BEA is always a great show. There are so many different reasons to attend: introduce the new fall books that we're excited about, meet old friends and catch up on what's happening in bookstores and libraries around the country, meet new friends and business partners and hopefully impress the living dickens out of them with our books and gracious manners, visit with friends at other publishers and walk around their booths stealing ideas, have meaningful conversations with authors and illustrators (both on our list and not on our list), and travel to exotic locales like the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Meg and Taylor and I enjoyed L.A. so much, we think it's high time Charlesbridge opened a West Coast office. Here, Meg and I discuss the finer points of sales and marketing at our new beach front office space in Santa Monica.
And Taylor works on the new catalog cover.
The absolute best day of BEA (certainly no offense to the other days) is Thursday. That's the ABC New Voices luncheon. This year's speakers included the inspiring and delightful Cecilia Galante whose new book The Patron Saint of Butterflies is a fascinating story of two best friends, one of whom is devoted to their religious cult upbringing, and the other is not. We had the opportunity to meet Cecilia on Friday night at the ABC Not a Dinner and (Mostly) Silent Auction. Cecilia is a smart and funny new voice not to be "new" for long as she'll be most likely be turning up a lot.
The best part of Thursday, though, is that after the luncheon, we were free to go shopping in Hollywood as the booth was all set up and there were no pressing meetings to attend. Here, we found the footprints of homeboy Matt Damon at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
This year we were ever so lucky to be accompanied by children's lit great Jane Yolen. Her new book Sea Queens: Women Pirates Around the World is new this July. Jane knew everyone, or, more to the point, everyone knew Jane. We were never wall flowers with Jane on our arm. The best part was when we made her climb the only hill in downtown Los Angeles to go to dinner at an Italian restaurant that shall remain unnamed. The doorman assured us it was walking distance. I suppose if you're really fit and looking for a challenge on an empty stomach. And, even though I did really love L.A., how come the entire city only exists on the inside? We could not find that restaurant for the life of us because it was tucked away inside some insidiously discreet hotel courtyard. And, don't ask for the water.
And, yes, we did work the booth also:
And this lame (but funny) video. I haven't quite figured out my new camera.
Posted by Donna... sorry.
1 comment:
Who's that crazy girl in the video? She looks so model-ish when she's posing in the ocean, but so scary and close in the video.
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