Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Opening Day for BEA!!!

BookExpo 2015 kicked off perfectly last night with the Welcome Reception for China at the Asia Society.  A packed room of industry heavy weights from 2 continents engaged in 90 lively minutes of socializing around several tasteful musical performances and a few brief speeches before everyone scampered off to dinners and parties. 

I am pleasantly shocked to walk the show floor this morning to see everything so buttoned up and looking finished.  Maybe we can take another half day off of the move-in?  I am KIDDING.  BEA is teed up for a fantastic opening as booksellers are being hosted through the ABA's meet the editor program and visiting publishing houses all around NYC this morning.  The invite only China Opening Ceremony happens from 11-12.  IDPF, BEA Bloggers & the Audio Publishers Association all start up at 9:00 that will start the building crescendo leading up to the Jonathan Franzen event at 12:30 and of course there is the Adult Editor's Buzz panel that starts at 4:15.  The Global Market Forum program will have one its marquee events today starting at 2:30 - New Global Strategies and the Outlook for the Publishing and Media Industries. 

Of course the show floor opens at 1:00 and promises to be a packed 1st day.  I recognized this new schedule was not without challenges, but I think this is going to be huge benefit to all to have BEA busy and jammed from start to finish. 

2 comments:

  1. Curious about why there's an overlap with Blogger Con? In previous years, Blogger Con was held before BEA started so that attendees could attend both. Please tell us this isn't the new norm!

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    Replies
    1. Hi Alexia: The dedicated conference day was eliminated to separate BEA (B2B) as a trade event from BookCon (B2C) which is a consumer event. IDPF, BEA Bloggers, the Audio Publishers Association (APA) and BEA's Global Market Forum (GMF) programs all ran yesterday while the show floor did not open until 1pm. BEA Bloggers hit a high water mark for attendance and APA was sold out while both the GMF and IDPF events had packed rooms. There is a lot more that goes into this, especially the limited window of time we have Javits that has to include set up and tear down/move out. Collapsing the conference day into the 1st day of BEA so far looks like it worked great as the show floor was busy and it did not impact any of the programming - this will allow BEA to play to its strength while BookCon can grow as it establishes itself. The other win - was saving a lot of people of a day of travel cost/time away from their businesses. We will listen to peoples comments and do what serves the most people best, but this was a scenario that the good far outweighed any negatives in making the shift

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