It seems as if everyone in publishing these days, from folks at Publishers Weekly to your friendly local publicist, is speculating about the demise of the ABA. The American Booksellers Association national convention has been a steadfast arena for hobnobbing, deal-making, and personality-pushing since 1947 - an odd eruption where the normally restrained book culture is transformed into expensive spectacle. But with the rise of national chain bookstores, the explicit reason for attending the convention - selling books - has become harder to justify. Executives from large houses explain that instead of spending money shipping books, employees, and displays to Chicago, they could easily fly the most important book buyers to Manhattan, and wine and dine them to sell their wares.
This, of course, would leave a lot of people out - small publishers, small booksellers, the interested public ... and me. Yet if the Titanic of book fairs were to sink, there'd be quite a few literary life-rafts ready to welcome the jumping deal-makers, promoters, and especially, the gawkers. Regional book fairs are a growing and exciting part of the literary world.
Already today, if you're able to jump from boat to boat, you can get an interesting sampling of several regional cultures, all in their best literary drag, that you can't find at the ABA alone. Since I'm a West Coast guy, this last year took me to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle book fairs, where I mingled with the browsing partygoers, learned how to speak on panels, and spent too much money on taxis and food.
The Los Angeles Times Bookfair was the most pleasant - it was held outdoors on the UCLA campus, and because it was free, it was packed. The booths featured a very SoCal mixture of religious cults; Henry Rollins-inspired tattooed, body-building poets with glasses; and families out for a day in the sun. I witnessed an amusing intersection of all three when a Henry Rollins look-alike got pissed off, discovering his daughter holding a freebie "Jesus is Love" balloon. At my panel, when asked how many were on the Net, about half the audience raised hands.
Microsoft hovered over the Seattle Times Bookfest like a simultaneously ominous and benevolent cloud. Everyone I talked with seemed to be wondering why the typically Scrooge-like mega-corp had picked out the Bookfest for patronage. No one complained, though. Since MS sponsored the whole thing, there were computers with fast connections next to every podium, and audiences seemed primed to think very seriously about the power and implications of the Net. When I posed the Net-access question there, the whole audience raised hands.
San Francisco was clearly the biggest of all the fairs, held in two huge halls and exposing a panoply of tastes. The exhibitors were varied and included a larger sampling of big publishers than the other events. The Web forums were approached with a lot more than academic interest. Not only did the whole audience raise hands when asked if they were on the Web, a large portion of them were publishing on it. This made for plenty of exchanges like:
"Writing done for big corporations really sucks!" "Wait a minute ... we work for those corporations ..."
Net celebrity Justin Hall, followed around by a cameraman, kept jumping up to deliver rousing calls for self-publishing empowerment. The speech-making frenzy was contagious (as was the mood of self-importance.) Both Internet panels I went to erupted midway with audience questioning and posturing. It was good to be in San Francisco.
It's easy to see the demise of the ABA as a tragic tale of a large national institution falling apart into regionalism, and the publishers like so many Dark-Age monks fleeing the capital for the security of the provinces. That view might hold a glimmer of truth, but the rise of smaller book fairs is also very exciting. For the reading public, a chance to hear a variety of writers, get a feel for publishers, and connect with the reading community in their towns is no small thing.
To Net culture, too, small fairs are natural allies. Publishers without a lot of money take the Web very seriously - it could mean their survival. Also, on the Web everyone acts like a big fish, and these little ponds are just the place for would-be barracudas to test the waters. Newbies are not overwhelmed by the glitz, and wonderful exchanges like the ones I heard at the panels I was at can develop unselfconciously. Sure it all feels kind of Podunk and amateur. But as the computer literate know, hobbyists can develop big ideas, and the word "amateur" has its root in love.
Did you go to a book fair this year? Did you like it?.
