It is still a few weeks before BEA… I have noticed some interesting things, some anecdotal, some factual, some out of thin air…My musings to date…

1. There are still hotel rooms available. This is a bad sign. What this suggests is that attendance from out of NYC will be down. THIS suggests that any attendance figures the show touts will be highly packed with ‘locals’ as NYC has the bulk of the staff for the industry.

2. Speaking of packed numbers… again, we have ‘over 1500 exhibitors’. This is amazing. Though, I have done a fairly serious, one by one read of the exhibitor list and have discovered a MARKED increase in the number of foreign publishers, this year Russian, and a number of Far East printers, primarily Chinese. Remove all the foreign publishers and printers… and my gut feel is the number would fall to 1100-1200 at best, 1000 at worst.

Who can afford to set up a booth these days as a small or medium sized publisher? In addition to the costs set out in #3 below, there are shipping, booth, staff, lost work, and materials design costs, plus any freebies you are giving away.  I did the math last year to show the insanity of taking a booth. I won’t repeat it this year… but it is just as insane.

3. Please explain to me how a bookstore owner, who is supposed to be the target customer for the booth buyers at this show, can afford to attend these days? Airfare, 3 nights hotel, meals, attendance, and miscelleny have to come to almost $1,000. That suggests bookstores are doing much better than they claim, which isn’t likely. The numbers don’t support the assertion. 

4. The truly big name authors seem to me to be absent. I know that is purely subjective as one person’s big name is another’s ‘who?’. But, my feel is that a few of the big publishers are not taking space, and thus, aren’t donating their authors. Let me know if I am wrong about that and if the ‘list’ really is packed with superstars I just am not aware of.

5. If I remember long ago correctly, and that is questionable, since I can hardly remember yesterday very well any more… next year, 2012, is the last edition of guaranteed BEA shows in NYC. Aha, a brief review of the BEA site shows that the commitment is to NYC through 2015. I just hope noone has signed a contract… I would put the odds of a BEA show in 2015 at 50/50. In 2020… at maybe 1 in 4.

And, it has been moved now to even warmer weather in June. Great move! It wasn’t hot enough in past years when the air didn’t or stopped working… now it will actually kill people in June. 

Though, the idea of keeping the show in NYC, as opposed to the genius of moving it around to some of the hottest publishing spots in the country, including Las Vegas and Los Angeles (for which I hope someone was fired)… makes sense. At these prices, might as well leave this as a local show for locals to get together and toast their success (or survival).

Count on a lengthy report, as I always do, after the show, and after I have had some time to cogitate on the experience and its impact.