Traditionally, a heavy schedule of author-signing sessions can reliably queue up the independent booksellers and help spark (publishers hope) book orders for the shops. With the emphasis on bookselling at the Chicago BEA, this element of the show looked fully engaged and busy, a steady round of trade authors going through their autographing paces. Even relative unknowns like Warsaw-based Zygmunt Miłoszewski (whose Rage was out August 1, 2016, in its English translation) were able to draw a steady round of interested folks for the thirty-minute signing sessions.
The space devoted to self-publishing authors, Author Market, comprised maybe thirty tables grouped in a small encampment. It was surrounded by what looked like acres of lavender carpet, another of those vast tracts of empty space on the expo floor. Notably, this group was far from the uPublishU presentation stage. The presentation space was named for the self-publishing conference that was discontinued this year; uPublishU conference attendance last year was visibly way down. However, the stage wasn’t dedicated only to indie author services presentations, as its name implied, since it hosted such events as Digital Galleys for Publishers led by Ingram.
So the branding uPublishU was maintained by BEA but transferred from the former indie-author conference to a presentation space, with no connection to the self-publishing Author Market. (As we’ve written recently, trade shows and authors have yet to find an effective relationship, and there were objections to the Author HQ placement at London Book Fair in April.)
In the area near the uPublishU stage, we found Orna Ross, faithfully staffing an Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) table—again, far from the indie authors’ enclosure. Next to her, a sign of the times, perhaps: a matching table rented by Kobo—which once rolled into these mighty trade shows with a sleek all-white show pavilion the size of a small apartment.
Bottom line: Independent authors lost some traction in this year’s BEA. We can’t know for sure whether author-services companies were less engaged this year, but that might be expected, considering that the chance of speaking engagements was no longer on offer at the now-defunct uPublishU conference. The search continues for a meaningful presence for indie authors in the trade-show setting, while any emphasis on bookseller appeal raises the value of these events for trade authors and their publishers.
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.
