Dateline BEA: Roaming the floor

By design, today was more of a “take it easy” day. No rushing from panel to panel, party to party. A bit more down time. And a lot of walking. Lots and lots of it.

But then, this is Javits. And it is gigantic. I couldn’t properly appreciate the glory of its hugeness until I walked in around 11 AM this morning to the lower level, packed to the brim with exhibitor booths, people milling about and a ton of chatter.

And the lower level is only perhaps a quarter of the size of the main exhibitor area.

Too many books, indeed.

But as my fellow colleagues in blogging have pointed out over and over, BEA’s focus is on business, on books as product and on making deals. It’s about finding better ways — more efficient ways, if possible — to make money. And seeing choice galleys given away almost nonchalantly when, just a few years ago, the idea of reading a book before it was even published was an utter novelty.

The highlights after the jump.

The first person I see when I walk through the floor is some guy with toilet paper on his head and a badge saying “TOILET NOVEL.” I wish I’d had a picture as I think it might top this one. I thought of asking him what the deal was, but the thing with such creatures is that the moment you do so, you know they will give you a huge spiel about how fabulous their book is and how evil the industry is for not noticing them. So I walked on. I wonder if he got any other victims though…

Only panel attended was the Emerging Voices at 1 PM, fairly well attended and because it was reading-based, some authors did better than others. I was already excited for Laila’s book, but now really on my radar are first novels by Stephanie Doyon (about a dead-end town and the two polar opposite kids who are constantly linked as they grow up) and Judy Sheehan. Very different, but they were engaging readers with great authorial — and actual — voices.

Had a nice chat with Caitlin Sommie of Unbridled Books. They have a good thing going, choosing a virtual model for their company and their enthusiasm for books is great to see. I’d had my eye on Edward Falco’s books for some time and will be paying extra attention to his upcoming novel, WOLF POINT, which is a dark literary suspense work that seems to be my speed.

Also on the small press front, got to see Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe of Uglytown (nattily dressed as usual — how do these guys do it?) and Benjamin Leroy of Bleak House Books. It’s all too easy for small presses to be lost in the crowd, espec when the Big Guns have almost an entire row to themselves, but great gems are to be had, and they should not be ignored.

Though on the major league front, the bottom line was this: traffic jams. Who knew? But being stuck for 20 minutes trying to wade through Time Warner’s outpost was rather odd…

The books that seem to be picking up steam on the buzz front, at least for crime fiction, are Brian Freeman’s IMMORAL (which has had foreign rights sold in a zillion countries and has all the muscle St. Martin’s can muster) and Danny Leigh’s THE MONSTERS OF GRAMERCY PARK (which as more of a literary crime thing could find a broader audience — hell, I sure hope so.) But I assume I’ll know more on the what’s hot/what’s not front once Saturday rolls around, what with it being Mystery/Suspense day and all.

More when I think of it, but for now, I’m off for dinner. Tomorrow should be fun. Albeit incredibly wall-to-wall…