I’m Back! BEA Day 1 Report

I’m back from BEA in New York and all rested up and ready to share my experience with you. I’m going to start with last Monday, which was the BEA Bloggers Conference.

The conference started with a Networking Breakfast. Lunch worked the same way but was called Let’s Talk Blogs! Networking Luncheon. It was really speed dating with authors. You picked a table to eat at with about eight other bloggers and every ten or fifteen minutes another author would rotate to your table. Each meal three or four authors would rotate through per table. Supposedly these authors were also bloggers and would use their time to talk about blogging with the bloggers at the table. This didn’t happen. The author would use most of the time to plug his or her new book and then answer any questions the bloggers at the table had about his or her new book. The only time we talked about blogs was when there wasn’t an author at our table. I really appreciated being able to meet fellow book bloggers and I learned a lot from talking to them. I could have actually done without the author networking though.

After breakfast, Jennifer Weiner gave the Keynote Address. I have mixed feelings about her talk. She made some good points about how women’s fiction isn’t taken seriously by the New York Times and other big book review outlets but some of it came off as her being bitter that her books aren’t taken more seriously. Moreover, her talk had almost nothing to do with blogging.

Next up was a panel discussion called Blogging Today: What you need to know and what’s next. I found this panel informative and helpful. Jen Lancaster was on the panel and I LOVE her. Another panelist was Candace from Beth Fish Reads, one of my favorite book review blogs. She had some good tips about diversifying your blog content to gain readers.

The breakout sessions were after lunch. The first one I went to was called So You Want to Make Money? According to the panel in this breakout, you can’t really make any money book blogging. Not enough to make a full-time job out of it anyway. (My dreams of being a millionaire book blogger were crushed!) They did have some interesting ideas about packaging blog content and charging for it. For example, making an e-book that compiles your reviews for your top twenty books of the year and then charging 99 cents for it. The panelists disagreed on whether or not people would actually be willing to pay for something like that.

The next breakout I attended was Demystifying the Book Blogger & Publisher Relationship. I enjoyed this panel and was quite surprised and pleased to see how much respect the panelists from the publishing industry have for book bloggers.

Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess, gave the Closing Remarks. She was hilarious, of course. I’m sure she was chosen to speak because she is a blogger who was able to basically turn her blog into a very successful book.

Overall, I was disappointed with most of the conference. It seemed like the organizers didn’t have a good understanding of who the attendees were or at least not the same understanding that I had of who they were. Every blogger I met at the conference was a book REVIEW blogger. Not a blogger like Jen Lancaster or Jenny Lawson who is wanting to turn their blog INTO a book.

I came expecting to learn more about how to write good book reviews, book blogging ethics and etiquette and things of that nature. The breakout sessions were great and had the sort of content I was expecting. The other events were mainly about promoting authors and their upcoming books. I shouldn’t have to pay for a conference if it’s going to be mostly advertising to me – they should be paying me! I’m glad I went for the experience and because I met a lot of really great book bloggers but I don’t know if I’ll go again. The focus would have to shift dramatically for me to consider it.