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Mousing the Virtual Exhibits and Presentations at U.S. Book Show 2021 |
Organized by Publishers Weekly, the all-virtual U.S. Book Show replaced the long-running Book Expo America put on by Reed Expo. I’d been walking the floor at Book Expo almost every year since 1997. This year, like almost everyone else, I let my fingers do the walking.
Keynotes and Panels
I attended several sessions, either in real-time or on replay—and the replay option was one great thing about the virtual format. I could hear sessions at my convenience and extending over several days after the event was over, and I could stop and start at will if I got a phone call or needed a computer break.
Oprah Winfrey gave an eight-minute keynote:
When we experience trauma, we need to [acknowledge it]. And the isolation we’ve all gone through this last year [which trauma survivors already experienced]. [Crediting her co-author, Dr. Bruce D. Perry:] Balance is at the core of health. Our boats got rocked this year. The shifts have all of us looking at what happened to us. We were all impacted in different ways. Hopefully, we’ve allowed ourselves the time and space to acknowledge that—trauma exhaustion, how what happened impacts us as we re-emerge. Resilience is not emerging unscathed but “we are more like a clothes hanger. We can bend and twist, but the grooves and bends still imperceptibly exist.” We’ve all been bent. We need to look at each other with empathy. While I acknowledge the immense challengers [to booksellers], I hold on to the stories of great resilience in action: online retail, remote author events, gift boxes with wine bottles. BINC [a book-industry charitable fund] has helped booksellers stay alive.
Books create “I never thought of that before.” Keep supporting rock star authors. We will continue to be here and read and savor every word.
Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Be a Revolution, spoke not only about writing about racism long before that became such a theme of 2020, but also how Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) influences her writing process:
After George Floyd and Brionna Taylor, my book was tied to the trauma. Nobody wants their ‘success’ through the murders of Black people. But we want people to engage all the time—even if we don’t see bodies in the streets. But I’m proud of the way people are engaging with the book and using it for substantive conversations. I want people to understand that systemic change is based on efforts year-round. I don’t want the work of Black activists and scholars to be narrowed down [to the news-cycle scenarios]. People have been doing the work [to make the big awareness happen] for years and years.
I was looking back [while writing] through my own experience to think about where in the schools it could be used. Not just race classes but social work, writing craft. We have to tackle these issues everywhere. Race impacts chemistry, biology, English lit, all these areas of our life.
There was pressure on the second book to use the style and tone of the first. But I was trying to give people this resource to move forward on areas where I’d been writing for years. I could have written 20 books. Figuring out which stories belonged and how in ways that wouldn’t be traumatizing to people who’ve lived with this violence all their lives. It stretched me. I learned a lot about myself and my process. Sometimes it takes time to love your book again—but when I sat down to record the audiobook [she fell in love with it again].
ADD: My ability to hyperfocus—if you know how to work with it, ADD can be incredibly helpful. But I had to realize that I wasn’t broken—that the way we define work and productivity is broken. There are different styles of writing and thinking about the world that different brains can bring. I would die if I had to write for five hours straight. That didn’t make me less of a writer—but I would love the industry to recognize that the ways we set up deadlines, teach and train writers based on the ways brains work can unlock so many new voices.
Writing openly about issues of race brought harassment and death threats. I was going to write fiction, spend time with my family, and heal. I wasn’t going to [discuss race again]; it felt extractive. But then I was thinking about the community I want to get back to and spend time with. What if they could see what motivates me to do this work and recognize that they could do it too. My agent and I put our heads together to look at what’s been working to create change and fight systemic racism throughout society? What would it be like to provide that entryway, that people are doing it and you can join this?
Senator Elizabeth Warren used her keynote interview to discuss girls’ empowerment, the theme of her 13th book and first children’s book, Pinky Promises. I loved this anecdote:
A little girl, probably about 8, got to the front of the line. She had really decided what she wanted out of this. She bounces up. Her dad’s about to take the picture and she said no, she wanted the picture of the two of us making the pinkie promise. She stated to walk off and instead of just leaving, she looked at me very directly and she said “and they win!” And I said “yes, they do.” She put her hands on her hips and said in this warning voice “You better win. I’ve been waiting for a girl president since kindergarten!”
Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi also has a new children’s book coming out: Tomatoes for Neela. Interviewed by her editor, Viking’s Tamar Brazis, she discussed how she works in Indian, Mediterranean, and American food traditions along with principles of good eating such as using fruits and vegetables that are in season. Her original audience was her biracial daughter, Krishna.
I also attended several panels. Most of them were genre editors talking about one book they were bringing out, and those didn’t work well for me. But I did enjoy a panel of indigenous authors from several North American nations, in a much more free-flowing discussion. Unfortunately, my notes on that session got overwritten, and a request for a transcript went unanswered.
Exhibits
This year was very different. Only my fingers and my mouse got to walk the show floor. The exhibit halls are arranged alphabetically. It’s very different from wandering the aisles. I liked the democratization: big and small exhibitors had the same tiny bit of real estate to try for a click (unless they buy extra booths; Hachette took six, including one just spotlighting James Patterson), without the blare of over-the-top sound effects, flashing lights, etc.—but I felt most vendors don’t understand how to show themselves off properly, and I miss the serendipity of striking up a conversation or spying an interesting-looking book as I’m passing by.
Even National Book Network, which did great displays at past Book Expos, presented only a static snapshot of seven random cover thumbnails and links to either download their massive catalog or browse a catalog of catalogs on Edelweiss, or a tiny-type description and learn-more link for their distribution services. Ugh! Doesn’t anyone user-test these things before they go live?
By contrast, Page Street’s first of two booths offered big, clear buttons to its catalog and displays eight large, clickable covers in four categories. Nice—until I clicked on one link and instead of getting info about the specific book, I had to scroll extensively through a long list of all their cookbook sellsheets to get the correct one. Their second booth had seventeen covers, smaller but still readable, and a random click led me to the specific PDF.
Some companies made sensible adaptations. Several offered PDF samplers or ARCs. Some even categorized their offerings. I loved the way a science fiction house divided their offerings into “SF, F, and WTF” and also had a division called Repeater that promised “escape from capitalist realism” (I’d written down that it was Angry Robots—but when I clicked again a couple of days later, I couldn’t find either of those, and instead found a Christian environmental and social justice imprint called Broadleaf Books). Many booths offered chatbots, specific contacts, Twitter feeds, a slide show of covers—some clickable to their own site, a catalog, a list of available materials, or Amazon—and others that didn’t link at all. Lots of booths offered videos—but these varied widely in quality and interest. Some played automatically (which I think is very rude, especially when people may be browsing the booths while listening to a panel). Others, mercifully, had to be launched. Far too many were either nothing but video versions of PowerPoint brochureware, some with ridiculous tiny print—or long redundant speeches by executives. Others were much better, including authors discussing their work—and I think there was at least one cooking demo. I visited from a laptop and that was a poor enough experience; I can’t begin to think about how awful it would be to do this from a phone.
Some exhibitors did even worse: Non-adaptations: ¾ inch cover thumbnails, very few titles displayed (Watkins); non-clickable 1” thumbnails (Astra House). No titles displayed (Austin Macauley).
Speaking of poor experience, the tech was hit-or-miss throughout the show. Sometimes I could easily launch a talk from the auditorium; other times, I would click repeatedly and nothing would happen. The site search didn’t work for me. I tried the networking lounge once, got asked some ridiculous question in order to enter, and left again promptly. And it kept asking me to log in each time, yet it knew enough about me that when I tried to access something in Safari when I couldn’t get it to work in Chrome, it threw me out of the session I was listening to in Chrome, and then I couldn’t get back in even when I closed the Safari window. At least if I simply entered my email, it didn’t make me fill in all the rest of it—though it appeared to. Each time, I got the entire registration form again. Luckily, I discovered that I didn’t have to fill out the rest of the form yet again just to visit the auditorium or exhibit halls, and that worked. But both the show organizers and the exhibitors have some work ahead to improve the user experience for next year.
Here are some books that caught my attention as I scrolled through the exhibit hall. In previous years, I was able to physically look over a book that looked interesting. At this virtual show, for the most part, all I saw was the front cover. A few had links to sell sheets or more information.
Lifestyles:
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, The Art of Arousal (Abbeville (Norton))
How to Live Like a Monk: Medieval Wisdom For Modern Life, Daniele Cybulskie (Abbeville (Norton))
Wendell Berry, Why I Am Not going to Buy a Computer (Counterpoint)
Annabelle Gurwitch, You’re Leaving When?: Adventures in Downward Mobility (Counterpoint)
Politics/Social Impact/Race/Justice:
Benjamin Reeves (former lead editor, Worth Magazine’s Power 100), Who Really Runs the World (Abbeville (Norton))
Jeffrey Kass, The Rona Diaries: One World – Two Pandemics (Adelaide Books). (Cover: Masked Ben Franklin portion of $100 bill. Corona and racism.)
Becoming Abolitionists (Astra)—non-clickable thumbnail too small to read author or focus)
Bruce Piasecki, Conquering Tomorrow Today: Six Exemplar Lives (Shirepress, exhibiting as Bruce Piasecki)
Kenny Xu, An Inconvenient Minority: The attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy (Diversion)
Deanne Quinn Miller, Prison Guard’s Daughter: My Journey Through the Ashes of Attica (Diversion)
Klaus Dodds, The New Border Wars: The Conflicts that will Define Our Future (Diversion)
Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press)
Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation [about whiteness in America] (Graywolf Press)
George M. Johnson, We Are Not Broken (Hachette) (YA memoir of a Black family)
Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (Perseus)
David Wessel, Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age (Perseus) (Examining one of the giveaways in Donald Trump’s tax cut)
Hitha Palepu, We’re Speaking: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris: How to Use Your Voice, Be Assertive, and Own Your Story (Little Brown)
Jamia Wilson, This Book is Feminist (Quarto)
From the sell sheet:
In this new feminist classic, the focus is intersectional from the beginning, not just as an add-on. Using the framework of ‘personal is political,’ Jamia Wilson—former director of the Feminist Press—analyzes her own experiences, before expanding outwards and drawing on stats, quotes, and luminaries to gain strength from.
Expand what feminism means to you, your community, and society by examining these 15 themes: feminism, identity, justice, education, money, power, health, wellness, freedom, relationships, media, safety, activism and movements, innovation, and an interactive exploration of what feminism means to you.
You will close the book with an understanding that history and culture play a role in shaping systems of power and of what we can do with our strengths, community, and values to help change course when needed. You won’t have read a feminist tome like this before. Other inspiring books authored by Jamia Wilson: Young, Gifted, and Black, Baby Young, Gifted, and Black, Step Into Your Power, and Big Ideas for Young Thinkers.
Particular strength in this category from Broadleaf, a publisher I’m not familiar with—though I recognize sister houses Augsberg Books and Fortress Press as long-time players in the Christian market. Broadleaf’s mission statement is to:
…inspire transformation in readers and their communities to foster a more open, just, and compassionate world.
Rooted in the progressive Christian tradition and reflecting the diversity of human creativity, we publish books that engage readers in fresh, substantive, timely, and inspiring reflection on what it is to live with meaning and connection.
We are committed to publishing authors who bring thoughtful perspective to explorations in religion, spirituality, social justice, culture, and personal growth with credibility and authenticity.
And their long list of titles at this intersection include We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign (Liz Theoharis, editor); Baptized in Tear Gas: From White Moderate to Abolitionist by Elle Dowd; A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community by Adam Russell Taylor (president of the Christian social action organization Sojourners); Thy Queendom Come: Breaking Free From the Patriarchy to Save Your Soul by Kyndall Rae Rothaus; Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience since 9/11 by Maha Hilal (among many others).
To have a whole imprint devoted to the places where social and environmental justice overlap with religion is striking. Yes, of course, social justice (and more recently, environmental justice) has often taken root in faith-based communities. Gandhi in India, Martin Luther King, Jr. in the US, Liberation Theology in Latin America, Desmond Tutu in South Africa are a few among many points of intersection. But in my experience, the publishing world has largely ignored the influence of religion on progressive politics. So I’d call this the most exciting trend I saw at this year’s show.
Environment
Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World (Counterpoint)
Melanie Challenger, On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature (Counterpoint)
Daniel Mathews, Trees in Trouble: Wildfires, Infestations and Climate Change (Counterpoint)
COVID
The book industry apparently wants to be done with the pandemic; I saw almost nothing in this category. Aside from the above-mentioned Rosa Diaries, I only saw two:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Expect the Unexpected (National Geographic)
Debora Mackenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How COVID-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity (Hachette)
Not specific to COVID but easier to place here than elsewhere was a title by Oprah Winfrey (with Dr. Bruce D. Perry, neuroscientist/child psychiatrist), What Happened to You: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (Flatiron).
Other Science
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Cosmic Queries (National Geographic)
I really didn’t look at fiction, Young Adult, or other categories where it’s hard to tell much from the title and cover.
Shel Horowitz, Editor of Down to Business, has been covering the book industry since 1997. His own latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to develop and market profitable products and services that foster social change and planetary healing.
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