I’m the kind of person that writes everything down. I have a ratty little notebook and a pen that comes with me everywhere. I carried it around BEA, and took a bunch of notes about things I just didn’t know before I got there. These notes helped me form some ideas about what I might do next year to make BEA even more fun for me.

I also finally managed to get the few photos I took online, so I want to share some of those with you since pictures — especially of something as huge as BEA — are worth just as much as any words I can come up with. (You can see the rest of my photos on Flickr).

Anastasia and Ash in front of our hostel, the Chelsea Star Hotel.

This year… I registered as a blogger through the Book Blogger Convention.

Next year… I will try to register as press. When I went to the press area at BEA, I found out that bloggers don’t have access to the press room – and can’t register as press at the event. I also didn’t bring any evidence that I work as a freelancer writing about books, so was not able to have access to that area. I’m not sure what mythical perks exist in the press room, but I want to find out!

[continue reading…]

BEA is about a lot of things, but one of the nerdiest and most exciting parts is all of the books. I mean, it’s ridiculous to see how many books are out there and how many fun ones there are to read. Before coming to BEA, I didn’t really understand how getting and finding books at BEA worked, so I didn’t think I’d come home with many.

I was totally wrong! I got a lot of great books in a number of ways, so I decided to list them based on how they were acquired to give you a sense of how BEA works. I’m sorry there are no pictures — I packed up all the books and mailed them without actually photographing anything!

Author Signings

One of the most common, and probably most interesting, ways to get books is through the author signings. There is an autographing area set up in the back of Javits where authors will sit for 30 or 60 minutes signing copies of their book. At other times, authors will be in booths on the show floor (at their publisher ‘s booth or something) doing signings.

I got a lot of books signed because many of the nonfiction authors I was looking at had very short lines. Some of the very popular books – celebrities, major fiction writers, anything YA and paranormal (ha!) – had very long lines, but I never waited more than about 20 minutes for any of these:

• A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel (Walker & Company)
• What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting by W. Scott Poole
• Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love by Andrew Shaffer (Harper Perennial)
• The Smartest Woman I Know by Ilene Beckerman (Algonquin Books)
• Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham
• Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman (Harper Perennial)
• You Are My Only by Beth Kephart (Egmont USA)
• Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos (William Morrow)

[continue reading…]

Hello to everyone from BEA! It’s about 8:00 on Wednesday morning and I’m sitting on the small terrace (well, smoking area) at our hostel before I heat over to Javits for the second full day of BEA. I’m blogging on a borrowed netbook and the Internet connection is slow, so apologies for any lack of pictures or links — you can view all the photos I’ve taken (not many) by heading over to my Flickr album for BEA.

Enough excuses, on to the recap!

Sunday

After driving to Milwaukee, flying to Cincinnati, and then flying to New York, I arrived at La Guardia about 5:30. After some misadventures with my car, I made it to Jenny (Jenny’s Books) apartment, who graciously let me sleep on her foldout bed. She also made dinner for Memory (Stella Matutina) and I — fried chicken, potatoes, and garlic bread. It was awesome.

Monday

I got up, got ready, and took a cab to check into my hostel. Anastasia (Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog) and I headed to Javits to register where we met up with Tara (BookSexy Review) for a day of touring around New York.

We took a long, meandering route along the Highline and through part of downtown to make a visit to the Strand Bookstore. That place was really awesome — so many books on three floors! I didn’t buy any books, but did grab a pretty sweet tote bag with the Strand logo on it.

After the Strand, we grabbed a bite to eat, then took the subway up to Central Park. It was a little drizzly during the day, so the park was damp, but it was really beautiful. Here are some photos!

About 2:30 Tara and I split off to go to a tea hosted at Random House. This was my first publishing-y event, and it was fun. There was good food, some cool teas, and a table with different Random House book to pick and choose from. It’s so, so hard to resist a table of free books, and I ended up grabbing quite a few:

• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan (because it’s a fictional story about Frank Lloyd Wright)
• Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin because I liked the idea of another Alice story.
• The Hotel on the Corner of Sweet and Narrow by Jamie Ford because I remember readding lots of good reviews of it.
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, because it’s going to be a movie this summer and I might read the book before then 🙂
• Ape House by Sarah Gruen because I liked her previous book, Water for Elephants.
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller because it’s a memoir and I am a nonfiction junkie.
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet because Tara said it was a great book.
• The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, which is one of the big books Random House is pushing here at BEA.

Post-Random House, I walked with Tara back to my hostel, then met up with Florinda (The R’s Blog) and Karen (Sassy Monkey Reads) for dinner. We just stopped at a pub close to their hotel, which ended up being delicious. Then, because I’m lame and was tired, I went back to the hostel to blog, read through some of the BEA materials I picked up, and get to bed.

[continue reading…]

Hello to everyone stopping by from BEA and the Book Blogger Convention! If all is going well, when this post goes up I’ll be on my way to the airport. I’m putting this up as a quick introduction of myself if we didn’t get to chat long when we met, and because I forgot to include a photo of me in my last BEA-related missive.

This is also a sticky post — for new content (hopefully from BEA) just scroll down to the next post. If you’re curious about my plans for BEA, check out this post or just send me a message on Twitter — @kimthedork.

About Sophisticated Dorkiness

Sadly, I’m not really the South Park character on my business card and blog header. I’m just a regular girl blogging about books. I’ve been writing here at Sophisticated Dorkiness for just over three years.

By day I work as a trade journalist for a magazine based in Madison, and by night I’m an avid reader, blogger, and freelance journalist, where I write a monthly books column and reviews for a local newspaper.

I primarily read and review nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, and literary fiction, although I delve into other genres like YA fiction and comic books when the mood strikes — check out my Review Policy for more information.

That’s all I’ve got. Can’t wait to be in NYC, so if you see me, say “Hello!”

UPDATED TO ADD: I have been blogging from BEA just a little bit. You can read about my first couple of days in New York, and a look at some of the books I just mailed home.