz that serves Twilight, but I have to say "seems" because I don't have any qualifications to speak to those matters directly.

Maybe the silver lining is that in a few years I'll no longer have to read that same post every year from people that stuff themselves full of book industry freebies like a high school football team hitting the potato bar at Golden Corral, all in the service of feeding eBay and their own general acquisitiveness. Instead we'll get posts about how long the lines are and the way things were in the good old days.
 
posted 8:20 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives