Book Expo Starts Tomorrow

The biggest event in American book publishing and bookselling, Book Expo America, starts tomorrow in Los Angeles. It's a mind-boggling confab of education sessions, celebrity autographing, special events, and a trade-show floor with booths from thousands of publishers and publishing-related companies. If you've never been, you should go at least once in your lifetime, if only just to get an idea of the massive scope of our industry.

Our sales and marketing people are already on their way out there to set up the booth. My boss and I are making like seagulls and swooping in Friday morning and swooping out Sunday morning. We mainly want to be there to support our authors and scope out the competition. Oh, and maybe to get Alec Baldwin's autograph.

Several of our authors will be making appearances in the Autographing Area on Saturday:

• Molly Fletcher, Be Your Own Agent, 11:30 am to 12:30 pm, Table #7
• Susan Britton Whitcomb, The Christian's Career Journey, 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm, Table #3
• Robert Orndorff and Dulin Clark, The PITA Principle, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm, Table #13

Interestingly, my husband the book fair maven is not going to be there. Any customers he didn't manage to see in London in April, he'll see in Frankfurt in October. His customers are all based in eastern Europe, and L.A. is just a bit too far to travel for them. But his colleagues' Asian customers will be there in full force.

If you'll be at the fair, drop me in line in the comments and maybe we can plan to meet up.

I'll be posting again tomorrow. But after that, you might not hear from me again until Monday. At seven pounds, my four-year-old dinosaur laptop with the bad wireless card is not worth lugging there.