Psst… Book Expo America Is Taking Place Right Now

It would have been difficult to imagine some seven to ten years ago -- when comics' growing prominence at the major publishing showcase Book Expo America had the feel of a teen movie where a long-neglected but deep-down beautiful girl showed up at prom in a smoking hot dress -- that this same exact show could be going on right now without comics' role significantly diminished and yet without an overriding comics industry or fan emphasis on the event. Heidi MacDonald at The Beat is doing some comics-focused reporting, and certainly publishing industry bible PW is on hand and today keeps comics well within its coverage radius. And yet there are signs that fewer people care than maybe used to. I get a sense -- and this admittedly isn't scientific -- that more regional comics bloggers make MoCCA a priority over focusing in any way on BEA. The Comics Journal editorial team is located in New York now, but I don't think the show has even made their daily blogging posts, let alone a feature; the comics news clearinghouses Newsarama and Comic Book Resources manage one mention on their combined front pages (the event is part of a blog round-up at CBR), and some key comics publishers with aggressive bookstore sales tracks haven't made the trip at all.

Exactly why the event seems reduced in stature involves factors far outside of my natural grasp of publishing. I can speculate, but I recognize that I could easily be shouted down by someone with a greater investment in the show or book publishing generally. For all I know, BEA is still as vital as it ever was, or maybe even more so, with scales constantly falling from the eyes of those in attendance on hot issues like the ongoing digital revolution. I am certain that for some publishers, and some comics people, this is still an immensely useful and vital show. And in a wider book-publishing sense you certainly still read about parties, and see those features touting a short list of supposedly hot books, and get those "this is what this year's show is about" articles from major news sources (e-books, if you haven't heard).

What you hear about comics also sounds swell: I would climb over any combination of swag-gathering librarians to hear Shannon Wheeler talk to Roz Chast, I love hearing Bill Willingham hold forth any occasion I can (he did a spotlight interview with MacDonald), and what I've read in a couple of places about Dark Horse focusing attention on books that might have special interest to libraries and children's book buyers sounds like I'd love to be there to hear those pitches and anything like them first-hand. There's also the continuing undercurrent about the future of the show itself, that it needs to become more like a consumer-focused Comic-Con in future years to maintain its long-term viability. That kind of discussion can be fascinating, and comics people should have much to say on that matter having been the first-hand beneficiaries of Comic-Con type shows for years and years and years now. I'd love to be grinding through an omelet near the Javits Center having this kind of conversation even as I write this post.

Still, it certainly seems like something's missing, if only a sense of size and scope and unique importance. My hunch is we're seeing a combined shift in the way the prose publishing business functions -- that the industry part of the book industry has been wounded, or at least suffers from the kind of stunned lethargy that's derived from news like 100s of million in chain store losses in a single month and chatter that physical sales as a significant factor may be near their end, period -- and in the idea that a show like Book Expo has value beyond its potential ability to reach the most people in the most profitable ways. I'm certainly not seeing the explosion in media coverage that was hinted at as the show's birthright if the show settled into New York and away from its rotating-city schedule. And while it may just be me, I'm also not seeing the opportunity BEA provides for folks to pick up free books from a variety of publishers spoken of as an opportunity to shape the market to come with as much frequency as I used to, as opposed to a chance to take home piles of free stuff (it was always that, just not only that).

I've been asking people here and there about comics and Book Expo, and almost no one's felt comfortable venturing a publishable opinion. An exception was Fantagraphics Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds, whose company was a fixture of the comics presence at the show during those heady early 2000s but chose not to attend at all in 2011. Reynolds wrote back that, "the simple answer is that BEA is ridiculously expensive to exhibit at and I'm not sure it's prudent allocation of resources anymore. And there are few quantifiable returns that you can gauge it against. I suppose it all depends on what books and authors you're promoting and whether you can fold BEA into those plans. We saw an opportunity to skip this year and took it." Reynolds emphasized that in future years the show might better fit into Fantagraphics' plans. He cites the show being settled into New York as a discouraging factor for yearly attendance, in that while this serves the major book publishers headquartered in the city in terms of their being able to cut costs over, it reduces the overall exposure to a variety of industry people that may have found it easier to go to the show when it was in Chicago, LA, or Washington D.C.

So while the measure in what BEA may have lost, if anything, remains nebulous and hard to grasp, it seems undeniable to me that something is different now, both from what was and what was expected. That may be a comics thing, that may be a prose publishing thing; it may be both. If nothing else, there was a time when I don't think anyone saw these kinds of questions being asked.
 
posted 9:00 am PST | Permalink
 

---

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