LA Festival of Books

[aurelio]

I am planning on attending the LA Festival of Books next Saturday, April 23rd. Anyone here ever been to one of these? Any advice? Does anyone know if they have much of a scifi contingent there? Or if it is a good place to meet agents?

I plan on showing my book around, handing out info cards, and adverts.

Any other Chronicles members from the LA area going?

[Chimeco]

Wish I could join you. My family is up in LA. Let us non-goers know how things spoon out for you.

[aurelio]

Sure enough. I'll give a report to this thread after I check it out.

[aurelio]

Okay, I attended the Festival on Saturday:

Well, it was BIG. There were a ton of people there, and booth after booth after booth. It was overwhelming. There were TV stations and I think three or four different radio stations broadcasting from the site. I went up to one of the radio producers and gave her my EVE blurb sheet, then asked, tongue-in-cheek, "So, will you put me on the radio?" She yelled, "NO!" right into my face. I started to laugh, because her reaction was so dramatic. Apparently she didn't have much of a sense of humor.

Most of the deal there was people trying to sell you stuff, but I did give my book info to several local and quirky bookstore booths, asking that they check EVE out and consider carrying it in their stores. My guess is this was not effective at all. We shall see. There were a lot of booths for publishing companies; that was interesting.

There were signing booths and lines everywhere for writers hyping their wares, and lecture halls for the various talks and panels. The Festival basically took over the whole UCLA campus. I didn't attend any of the lectures this time out.

Oh yeah, and there was the smell of food kiosks everywhere - like at a carnival - and balloons and really funny/bad/scary costumed characters in the children's book sections. Scary children's books too. At that point, my partner Chuck turned to me, made a face, and said, "All this stuff makes me think of John Wayne Gacey." One of the costumed guys that was supposed to be some sort of rabbit I think, was too weird for words, and I overheard some woman say to another, "Is that a big marshmallow with wings?"

There were a lot of private booths, rented by authors to push their own, self-published books too. Some of those were really sad and creepy, others very slick and hypey. Books were being sold though, and the crowd was pretty into it.

I visited a booth shared by Swink Magazine and Vermin on the Mount. A fellow writer I just met through the Zoetrope forum invited me to stop by. His name is Jim Ruland, and he's a really nice guy. He has a collection of his short stories coming out in October, entitled Big Lonesome (Gorsky Press).

He also gave us an invite to a reading Swink & Vermin were hosting at a bar in Chinatown, so we went. It was fun, like an update to those 50's beatnik bars with bad poetry and angst-ridden prose. A couple of the selections were really very good however, and the guy that runs the literary blog, The Elegant Variation (he's been on NPR because his blog is a big deal) read a selection from his upcoming book that was great.

I talked with him after and sent him an email to try to hype EVE, but he glazed over when I was talking with him about it, so I'm sure he gets too much of this sort of stuff from people like me. If I can get him to look at my site that might make up for my clumsy social skills. I really hate this self-promotion stuff.

So, in a nutshell, there you have it. Now I'll see if I hear from anybody I blurbed to this week - ha ha boo hoo...