Conversation in Trade Show World

I just ran the numbers. During the three-plus years that I've been writing for Shelf Awareness, the term "conversation" has appeared in 75 (or about half) of my columns. This means either I'm terminally redundant or the word really matters in our business. For obvious reasons, I lean toward the second option.

Between Thursday, September 24, and Sunday, October 4, I spent eight of the eleven days in conversation with booksellers, writers and publishers at the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show in Greenville, S.C. and the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association show in Cleveland, Ohio.

Trade Show World is a suspended state of time and reality that I happen to love. It has its definite advantages over real life, including room service, daily housekeeping and hotel lobbies full of people who care deeply about books and aren't afraid to say so.

There are seemingly endless streams of conversations going on when you're living temporarily in Trade Show World. These include casual, person-to-person chats; public exchanges during panels, workshops and seminars; small group discussions at luncheons and dinners; and the serial chatting near book-laden display tables on the exhibition floor.

Most of these conversations are simultaneously private and public. I learn things that inform, and sometimes alter, my views about the book trade, but I consider them off the record and you won't see those quotes here. I'm not so much protecting sources as honoring the spirit of conversation by recognizing a borderline.

Wherever you are in Trade Show World, though, you're talking books. All books all the time. And, of course, you're listening. Being a good listener is arguably the more important skill.

So let me tell you a few of the things I heard while talking about, and listening to others talk about, the world of books during my recent pilgrimage to Trade Show World.

Technically, the longest conversation I had was with novelist Joseph Kanon (Stardust). On Friday, September 25, I attended a "Before We Were Authors" panel at SIBA, during which Joe said that when he worked in publishing, writers would often say, "I hear you work on the dark side." Later, at publishing parties after he began his career as a novelist, people joked, "You've gone over to the dark side."

So now we know a trade secret. Apparently we all inhabit the same side of the book planet. Maybe somebody should hit the light switch.

After Joe's panel, we talked briefly. I'd first met him in the 1990s when he read from Los Alamos at the bookstore where I worked. What made our recent conversation epic in length was that we were interrupted (duty called for both of us) and we didn't finish our chat until we saw one another again at a signing table in Cleveland a week later after GLiBA's Booksellers Banquet. Such are the mysterious ways of Trade Show World.

What else did I hear? Novelist Elizabeth Kostova (The Swan Thieves) acknowledged an enthusiastic greeting from booksellers at the SIBA Supper by saying, "I just feel we should applaud you."

During the "Taste of HarperCollins Breakfast," Ron Rash (Serena) compared SIBA to "a family reunion because I see so many people I know. I guess it's more like Heaven."

Belief was in the air at the GLiBA Book Awards luncheon. "I truly believe that if you get one book into the hand of a child, that will lead to another and another. It will open a wider world," said children's picture book winner Heather Henson, author of That Book Woman. And Pamela Todd, who received the children's chapter book award for her novel, The Blind Faith Hotel, observed: "I really believe that books can save us. You give a book to someone and it creates a chain reaction."

The keynote speaker at GLiBA's Authors Feast was Dan Chaon (Await Your Reply), who said that "one of the things we can draw upon as author and bookseller is that books are not products. Individual books are not interchangeable." Writing, he added, "is a small private discourse between a writer and a sympathetic reader. I think what you are doing is really adding to the good karma of the universe."

Or, as Becky Anderson Wilkins, co-owner of Anderson's Bookshop, Naperville, Ill., so eloquently observed in her acceptance speech after receiving GLiBA's Voice of the Heartland Award, "We fight for our businesses. We fight for each other. We fight for our communities. . . . I have learned so much from these books, but I have learned so much more from you." The conversation continues.--Published in Shelf Awareness, issue #1028