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Oh, What a Wonderful Morning - BEA Week Begins!

To paraphrase Oklahoma, what a wonderful morning today at work when we were visited by not one, not two, not three, but EIGHT book bloggers who are in town for BEA and the Book Blogger Convention on Friday! It was so nice to sit down with Trish from Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?, Natasha from Maw Books, Nicole from Linus's Blanket, Lenore from Presenting Lenore, Michelle from Galley Smith, Alea from Pop Culture Junkie, Amy from My Friend Amy, and Gail from Ticket to Anywhere. We chatted about how it all works between publishers, bloggers and authors and how it can work better. The gals then popped into our video studio to shoot a quick video hello (to come!) and we followed that up with lunch and chatting about some of our favorite books coming out in the next few months. I wish I could have stayed talking all day, but I had to do some work for the rest of BEA week. And of course, I felt better knowing that this was just the beginning of a week of blogger fun at BEA!

Listen to the Book Blogger Panel from BEA Now!

You can listen to the recording of the Book Blogger Panel at BEA now, right here, by clicking play. Enjoy.

16 Days and Counting....

...to the biggest blogger blind date of the year... BEA! BEA stands for Book Expo America and is the annual trade show for publishers and booksellers, where publishers debut their Fall lists and trot their authors around to meet booksellers, sign books and ARCs, and attend parties. Booksellers come from near and far to meet said authors and talk with publishers. But BEA of late has started to feel like it might not be worth all the time and expense that publishers put into it, and what booksellers pay to get there to attend it. Throw in our current economic climate and what I suppose will be a scaled-down BEA with lower than usual attendance, I really wasn't looking forward to this year.

But all that has changed over the past months as I have learned about more and more book bloggers who are attending BEA, many of them for the first time. This year, there is an entirely new contingent of people going to BEA who read, review and recommend books to ever-growing audiences of book buyers! I'm a big geek and it's really exciting to me.

I'm thrilled that I'll be in the company of six of my favorite book bloggers on Saturday May 30th on a panel where we'll explore the publisher-blogger-bookseller relationship and what we can do to make it better and maximize all of our efforts to help readers find books that they'll love. Julie of Booking Mama, Natasha of Maw Books, Stephanie of Stephanie's Written Word, Amy of My Friend Amy and Dawn of She is Too Fond of Books, Candace of Beth Fish Reads and I will examine how things work now and how they could work better. For those of you not able to attend, we'll broadcast the panel live via Book Club Girl on Air. Set your reminder for the live broadcast  on May 20th at 2 pm EST here.

There will be other opportunities to meet bloggers during the weekend as well, stay tuned for a schedule of when bloggers themselves will be signing (though what we will sign, not too sure ;))

And, if you have questions for a book blogger, publsher or bookseller, that you'd like us to consider during our panel discussion, please feel free to post them here!