Will I see you at the BEA?

Only a few more days now! The VerveStar folks, Nick Delarosa and Miranda Spigener, are leaving Friday to set up Booth # 4885. As I run through the ranks of literary blogs, I find quite a few of you gathering your stuff to go.

There will be five of us debuting at the VerveStar booth this year: Mary Odle Fagan (that’s me!), Coco Mayor, Matthew Scott Kimple, Franklin Murdock, and Jahnavi Foster. My big media day will be Wednesday, but I’ll be cruising the Javits Center the rest of the time seeing how many of you I can find.

Tending to all the details just for my part makes me wonder how on earth Nick and Miranda are getting it together for all five of us. Sometimes I find emails that were sent at 4 AM! Sure hope they at least get some sleep on the plane. Can’t thank them enough for their Herculean efforts.

See you in NYC!

So…we’re getting ready for the BEA again…

The international Book Expo is getting ready to happen. Actually, it happens several times a year in various places – Frankfort, London, Beijing, etc. – but the last week of May it happens at the Javits Convention Center in NYC. Hence, BEA, meaning Book Expo America.

The VerveStar partners started preparing months ago. They scored booth number 4885, an enviable location on a corner across from the uptown stage. (You’d have to see the five-foot-long diagram of Javits’ main floor to appreciate that…)


Last year I found the BEA to be the most seriously non-productive fiasco I could ever imagine. Just scroll back forever to last year’s posts and see. But THIS year I’ve got a new publisher, world class publicists Miranda Spigener and Nick Delarosa, and Booth 4885 to report to. I gotta believe that THIS year it’s gonna be different!


And THIS year I’m taking a hint from my son, who went to NY on business a couple of years back. The trick, it seems, is to stay across the Hudson in New Jersey where prices are somewhat more reasonable. There’s a ferry that goes from Weehawken directly across to the Javits. And there’s probably also a bus that would kindly take me through the Lincoln Tunnel and deposit me within a couple of blocks of said destination. And instead of running the gamut of Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak, Priceline, Hotwire, etc., I’m trying Southwest Airlines. So far they’ve offered the lowest fares to both LaGuardia and Newark Int’l.

So if you’re thinking about the BEA, or New York City in general, stay tuned. When I get this all worked out, you can profit from my traveling discoveries!