Want to get a read on the book market? Visit BookExpo America, the book industry's biggest annual trade show. I spent May 19 and 20 at BookExpo as part of a horde of some 25,000 plumbing the Washington, DC Convention Center for the latest literary buzz. I didn't go to any of the formal dinners or lunches, so I missed Tim Russert, Barack Obama, and Frank Rich hawking their imminent, undoubtedly buzzworthy publications. But I did cover panels focusing on blogs, the graphic memoir, and the "official" buzz books of the fall. Let's take them in reverse order.
A buzz book panel May 20 featured the chief editors of Doubleday, HarperCollins, Farrar Straus Giroux, Public Affairs and W.W. Norton. Presented by Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson, this consisted of pitches for these buzz books, targeting booksellers both retail and wholesale, librarians, and chains. It was packed.
I predict that Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, a 900-pager due this fall, will be the biggest hit of the season. HarperCollins' Jonathan Burnham said he was glad his house outbid Scribner's and Little Brown for what he called a "masterpiece" reminiscent of Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Dickens's Bleak House; and A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry's acclaimed novel of '70s India. HarperCollins is sure to market the hell out of this, serializing it before publication and, I am sure, raising a high profile for it in stores.
Other buzz books I look forward to are Heist, a FSG book National Journal reporter Peter Stone has written about Jack Abramoff; Ward Just's Forgetfulness, a "novel of moral suspense" Houghton Mifflin's Eamon Dolan praised to the skies; and The Wonga Coup, Economist reporter Adam Roberts' geopolitical non-fiction thriller about Equatorial Guinea coming from Public Affairs.
On to graphic memoirs. Stoked by the success of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books and Harvey Pekar's long-running American Splendor series, graphic memoirs are gaining respect - and marketability. "Pictures of a Life: Comics & the Memoir," a panel moderated by Publishers Weekly comics expert Calvin Reid, featured the chronically prolific Pekar, who's working on an anthology of comics for Houghton Mifflin; Alison Bechdel, the outspoken and eloquent creator of Fun Home, Houghton Mifflin's first foray into the field; David Axe, writer of War Fix, a graphic novel about being a war junkie in Iraq; and Marisa Acocella, author of the imminent Knopf graphic memoir, Cancer Vixen.
Article comments
1 - Lisa Tolliver
Carlo:
Thx for covering BEA. I couldn't be there and appreciate learning about what I missed.
LT