Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print
LOS ANGELES -- It's too early to sum up the country's largest book trade show, wrapping up Sunday in sunny, cool Los Angeles, but the purely anecdotal report is:
There's nothing to get excited about this year.
Publishers' staffers who understandably ask and get anonymity, say they're smiling through the boredom.
"It's a show, after all, so we're acting our butts off here," said the staffer at a Saturday night party, very aware that the setting was the back lot of 20th Century Fox studios, a movie version of a seedy urban street that reminded me of Wilkinsburg.
Arriving guests walked an abbreviated version of the red carpet at the Academy Awards as performers dressed like newspaper reporters and photographers from the 1940s popped flashbulbs and asked stupid questions like, "How do you feel about the paperless catalog?"
I had no snappy comeback like Dana Andrews might have made. That one stumped me for a second until I remembered that this was the "green" BookExpoAmerica. Some publishers are replacing the glossy publications announcing upcoming books with electronic versions.
The best riposte I could manage to the phony hack was, "It looks like this is the closest you're gonna get to a studio acting job," because he was clearly not acting his butt off.
This was Jane Friedman's party. She's the boss of HarperCollins, a multi-imprint publishing empire owned by the media octopus Rupert Murdoch.
One of its serious literary authors is Jennifer Haigh, Cambria County's best novelist, whose new one, "The Condition," publishes next month. Its original date was this month. Haight's previous was "Baker Towers," an evocative story of life in the Western Pennsylvania coal mines of the 1940s.
Wearing a pale green wrap to fend off the evening coolness, she summed up the timing of the book in one word: Costco.
"The publisher said they had featured books for June, so they moved mine to July so it could be featured at the stores. They sell a hell of a lot of books."
This is bookselling 2008, a long way from the quaint belief that personal contact is the best way to get your book into the hands of the reading public.
At another social gathering, a perplexed publicist asked, "Well, what is the 'buzz book' of the convention? Tell me, I want to know."
Unlike my earlier shot at a comeback, I knew there was no answer. There seems to be no frontrunner for the eagerly anticipated novel or sensational memoir. What should have caught the BEA's attention was Scott McClellan's lashing of the Bush administration, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and the Culture of Washington Deception." However, Public Affairs, his publisher, preferred to send him on the New York based talk-show circuit instead. He was nowhere in sight in L.A.
Also MIA were reporters from many daily newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Seattle Times and even the nearby San Francisco Chronicle, said Lori Glazer, head of publicity for Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt.
There were agents from our part of the country -- Karen Long, book editor of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and the always present Carlo Romano, book critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The dwindling ranks of my tribe, while a concern of publishers and authors alike, might only indicate that their newspapers are choosing to husband their resources close to home and concede that BookExpoAmerica is just another anachronism in the uncertain world of printed books.
Like the marketing of books to Costco, the business is now conducted at a distance, rather than on a personal level.
But, the writing and reading of books is personal, as the dozens of authors here at BEA can attest by the friendly and grateful receptions of their fans at signings where the lines were long.
When the most common intermediary between the writer and the reader -- the local paper's book editor -- is losing his or her place in the equation, there's a void that is irreplaceable.
Sure, those who think the criticism of books should be confined to the "literary" sensibilities of the chosen few, only pay lip service to newspaper book "reviewing" in all its Philistine clumsiness. Yet, before those Costco shoppers toss a few novels in the cart with their six-month supply of toilet paper, they probably heard about the book from the daily paper.
