Booksellers and Librarians Remain Reimagined at BookExpo

Although the bookselling community was hotly come-hithered by organizers, big-retailer attendance stats remained a figment of BookExpo’s reimagining

As we covered in our last edition, BookExpo’s producers decided to go all in on booksellers this year as a way to shore up the trade show’s faltering fortunes and eroding attendance numbers. Since then, BEA has released figures as to how that panned out. In a phrase: not so well.

BookExpo’s preliminary numbers, which may be revised later, show 1,073 booksellers were in attendance, a number embarrassingly below last year’s figure of 1,289 booksellers. The 1,200 press people registered for media passes outnumbered the booksellers; perhaps we can hope for a reimagining for the needs of journalists next year. Some librarians were MIA, too, with 1,300 this year as compared to last year’s 1,597. The previous-year numbers come to us courtesy of Publishers Lunch (subscription required), where Michael Cader has calculated and catalogued these and other figures for years.

With Cader’s help, we’re able to chart some points about BookExpo, how it makes its reckonings, and where the trends lie. A caveat: some of these numbers are the preliminary ones (unevenly updated by the trade show), and in some cases, as Cader points out, media numbers are folded in (in other years, they’re not). That said, here are the salient numbers, with press people removed so that you’re looking at industry pros attending:

• 2015 (NYC): 9,634 industry attendees • 1,111 media
• 2016 (Chicago): 6,314 industry attendees • 493 media
• 2017 (NYC): 6,807 industry attendees • 860 media
• 2018 (NYC): 6,532 industry attendees • 1,200 media

BookExpo made some aggressive efforts earlier in the decade to serve the interests of self-publishing authors. Those efforts—namely, the uPublishU conference and the original Authors Hub exhibition area for non-aligned writers—were all but eliminated for the 2016 Chicago show, with just a small hub area remaining. The evolution of the show has steadily been less welcoming to writers of all types (gone are the bloggers’ conferences, indie author tickets, and so on), leaving an emphasis on traditional authors presented by their publishers for speaking appearances and signings.

And that effort to create a New York Rights Fair competitive to BookExpo’s former International Rights Center? That’s not where the missing booksellers were. That show has announced approximately 3,000 visitors, but their claims were quickly countered by one of their own exhibitors, Peter Murray of Australia’s Murray Books, who wrote, “We were exhibitors at the NY Rights Fair and will dispute the claims of the organisers that 3,000 people visited. More like 300! We had no interest in our products, and the only visitors were selling us their services.” The 3,000 figure is likely to have included not only BookExpo-goers who could use their passes to drop by the Rights Fair, but also what publishing house staffers are telling us were widely available free tickets for industry players.

Bottom line: We think there’s a more disturbing figure here for BookExpo organizers than even the dwindling attendance numbers: 54 percent. That’s the percentage of first-time attendees. Sounds great, right? Not really. This is the leading North American trade show for the industry, in place for decades. And if only 46 percent of the turnout consisted of repeat visitors, then the slope for BookExpo is looking severely slippery.