By Shel Horowitz

Trends

At BEA 2017, I was “shocked, shocked” at how few books I saw that acknowledged the painful new reality of US politics. I was out of the country during the 2018 show, but wow, the publishing world has made up for lost time.

Almost everywhere I looked, there were books on democracy, resistance, cultural/ethnic/religious/gender and sexuality diversity, non-mainstream cultures, immigration, feminism, the environment, keeping from getting sunk in a nightmare world, personal empowerment/dealing with mean people, validation of science and journalism… Publishing houses large and small were part of this trend. And a surprising number were aimed at children (including both picture books and YA), and/or had a religious theme. At the end of this report, I’ll list a small percentage of books I saw in these categories.

The other really strong category was graphic novels. They’ve been growing steadily for several years, but this year, there must have been hundreds—with much better production values than the past, too.

What got short shrift at this year’s show was the business category. I can’t think of a single standout business book I saw. It was mostly the standard how-to stuff, and precious little of it.

Tech also seems to have plateaued. I saw a lot fewer people offering publishing management software, for instance.

And there were a lot fewer celebrity books than usual, though the category is far from dead. One I thought was really odd: Supreme Glamour by Mary Wilson of the Supremes (Thames & Hudson). With all the amazing stories she could have told, she focused on what they wore.

The Mood

While not as quiet as 2018, the show is definitely a lesser deal than it was a decade ago. Many long-time exhibitors were cutting back or skipped the show entirely. I got invited to exactly zero parties, and only heard about one (the next morning). Non-book freebies were much scarcer. And the bare-bones pressroom, which once had computers to share, lots of snacks, and tons of press kits, had only a few chairs.

Only a few publishers, among them Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, and (surprisingly) Norton had really huge booths, and even these were scaled down from previous years. Some non-publishers had large booths too, including the Ingram family of distributors. But many of the old standouts skipped this one. Among the absent: Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Independent Book Publishers Association (whose executive director did moderate a panel, at least), Berrett-Koehler, Morgan James. IBPA’s absence was particularly surprising, because in the past, they‘ve had a large footprint and funded it with fee-for-service offerings from exhibiting member books to providing autographing space.

And foreign publishers were almost invisible. I’m used to an international area with 20 or more countries, most with a country coordinator who could steer inquiries to the correct member publishers (who were often on-site). I’m also used to wide diversity in subject matter.

This year, the foreign publisher presence was pathetic. China, France, and Italy all had small pavilions with a handful of publishers each. The Chinese were only interested in pushing their own English-language titles in the US. The French and Italians brought very few titles to show. The booths were mostly unstaffed in my several passes through, except for a few people who seemed to be hanging out at the French area just to socialize in that language. As far as I could tell, none had a country coordinator, and judging by the covers, none exhibited any business or self-help.

What seemed to take their place was Unbound, the section of non-book items to sell in bookstores: candles, apparel, tea blends, games, and such. This area used to be about two aisles. This time, I think it was six. Cool stuff, to be sure, including lot of blank journals with recycled vintage book covers, t-shirts and totes with literary characters or quotes, a beautiful set of elaborate pop-up books and another of wooden games—and wooden drop-the-marble toys   in different sizes that made marimba-like sounds.

Despite few vendors and modest attendance, the show was buzzing with positive energy. Book-signing lines for the more popular authors stretched into adjoining aisles, with in-booth autographing actually piling up consistently longer lines than the autographing area (even though the autographing area eliminated the $1 per book charity contribution of past years). People looked engaged at numerous 1-to-1 and small-group meetings in the back corners of exhibits.

Titles Reflecting the New World/US Reality—and the Resistance to It 

Here are just a few of dozens of titles that caught my eye:

Chalice Press

• For Such a Time as This: Hope and Forgiveness after the Charleston Massacre
• Sustaining Hope in an Unjust World
• Preaching Resistance: Voices of Hope, Justice & Solidarity

Sterling

• The Unstoppable Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Separate glossy biographies of both Barack and Michelle Obama
• The Earth Book

Johns Hopkins

• Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid
• Vaccines did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism

The New Press

• Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women (winner of several awards including the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice)

MIT Press

• Science Not Silence: The March for Science Movement

University of Illinois Press

• Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant (available in either Spanish or English

Quirk Books

• William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Mean Girls
• The Gay BCs: A Joyous Celebration of LGBTQ+ Vocabulary (children’s alphabet picture book)

University of California Press

• Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed

Workman

• The Kitchen Without Borders: Recipes and Stories from Refugee and Immigrant Chefs

Even graphic novel distributor Diamond was featuring several social justice titles as well as “Breaking the Norm,” “a comprehensive list of graphic novels that support diversity in character creation story development, and presentation.” And Ingram, which owns not only the largest book wholesaler in the country but several distributors and the on-demand printing company Ingram Spark, acknowledged Pride Month by handing out “100 LGBTQ+ Books from Independent Publishers, with the hashtag #IndieBookPride right on the front cover.

Shel Horowitz is not only a publishing consultant/book marketing copywriter, but also consults at the intersections of profitability, social justice, and environmental healing. His latest book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Visit him at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

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