I attended Book Expo America (BEA) this year (May 27 – 29) in New York City. The photos below were taken by one of the speakers, Ashley, and posted on her website at
https://www.nosegraze.com/bookexpo-america-2015-recap/
Ashley was one of the speakers at Blogger Con, which was a conference that ran concurrently with the first day of BEA. Ashley is an expert at WordPress and her talk was fantastic! Her talk definitely showed that she has an immense amount of knowledge concerning the WordPress platform. Follow her blog if you wish to learn tips about WordPress!
On Wednesday I went to the bloggers conference and found it to be extremely interesting as I have 3 blogs and I am trying to get more out of them. What was the most positive thing about the conference was meeting a whole group of fairly young people who were very nice and had very interesting tidbits to say about blogging and technology.
On Thursday I went to the exhibits and that was like being in a candy store. Never having attended a book expo like this, I was overwhelmed. My goal was to find a small publisher for my second book. I was also looking for some publicity companies for Genius and Partnership. I didn’t mean to visit with any authors and get signed books, but that all changed when I happened on Mika Brzezinski totally alone at a signing table and I walked up to her and she graciously signed her new book for me. Later I received signed books from two new mystery novel writers and had great short conversations with them and one asked me to contact him.
Another goal was assess the state of legacy publishing versus self-publishing, and in fact, I had productive conversations with two senior editors of small publishing companies.
I showed Genius and Partnership, produced with the wonderful Pressbooks program/platform, to quite a few publishing professionals at the Book Expo, and most were fairly positive about its look and design. I went around and tried to find books that are also full of color images like Genius and Partnership and, except for art books with beautiful color plates, the classic 6 x 9 non-fiction book either has a small section of color images inserted into the book, or the images throughout the book are all black and white. Only one publisher that I browsed through had anything similar to what I did with Genius and Partnership. A couple of people who looked at Genius and Partnership thought it looked “self-published.” I was completely insulted but I have to have an open mind as what I like may be not what most of the world likes. Of course, they could just be jealous too. But there were others who were very impressed. That made me feel better.
Books of Joseph L Dixon 
Thanks so much for attending the WordPress panel! I’m so glad you found it interesting and informative. 🙂
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