Yesterday, I dropped by Book Expo America—North America’s annual get-together of book industry insiders, held this year at New York’s Javits Convention Center—to wander the aisles and check on the placement of my Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels, Blood Feud and Blood Reign, at the booth run by IBPA: the Independent Book Publishers Association (I’m a member).
Since I wasn’t able to attend either BEA or its spin-off festival, BookCon, as a publisher—the prices charged for exhibitors’ booths being insanely high—I settled for taking advantage of my IBPA member benefits by purchasing display-shelf space for the novels at the association’s rather large setup. The idea is that—as it does for all members who participate—IBPA will act as The ’Warp’s sales representative at the shows, take any orders they might receive from interested booksellers, and pass them along to me to follow up.
So what was BEA 2015 like? Let’s take a look…
I strolled in around 11:00 a.m., and the first thing that struck me was how quiet the place was: usually BEA’s first full day (Wednesday’s opening was a half day) is packed to the rafters with publishing folks—writers, editors, agents, librarians, bookstore owners—with the last two groups lining up to either attend author signings or snag the most-sought-after galleys, which are bound, uncorrected proofs of a book before it heads off for final printing; they’re also called ARCs, Advanced Reading Copies. (I don’t know if it was sought after, but I wound up with a galley of a YA novel titled A Blind Guide to Stinkville.) But based on a report from the magazine Publishers Weekly (the industry’s “bible”), half-day Wednesday was the crazy day, with attendees lining up along 11th Avenue a full hour before the doors opened. And if I thought the show was lacking in foot traffic, that’s only because I hadn’t stepped through the expo’s main doors—it certainly turned out to be crowded enough once I got inside!
It took a good deal of ducking and dodging around foot-dragging text readers (whose eyes were glued to their smartphones) and status meetings being held in the middle of aisles (because why stand to the side when you can be a human blockade?), but eventually I reached the IBPA area and quickly located the Young Adult book section where the Pan books would be located—and there they were, dead center on an eye-level shelf! Well, that was a much better placement than my previous attempt a couple years ago, when I found Blood Feud tucked away in a dimly lit corner of a bottom shelf. Good job this time, IBPA staffers!
It was while I was admiring how spiffy my books looked that I met my next-door-book neighbor, Hometown Media Productions author/publisher John P. Vourlis, who’d stopped by to check on the placement of his own book, Yoga for Freedom: a nonfiction account of the experiences of twenty American yoga students and teachers during a trip they made to Nepal. (John also has Time Spanners, a sci-fi time-travel comic, coming out later this year.) A real-life adventure side by side on a shelf with a couple of dark fantasy ones—where else but BEA? 😉
Pleased with the location of the Pan novels, I took off to wander the aisles and see what else was around—and ran into John Colby Jr., publisher of Brick Tower Press and owner of ibooks, inc., the publishing house I’d worked at for a decade as an editor, then as its editor-in-chief. He was promoting ibooks’ latest release, Escape From Plauen, a biographical account of a Holocaust survivor. We exchanged publisher stories and talked about the possibility of my doing some copyediting for the company, and then he had to rush off to a meeting. And I decided it was time to go. I’d seen what had been done with Blood Feud and Blood Reign—now it was up to IBPA to help sell them.
So at the end of the day, the question is, was the display-space purchase worth the expense? I won’t know right away—BEA ends today, and then BookCon runs this weekend, so both Pan novels will be available for order through Sunday. After that, I’ll just have to wait and see if any orders pop up. Here’s hoping for the best!
The next three for-real ’Warp appearances occur this fall, first at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 20, followed by the Collingswood Book Festival on October 3, in New Jersey, and wrapping up with the zombie-riffic Walker Stalker Con, on December 4–6, in Secaucus, NJ. Hope to see you there!
Awesome Con 2015 runs this Friday, May 29, through Sunday, May 31. And although the StarWarp Concepts crew won’t be attending, Richard C. White—author of the SWC titles Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings and The Chronicles of the Sea Dragon Special—will be there in Artists Alley, promoting his ’Warp releases as well as his work for other publishers. You’ll find him at his Nightwolf Graphics table: J17.
Troubleshooters, Incorporated: Night Stalkings
Available for just 
The Girl With All the Gifts, by M. R. Carey: Mike Carey is a former writer of DC Comics’ mature readers horror series Hellblazer (recently adapted by NBC as the television series Constantine), the current writer of The Unwritten, and the author of the Felix Castor novel series. A twist on the zombie apocalypse trope, Girl is the story of Melanie: an intelligent, ten-year-old zombie with a love of Greek mythology, and a desire to be more than the flesh-eating monster that she is. Admittedly, there are a few annoying character clichés that pop up—the coldly efficient “mad” scientist, the hard-bitten soldier, the idealistic civilian whose morality could put everyone at risk—but overall it’s a gripping, sometimes gory, but always fascinating novel.
I Want It Now!: A Memoir of Life on the Set of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, by Julie Dawn Cole with Michael Esslinger: Written by the actress who played the incorrigible spoiled brat Veruca Salt in 1971’s Gene Wilder–starring adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic middle-grade novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this light and enjoyable autobiography focuses mainly on the movie—as would be expected from a book aimed at the legions of Wonka fans who (dare I say it?) hunger for behind-the-scenes information on the making of the film. But it also, of course, tells the story of Cole’s rise from up-and-coming tween starlet to accomplished actress, and the interesting paths her life took. To paraphrase Wonka at the end of Chocolate Factory: “Don’t forget what happened to the girl who suddenly got everything she wanted: She lived happily ever after.”
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood, by Michael D. Sellers. This self-published e-book (also available in print) provides the answer to the question, What the hell was Disney studios thinking when they fumbled the 2012 release of John Carter, the first-ever screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic “John Carter of Mars” pulp-adventure novels? Being in the film industry, Sellers uses his background as both an insider and a Burroughs fan to closely examine the history of the character, and all the missteps that plagued the marketing of the film. How on target is he with his analysis? Well, considering he’s the guy who edited together the unofficial John Carter trailer that made the world interested in seeing the movie, pretty damn spot-on.
Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1
A Princess of Mars
The promotional tour for 
It’s yet another enthusiastic response to Lorelei’s return, in the pages of our new horror comic anthology, Lorelei Presents: House Macabre! This time, the love comes courtesy of reviewer Peter Schmeiser and the pop-culture site 
In case you hadn’t heard, this week marks the 96th anniversary of 
Snow White
But you know what else is an entertaining tale? Our graphic novel 
Today, comic-art legend Alex Nino (DC’s Black Orchid, Tarzan, and Thriller; Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian; contributing designer on Mulan, Treasure Planet, and The Real Ghostbusters) turns 75!
With no script for the majority of the graphic novel—no one could find a copy of the original writer’s work—and no conclusion plotted, I took the simple approach: stare at the existing artwork, starting at page 1, and wait for the words to come; then begin writing as the ideas came flowing in. That also meant coming up with character names and researching the manga genre on the fly (I’m not a fan). I had to figure out everything fast, though: after all, Alex was sitting around his West Coast studio, waiting on the script for his portion of the book.
Still, working with Alex on Sunn was a joy for me. I just wish it could have been on a better project that would have allowed him to draw like Alex Nino. 😀 Actually, we did work on a better project that allowed him to draw like Alex Nino. A couple years after Sunn crashed and burned, I was the editor on a Kevin J. Anderson–scripted fantasy graphic novel, The Orc’s Treasure—a project where Alex really got to shine. And I couldn’t have been happier about how that turned out.
When I was a young comic fan, I was familiar with Alex’s weird, hyperkinetic artwork that played with just about every convention of comic art—I just didn’t care for it (stupid, I know). My tastes back then leaned toward more traditional artists: John Romita Sr., Gil Kane, Neal Adams, Tom Sutton, Mike Ploog (okay, Sutton and Ploog weren’t exactly “traditional”). Over time, though, I came to appreciate the craziness and energy of Nino’s fever-dream layouts, his figures practically bursting from the page. It was as far from mainstream art as one could get, but it was also so unique that with just one glance you knew you were looking at a Nino piece. For Marvel Comics, he drew the Marvel Classics The Time Machine and Moby-Dick, and issues of Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, Power Man, and Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. For DC Comics, it was Thriller, the pirate serial “Captain” Fear in Adventure Comics, the graphic novel Space Clusters, and a truckload of stories for the horror anthologies House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Weird War Tales, and others. For Warren Publishing, it was stories for Creepy, Eerie, 1984/1994, and Vampirella. And when he left comics for a number of years, he worked as a designer for Walt Disney Pictures, contributing to Mulan, Treasure Planet, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
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