There are many ways to rationalize this year’s move of BookExpo America (BEA) from New York City to Chicago. The bookselling wing of the industry, cheered by the American Booksellers Association’s leadership, has hailed this year’s hike to Chicago, asserting that up to 65 percent of the booksellers who attended hadn’t been to BEA in at least two years. Even so, bookseller attendance at Chicago reportedly was down some 5 percent from 2015. So if there was a gain, it was a trade-off: fewer booksellers but different ones.
What we observed in Chicago was what you’ll read elsewhere: a remarkably skinny edition of BEA, its small size perhaps exaggerated because Chicago’s McCormick Place expo hall is a vast concrete prairie. You’ll see Pollyannaish commentary along the lines of “How nice to have a BEA so uncrowded that you could take a seat at a publisher’s booth!” Such seats are normally reserved for sales-team members’ meetings, of course, making it hard to see all that roominess as good for business.
As Amy Rhodes writes in Publishing Trends’ “BEA 2016 Takeaways,” with such ancillary programming as Publishers Launch no longer co-located at BEA—and with the likely end of the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) Digicon conference that customarily opens it—the rights-center emphasis on London and Frankfurt now may tend to weaken BEA’s mission.
Chicago snapshots:
- Double-wide aisles: One Canada-based startup chief told us, “I always feel like I’m swimming upstream at the Javits, trying to get through the crowd to my next meeting. Here in Chicago, I can leave one meeting at 10:59 and make the next one at 11:00.”
- Stretches of unused space: The Content and Digital Stage had presentations going on from Sony, Kobo, and other key exhibitors for six or eight audience members at a time, among over fifty empty seats. “Tumbleweedy,” one colleague called it.
- Roving professionals: the management team from Nielsen strolled up to us in an aisle. “Where is your booth this year?” we asked. No booth. None for several heavy-hitting publishers, either. The Big Five brought trimmed-down stands.
Bottom line: Efforts at a positive spin on the Chicago placement of BEA this year are to be expected, of course. Unless Reed’s final stats on show attendance surprise us, it’s hard to see how this one-time move of the show can pay off. In his podcast commentary with Copyright Clearance Center’s Chris Kenneally, Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly notes that last year, China—as that year’s international Market Focus country—“took 25,000 square feet of exhibition space.” 2015 was a hard act to follow, in other words, even had BEA stayed put in New York.
Next year’s BEA is scheduled to return to the Javits in New York on a May 31–June 4 schedule, including the fan-facing BookCon on Saturday and Sunday, although the exhibition floor will be open only on Thursday and Friday.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
