Entries in aliens (2)
Alien at the window? Kirk Out.
Kirk signs!It is a ritual in the publishing industry that in May booksellers and publishers gather in a great hall such as the Javits Center in New York, the L.A. Staples Center, or the Washington D.C. Convention Center to meet, celebrate, and order books for the coming year. The Book Expo is mostly serious dealmaking, bargaining over numbers and discounts and terms of shipping, meeting and greeting the authors of the coming season's hoped-for bestsellers, and enjoying circus of promotion that plays out on the exhibitor floor.
There are all kinds of book promoters in various costumes handing out caps and t-shirts, posters and book bags, and lots and lots of sample copies. For independent booksellers from small towns around the country, it's a chance to meet the publishers and authors face to face.
For the buyers at the huge chains, and there are fewer and fewer of them, it's one-stop shopping for an entire catalog of titles for a year. For agents and studio scouts, it's a bargain basement of literary and theatrical rights.
And for authors who manage to get in, it's a carnival. I was there this year on behalf of my publisher Tor/Forge, part of Macmillan, to sign copies of Worker in the Light with George Noory and to promote our new book coming out next year, Journey to the Light.
As serendipity would have it, right across the aisle from me a long line began to form at the St. Martin's Press table. St. Martin’s is one of the sister publishing units inside Macmillan. "Who's going to be there?"
Nancy Birnes
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Just Outside the Glass
click to enlarge!This new space is terrifying to me, and it is also a great, great curiosity. That's because it's not just a website in the old way we used to think of websites ... oh, no my friends, it is not.
It's more of an experiment, in the way that those dried space monkeys in a glass are an experiment. Not that I ever had space monkeys; they were something you bought from the back of a comic book and I never read comic books very much as a kid. Plus, we were poor and I would have had to play sick and stay home from school to ambush the mailman before he got to our house and then I would have had to hide the thing the whole time I tried to enjoy its bubbling magic, and hiding a glass of fomenting monkeys away from my mother in my room was not that easy.