BookExpo America 2012. Nice.

Stephen Colbert at BEA Breakfast

My first delight of BEA yesterday was being in the same room with Stephen Colbert.  I felt this inner gasp of Wow! There he is!  He was small, silly and far away at the podium, but fortunately, there were two big projection screens on either side of the platform, so I could see him in his normal TV-esque headshot, too.  He took the success of 50 Shades of Grey as an excuse to make random references to his throbbing member throughout his talk.  Hysterical.

BookExpo America 2012

At lunch, a trustworthy bookseller told me that 200,000+ self-published titles were produced last year.  Wow again!  That’s a huge number.  I hardly care what this means in terms of each writer trying to get noticed in the throng.  What gladdens me is the idea of all these people writing.  We are writers!  I imagine this pent up longing to have our books out there, and now that there’s finally a convenient way to do it, tons of people are.  For me, writing adds such a richness to my life, and I love knowing so many other people have a similar process in their lives, too.

25 authors at a time sign books, and readers line up for their turn

Next wow: an hour’s worth of kids, librarians, bloggers, teachers, writer friends, and booksellers came through my signing line, some from as far away as Australia.  Some of them had the kindest words to say about the Birthmarked series, and others were encountering it for the first time.  It made me happy to introduce them to my editor and chat for a minute.

Behind the curtain of the Autograph Area, my editor Nancy Mercado and I pose with the boxes of books

I woke at 3 a.m. with my head buzzing, playing over conversations with my editor, my agent, and the folks from Roaring Brook at dinner last night.  My day in New York gave me a chance to see in a new way where my book fits in Roaring Brook, within Macmillan, within a stream of publishing houses, within a world of readers and writers.  It’s kind of like the old lady who swallowed the fly, then the spider and onward, with me being the fly.  Many thanks to Jon Yaged, Simon Boughton, and the team at Macmillan for bringing me in and making me feel so welcome.

BookExpo continues today and tomorrow at the Javits Center in New York City.

Readers bring and check empty luggage so they can stash free review copies to haul home at the end of the day