What is BEA?

Book Expo America, the industry's big, not open to the public, annual trade show. Booksellers and others interact with publishers and authors, blah blah. Lately it's been very, "How do we save publishing?!"

Gud, BEA=Book Expo America, the big publishing-industry con.

Lately it's been very, "How do we save publishing?!"

Eh, for decades before that, it was "how do we save Bookselling", with occasional bouts of "OMG INTERNETS IS COMING". I'm fairly convinced that they're in the handwringing/fearmongering biz more than the book biz.

I'm fairly convinced that they're in the handwringing/fearmongering biz more than the book biz.

Oh yeah. They're experts at handwringing.

That makes me think. My wife wants me to go to some writer's conference. I'm very dubious about getting much out of it and I can't say I'm very interested in it. I don't consider myself a real serious writer and I wonder if one really gets a lot of these things.

It depends on the conference, Gud. Who's presenting, who's attending, what kind of workshops are given. If you're interested in learning craft, or even just how other people write, it can be really fascinating, and it always used to fire me up to write more -- for a long time I was going to a couple a year, as an *editor* asked to speak, but I always got to sit in on other panels and talk to writers, so.

The anti-inspiration!

Very much so. Now I just feel ashamed that I read the books. Well not all the books. I think I stopped when I realized I just read a 600 page book and almost nothing happened. That and the characters ended up being all the same, especially the women.

It depends on the conference, Gud. Who's presenting, who's attending, what kind of workshops are given. If you're interested in learning craft, or even just how other people write, it can be really fascinating, and it always used to fire me up to write more

Hmmmm.... I don't know. It would involve travel, thus money and vacation time. I think my wife is more into the idea because she thinks I can get published based on reading as I'm going along. I am much less optimistic on that score, though I don't have the first clue what the market for fantasy books is.

Interestingly, out of pure curiosity she tried to Google the demographics of fantasy book readers and came up with nothing. I tried as well but struck out too (no surprise, she's usually better at Googling up facts than I am). That seemed kinda weird, it seems like the sort of thing that would Google up easily.

Fantasy has a really decent core of readers, Gud, just like any other genre fiction. I'm not sure how easy it is to get published in fantasy, because we didn't do fantasy where I used to work, but there are certainly a fair number of fantasy novels out each month.

The best place to look for information like that is actually books themselves -- who publishes fantasy, first, and then you go to their web sites and see how many new books they have coming out each month, who's doing straight fantasy, who does darker urban fantasy, that kind of thing.