#LA14SCBWI, L.A., Emerging Voices, and Inspiration

It seems a long time since the Emerging Voices Award was announced (8+ months to be exact). So, while I didn't forget about SCBWI's Summer Conference I was so inundated with life (moving, finishing freelance deadlines, residency applications, more freelance work, unpacking still, and somewhat noisy upstairs neighbors) it's easy to forget that such an honor was bestowed and that the prize was about to come to fruition. A week before the conference Dow Phumiruk and I received an email from the founder of the Emerging Voices Award Sue Ganz-Schmitt about having lunch and we were bowled over. It was getting really real now! I was about to head to a conference I had heard so much about but was a newbie at. How would this all go down? I've been to Book Expo and other more focused and smaller conferences but SCBWI, this was a big deal.

Travels to L.A. were fine but the L.A. traffic was something I experienced firsthand even at 8pm west coast time. From the time I figured out the shuttle situation to getting a shuttle and then getting to my hotel it was about 2 hours. I was tired. Technically it was 3 hours ahead so really 1am and not 10pm even though my watch and the clocks around me said different. I was hungry (airlines don't feed you for 6 hour flights!) and I was hot. Humidity came to L.A. But I got to my hotel and was given a super nice room and then plopped myself down in bed and attempted sleep for a big first day.

Sleep was an enigma while in California. I continued waking up in the middle of the night because my body said "Hey! It's 7am get up!" And my mind said "Shut up body!" Anywho, Friday was the first day, registration day and the schedule was packed from 8:30am to 8:30pm. SCBWI had you covered. Free tea, coffee, and hot cocoa to start. As I went on line Dow ran up to me and we embraced! It was SO good to see a familiar face and to finally see that lovely face in person. Dow and I sat and talked and it was like we'd known each other for years.

Afterwards executive director Lin Oliver started things off. Lin's speeches throughout were light-hearted and warm reminding us that at any stage of your career there'll be struggles and successes and sometimes it seems completely insane that we pursue art when there's no guarantee of monetary compensation or an audience but that we continue to pursue it because we love it and can't live without it. As the days went on many established authors/illustrators would reiterate this to a packed house of over 1200 attendees that "You are not alone" "We're in this together" and "Never give up."

Attendees of the conference have the option to request a manuscript consult (for an additional fee) and intensives on Monday after the main conference has ended (also an additional fee). As winners of the Emerging Voices award Dow and I had these included with our all-expense paid trip. So, you can say I was a teensy bit spoiled going to SCBWI and being able to take advantage of everything offered. Just a tad bit. My manuscript consult would be on the first day and I'd be the first meeting with...Laura Rennert! Don't worry, y'all, I played it cool. Like Fonzie cool. I did not freak out when I learned this. I did internally but my external self was composed.

Laura is Maggie Stiefvater's agent and I love Maggie's work. Laura was also my dream agent when I was making a list of people to submit to. And in meeting Laura and getting her feedback and encouragement I found that she's an amazingly kind and generous person. Her feedback was constructive and incredibly helpful and at no point condescending. She really can see potential in work and point out very specific points to look out for. And the next day when we met again on the coffee/tea line she initiated convo and was quite welcoming. I know us as artists, especially aspiring/emerging ones, look at people in the industry as untouchable but Laura continued to disprove that myth by being very outgoing. Even on panels many said "She's so nice! She seems like she'll fight for her authors." And that's the type of agent you'd want.

Dow and I also got to meet with Sue Ganz-Schmitt who kindly treated us to lunch. And then I introduced her to the French macaron which she loved so I feel my work is done here. Friday included a great panel lead by We Need Diverse Books was on Friday where authors Lamar Giles, Linda Sue Park, Meg Medina, and Sharon Flake, along with agent Adriana Dominguez furthered the discussion of the need for diversity in literature and for attendees to sit and consider what's been said. Afterwards was the PAL signing & wine and cheese mixer where SCBWI members with books can sell them and we can get autographs. Dow and I got a copy of Sue's new book with Chronicle Planet Kindergarten. I adore this book. So cute and a wonderful tale, with illustration that perfectly captures Sue's voice. After that I did yoga that they offer on Friday and Sunday which is a nice time to meditate and get away and exercise. Lori Snyder lead it to some nice jams and afterward I was relaxed and ready for bed.

Saturday proved to be getting things into high gear and I was still on partial sleep. My friend Malaika and I went out for breakfast and she introduced me to The Griddle Cafe. I heard editor Justin Chanda's state of the state of the industry that publishing is here to stay and will continue to go through ebbs and flows and reinventions. Workshops (or talks) take place in the morning after keynotes and in the afternoon with additional chats/keynotes inserted in between to give you time to stretch your legs.

At this point is when I'd suggest taking breaks. Admittedly I missed a couple panels I would've liked to see to hang out with friends I haven't seen in years and that's okay. You can't do it all and sometimes if you do you may find yourself a bit overwhelmed and stifled being in a conference hall for 3-4 days straight. So seeing West Hollywood and Beverly Hills and eateries my friends were dying to show me proved a nice reprieve from the constancy of thinking and talking about the industry and allowed me to attend sessions renewed and wide-eyed and ready to engage with others, especially at the We Need Diverse Books poolside diversity chat where I got to meet Cindy Pon in person!

Saturday evening brought party time with the Poolside Gala that was also Tomie Depaola's 80th Birthday Bash. Unfortunately Tomie couldn't attend because he got sick before the conference but that didn't stop the celebration or well wishes for Tomie whatsoever. I got into the party in time for when people broke it down and also the costume parade that Sue and Dow entered. (Congrats Dow on getting 3rd place for the Leaning Tower of Pisa costume! Handmade by the way.)

Sunday was a day that brought some anticipation because Dow and I would be recognized for the Emerging Voices award at the Golden Kite Luncheon where other published authors were receiving awards for their books in categories of picture book, nonfiction, and fiction, as well as humor.

The main room for keynotes was turned into an awards hall with tables and us being served by waiters in fancy suits. Dow and I got to sit in front in the reserved section with other honorees and would be brought onstage for applause and pictures. We sat with Sue and her husband Martin, but also Lisa Yee, Arthur Levine, Bill Konigsberg and his super cool/friendly husband, and EB Lewis. And we were sitting right next to Judy Blume! Judy Blume was like Meryl Streep where everyone who went on stage gaped at her and said "I love you!" at some point. She's super sweet and friendly too so that basically makes it so much easier to love her.

As awards were announced and other honorees got stood up to receive applause Dow and I heard our names and got a bit verklempt as some would say. My mind was on simply not tripping up the stairs or on cords or anything. Big smile, arms around Dow and Martin for the picture, huge applause, a hug with Sue on stage, down the steps. No tripping! It was surreal and went by quickly but was also a moment Dow and I realized must be how other literary events feel like when you get honored for your work and people see your face and for a moment, if fleeting, you feel like your work has reached a milestone and you simply have to keep going.

As the honorees went up each said something funny, inspirational, and all-around appreciative of SCBWI and the chance to share their work and find an audience. Afterwards I was approached by two attendees. One an older Black female whose hand I gently took in my own. She shook a bit but had a smile as big as mine as she said "I wanted to make sure and say congratulations. We're counting on you." It's a lot to take in when someone says that to you and you feel the weight and honor of it. My work will always encapsulate diversity, I am an African American and my hometown is one of the biggest mixed salads of culture in the world. I'm honored to be from NYC and it makes sense, to me, that my work will always reflect the diversity of the life I've lived and I want to share that with others. "We're counting on you," even hearing it from one woman means that I understand that my work matters even for one person at one time it matters.

Now, I wasn't going around thinking I was a big deal at all but I was flying high yet also a tad bit bummed because tomorrow I'd be flying home and deal with more jetlag and not being fed on planes and not be in the vicinity of so much encouragement and understanding of other artists. To get congrats from Sharon Flake and Linda Sue Park and Bill Konigsberg's husband and other SCBWI attendees who wanted to know more about my writing was just...wow. So uplifting I can't even tell you.

Monday! Time to pack. Time to do my AM intensive and unfortunately miss the PM one with Maggie (Thanks time zones) and then head home for work in the early morn. Awesome. But first, first ten pages intensive with Kelly Sonnack!

Funny enough when I came in the lady taking the tickets proclaimed "You won that award!"  to faces turning around to face me. Wow, slight celeb status. Thanks. :-) Kelly started off the intensive reading the first page of several books she'd recommend in YA, MG, and picture book genres for us to get a sense of how to take hold. She broke down what we as writers should be seeking to do in these first pages to hook not only an agent but readers. After about 30 or 40 minutes she allowed us to read the first page or more of our work and have us all give immediate feedback. Me not being shy I raised my hand first to read from a new YA suspense I'm working on. I read the first page and got very intrigued questions and was told by Kelly I hit all the points for the most part and could rejigger a couple things but that she (and everyone in the intensive agreed) would continue to read after the first page and a half. I even got an applause. Such a nice way to leave SCBWI.

And that "sums" up my trip (Yeah, in 2000 words so far but it was 4 days!). I am so grateful to Sue and Martin for creating the Emerging Voices Award and for SCBWI believing in diversity and it's need in more books across the board. I am grateful to Lin Oliver, Sara Ruttenberg, and Kim Turrisi for organizing such a fantastic conference that was well organized and on point. I am grateful for my peers and everyone who said a kind word to me at SCBWI and for Pam, Marquita, Dow, Malaika, Susan, and Erica to see them at SCBWI and LA and to remind myself how much I am surrounded by talent and kindness and how excited I am for our journeys as artists and to share our stories with others. So, I hope to go back to SCBWI next year and maybe every year after that. I'd encourage you to become a member of this wonderfully open society and to take your work seriously and know that even though you may be creating alone that you are definitely not.

#BEA14 & #TheBookCon: Not Such a Great Marriage of Events

Post-Memorial Day weekend people in the publishing/book industry had to mentally and physically prepare to go into Jacob Javits Center with guns blazing for Book Expo of America. Book Expo took place from May 28th to May 31st, with the exhibition floor opening on May 29th for signings and events. This year I took a much more mellow approach than in previous years having worked the event and attended. I have to say this experience allowed me to get out of tunnel vision and get into the show more widely. I'd recommend this to anyone. Scope out the authors you're really interested in seeing or getting books from and go from there to panels or reviewing the exhibitors and what they're doing. Add that in by going to sit-down lunches with former coworkers and friends, viewing the entirety of the floor, attending panels all made it a much more full experience than standing in line after line after line or running all around trying to make attendees happy.

Book Expo (aka BEA)

Let's talk scale. I've been going to Book Expo every year that it's been in NYC since 2003. This probably accumulates to six or seven times and in the span of one decade it has changed considerably, and, in some aspects, for the better. The single exhibition floor was put in place a few years back and serves as a better way to move from booth to signing to panels on the main stages and so on rather than splitting the difference.

The panels, I must say, were a bit disjointed to me in that they seemed very cursory. Understandably one has 50-80 minutes to educate a crowd on a specific topic and the info is really industry specific, however, in panels such as How to Market Authors Who are Inaccessible or How to Better Tag your Metadata, if you're already familiar with this and do it in your day-to-day job you more than likely learned nothing too groundbreaking. Yet, for self-published authors, as it was good to see, this is information that can be significant to how to better establish your platform and understand what's being done on the production side of your book.

Some more technical events happened on Midtown Stage and I was glad to go to one with a co-worker with the head of Adobe InDesign on updates on how to utilize this software to make ePub files in the new Creative Cloud. More technical aspects of the digital world may have you better suited to register for IDPF which often runs a day or so before BEA in Javits on the lower level.

Pavilions can be hit or miss. One can assume that many of the digital vendors are in the Digital Zone when others are spread out in other areas of the exhibit hall. Same can be said for university presses (whose appearances in booths at BEA have been steadily dwindling due to budgets and wondering if the reach is as wide as it is for trade). Vanity presses like Month9Books made appearances on BookCon day but there were many smaller booths that weren't around or were overwhelmed by lines winding through and around their booths from some of the major trade publishers.

When we discuss organization during the event, publishers seem to have gotten hip to the ticket craze. Even in-booth signings have tickets requiring this traded in for a signed book/blad/ARC. Learning from the overwhelming response to Rainbow Rowell's appearance last year Macmillan had tickets for those who wanted a signed copy before her signing guaranteeing you a book and hopefully a shorter wait. Random House had initiated tickets last year and signs held high with author pictures in addition to the listed time of their signings for easy location and no drama or worries.

The autograph area is always somewhat of a zoo, especially for big names like Libba Bray, Ann M. Martin, RL Stine, Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, and others (yes, those are all YA authors and their lines were insane).

What else is of note is that more and more Book Expo seems to host additional celebrities in conjunction with established authors. Celebrities jumping into children's books or picture books, cookbooks, and memoir. Anjelica Huston and Neil Patrick Harris signed blads of their upcoming memoirs. Debi Mazar signed cookbooks with her husband Gabriele Corcos thanks to the popularity of their Cooking Channel show Extra Virgin. Dominique Ansel signed recipe cards and offered chocolatey treats for an ever-growing line for his "secrets" to his desserts. And Jason Segel co-authored a middle grade series with author Kirsten Miller for Nightmares a book based on a screenplay he wrote when he was 21. But the celebrities don't get all the love.

E. Lockhart's new novel We Were Liars cause chaos among bloggers and teens alike with the continued hype of this book. Ann M. Martin's return with a new series Rain/Reign had people of all ages lining up for a chance to see her. Carl Hiassan and David Mitchell, James Patterson and James Frey, Sylvia Day and so on.

While Book Expo is industry specific with bloggers, librarians, booksellers, distributors, media, and others in the industry attending it does reflect the overall excitement and intrigue of an industry that aims to please it's best customers.

BookCon

This year BEA's Power Reader Day became BookCon. Sadly, BookCon was not worth the hype and what anyone who attended last year as a Power Reader remembers was stripped from BookCon customers.

BookCon (formerly Power Reader Day) opened BEA up to those who weren't in the industry but who were book lovers. It allowed them to get access to an event they wouldn't have been able to see and get freebies and learn more in the same breath. BookCon tix were for one day, May 31st which overlapped with the final day of BEA and they were $30 for adults, $5 for kids. And apparently, there was no cap on how many tickets were sold or how many attendees could fit into Javits.

But let me back up. Javits for BookCon was not the same as Javits for BEA attendees like myself. Oh no, BookCon was cordoned off into a section a bit over a third of the size of the entirety of Javits' main exhibition hall. Many publishers/exhibitors were cut off from BookCon and many, many more BookCon participants were not able to see the rest of BEA. Bulky security in red shirts and black pants loomed over those areas that drew a line between the two conventions. Yes, we were segregated.

I don't know if all exhibitors were made aware of this or not but of those that weren't they seemed surprised, especially with so many families around and potential for sales. In terms of the scope almost 10,000 (or more if reports get solidified) people came to BookCon and in a space significantly smaller than all of BEA this proved a hard maze to navigate through. And it most certainly felt like a safety hazard.

Lines for panels happening in conjunction with uPublishU were not lines but clusters of people positioned in front of a door to try and guarantee them a seat. Others at the Main Event Stage wove through the ground floor and around the registration desks. The line for BookCon attendees to get in was reminiscent of several cronut lines back-to-back. It was insane and the separation to get tickets for autographs in the autograph area was not clear.

As a BEA attendee I had access to BookCon but it did not go the opposite way, which caused much concern and irritation among those who originally purchased a one-day BEA ticket to have that magically changed to this new thing called "BookCon." Friends of mine in attendance for BookCon only insisted that they would not return to BookCon as is. And that they barely got anything due to the numerous lines making it hard to even browse. Another issue seemed to be that there were more publishers selling things rather than giving them away. In the PW BEA Edition organizers wanted to see how BookCon fared in order to decide if they'll have BEA/BookCon happen over 4 days with BEA going from May 28-30 and then BookCon from May 30-31. This, I imagine, would give anyone working these days in both areas reasons to curl up and rock themselves back to sanity.

There are many improvements to be made for BookCon and one I strongly suggest is not having it overlap with BEA if it means cordoning off an area for the attendees and scrunching so many people into a small(er) space. Also, monitor sales! Exhibitor attendance for BEA has gone done yet that doesn't mean attendee numbers should significantly rise!

A highlight for me of BookCon were the panels. Namely the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign that had a packed house of intrigued and supportive parties. However, BEA also had a panel held at the same time questioning why there wasn't more diversity with African Americans in publishing consisting of agents, editors, and entrepreneurs. In the BEA program there was a list of some, yet not all BookCon events meaning you had to get the BookCon material day of to discern what was happening. And the apps! The BEA app nor the BookCon app speak to each other making it hard for those who are BEA registrants to be able to see everything in one seamless page.

Oh, I could go on, but a blog post should be but so long. Next year BEA will be in NYC again before leaving after several years in my hometown to go to Chicago. I don't know if BEA will return to NYC or stay in Chicago for awhile, but what I sincerely hope is that if BookCon stays it becomes better organized for the safety and happiness of those who love books. The last thing anyone wants to do is antagonize book lovers because they are what keep the publishing industry going.