Bookexpo New York?

By now, everyone has already made their decision on if BEA moving to during the week, and remaining in New York—rather than moving around the country—for the next few years is good or bad. I’m personally torn, and it’s not just because I was planning on spending extra time in Vegas in 2011 on the company dime.

At Bookexpo, we at CBE are partners in the New Title Showcase. We work very closely with the BEA crew in making New Title Showcase a great service—especially for small and indie presses and authors. From that standpoint, I think New York is the best place possible to make that work. Not only is the Javits Center a great venue with a great location to host the exhibit, but New York is pretty much the media capital of the world, and is sure to draw the most attention possible to such a feature. For participants in the New Title Showcase, New York can do nothing but benefit them.

Aside from the New Title Showcase, we also have a huge exhibit on the show floor with our sister company The American Collective Stand. In a union town like New York, where hiring labor is required, large exhibit set up can get expensive. With the show moving to a Tuesday start, that pushed set up to the weekend—a double time cost for labor. This would be the case in many cities, especially many of the cities large enough to accommodate BEA, but there’s no doubt its going to be a prohibitive cost for a lot of the larger exhibitors at BEA (not to mention the cost of New York itself).

But costs aside, New York really is the most logical place to hold Bookexpo. From an international standpoint, a static location is helpful, and from a worldwide standpoint, New York is the place to be no matter where you’re from. The media attention and the benefits that will bring can hopefully offset the costs (which, by the way, still aren’t as high as those in Frankfurt during THAT fair). And with a large percentage of the attendees and exhibitors based in New York, it’s a convenience increase and cost decrease for the vast majority of those involved.

I think in the long run, once this new BEA format that the show management keeps mentioning is finally in place and we’re used to it, everyone will agree that these moves were necessary to take the show to the next level. Right now, the negatives might be showing through, but just like I used to tell my mom when I was cleaning my room, “it’s going to seem worse before it gets better.” I have faith that the BEA team will do a MUCH, MUCH better job making BEA one of the best book events in the world than I did cleaning my room.