I’m pretty sure I have bronchitis. :(

But I suppose I should get back to blogging. I’ll tell you about BEA even though I think it sucked since I got sick there! But anyway…

I got there early on Friday morning with the rest of the volunteers. You pretty much need a detailed map to get around the Washington Convention Center, but eventually I found where I needed to be.

I was volunteering for the General Autographing. So, there’s zillions of booths around the convention center (two floors of it) and a lot of the booths have stuff going on (signings and such) but then during the 3 days of BEA, about 500 authors pass through the General Autographing area. It’s 32 lines for 32 authors signing at any one time.

Each author is there for a half or one hour signing books. For some of the bigger authors (Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson, Edward Kennedy, etc) you need tickets (which are free but they start giving them out at 6am and they go quickly). My job was to watch over the lines and take tickets for the ones that needed it.

Most of the people attending the signings (so the people I saw) were booksellers or librarians, though the occasional author or publisher did pass through.

The first hour I was there I took tickets for the Edward Kennedy signing (he was there with his dogs - Splash and Sunny). Stephen Baldwin was signing (with a weird headband and giant pinky ring), as was Wink Martindale (who looks EXACTLY like he looks on TV).

Walking down the hallway I passed Derek Smalls (from Spinal Tap - real name Harry Shearer)!!

And now lets talk about free books. They’re flowing like crazy at BEA. As I was sick and knew I was going to have to carry everything home on the metro, I went light on the free books, only coming home with a bag full each day (yes, that was light, trust me!) A lot of the books I picked up were ones that looked intriguing but I knew I’d never actually pay $$ for - example - a Prince William Fanfiction!

Sunday, I didn’t work, but managed to pull myself out of bed and head back to the convention center to walk the floor.

It was pretty impressive. As a romance writer though, I was amazed at the lack of romance books advertised. We all know the facts, 50% of mass market fiction books sold are romances - well lets just say romance was NOT 50% of BEA (to be fair, most pubs were focusing on hardback books).

I did have a breif conversation with Diane Whiteside about it at the RWA booth (finally, my own people!) and she said that romance was where the money was so it didn’t really matter what other people thought!

So, there’s my BEA wrap up. It was interesting to talk to a lot of booksellers and librarians and stuff and I met quite a few VERY nice people.

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