American Booksellers Association’s 8th Annual Winter Institute

A Photographic Recap With Jason Wells

We made it to Kansas City and back! Despite major snowstorms before and after, Erica Warshal and I made it safely to and from the American Booksellers Association’s 8th Annual Winter Institute last week. We are thrilled to take part each year with other publishing houses, big and small. This year’s institute was particularly strong for ABRAMS, with informative panels, a new bookseller focus session, and with a debut author for Amulet Books taking the spotlight.

American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference

A Recap Of This Years Event

This year’s American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference took place in sunny Seattle. It was my first time there, so as a tourist and an exhibitor, it was a thrilling weekend. See my recap in pictures after the break because they really say it best.

New York International Gift Fair

A week at "Gift Show"

This week marked both the peak and the end of the New York International Gift Fair—a whirlwind experience of soaps, fragrances, artisanal jewelry, throw pillows, beautiful furniture, and books!

2012 Winter Institute in New Orleans

Old friends and and new at the American Booksellers Association's annual event

2012 marked ABRAMS’ second sponsorship of Winter Institute, a meeting of over 500 booksellers from all over the country. I was fortunate enough to attend alongside Erica Kochman. We divide and conquer to cover all bases during the show, with Erica handling any aspects that relate to sales and me handling all things related to entertaining. Editor-at-large Howard Reeves also attended as two of his authors were featured at the show.

ABRAMS gets down, eats well in ‘The Big Easy’

New Orleans plays host once again to the American Library Association Conference

Six years ago, ABRAMS was among a vocal group of publishers who supported the American Library Association’s decision to keep the 2006 annual convention in New Orleans. It was to take place less than a year after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city. But was the city’s renowned culinary and hospitality establishment ready for 30,000 librarians and publishers so soon after?

The answer was a resounding yes! Hotels rushed to make sure rooms were renovated in time, taxi drivers welcomed visitors to town, happy to drive you anywhere, and indeed, restaurants did everything to make you know your business was appreciated. To be sure, there were boarded up buildings and an eerie sense of quiet outside of the French Quarter. But the city’s enthusiasm for the ALA convention easily outweighed any fears some may have had.

Farewell BEA 2011: Rolling up the carpet for another year

Oprah, Wimpy Kid, Babar, Alton Brown, oh my!

Book Expo America 2011 has now come to an end. Hopefully, if you attended the show, you got a chance to stop by the ABRAMS booth and say hello, but in case you weren’t there (or were and missed us) I thought I’d give a photographic journey through our futuristic white-and-red BEA booth (which, according to some unbiased observers, was among the best of the show)…

Book Expo America is here! Come visit!

Busy week at Booth #3552 filled with books, books and more books!

As you can only imagine, we are running around like chickens with our heads chopped off on this, our first full day of Book Expo America. Things were pretty hectic yesterday at Jacob Javits Center here in New York, when I spent a very physically demanding eight hours putting together bookshelves, hanging banners, displaying books, moving couches and yes, setting up our very own, very cool Wimpy Kid 6 snow globe!

Hope you’ll stop by for a visit this week at Booth #3552 before it closes on Thursday! Events include a wine toast and screening of Oprah’s FINAL show, signings by Tom Angleberger and lots of beautiful books, galleys and giveaways! In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few images of our setting up before we get a full recap from our own Maggie Maggio later this week.

Book NERDS unite: A visit to the magical world of Harry Potter

Shhh! A (pretty fun) field trip during the International Reading Association conference in Orlando

One of the best perks of my job is the chance to attend the librarian and teacher conferences that occur throughout the year. The list of reasons why is long; I could easily make a top ten list, but I’m going to narrow it down for this particular post:

1) I have the opportunity to visit new cities—and when I plan ahead—the chance to tack on a vacation day or two so I can do a little exploring.

2) I get the chance to meet the people who are actually reading our books!

Last week was one such opportunity. We traveled to sunny Orlando, FL for the International Reading Association (IRA) conference. We had a great show that included a featured speaker presentation by Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney, a mystery panel with authors Tom Angleberger, Michael Buckley, and Jack Ferraiolo, an inspiring presentation by Lauren Myracle and multiple author signings at our booth including Henry Cole, Lee Bennett Hopkins, Marissa Moss, Eric Velasquez and David Ward.