Book Sellers Take Manhattan

Books

By KATE TAYLOR
May 17, 2007

On June 1, Alan Greenspan will give his first public interview in almost 20 years, as the keynote event of BookExpo America, the national bookselling convention being held this year at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

The interview is the first publicity event for Mr. Greenspan's forthcoming book, "The Age of Turbulence," which will be published in September by Penguin Press. But the former chairman of the Federal Reserve can hardly be said to be throwing himself to the media wolves: The interviewer will be his wife, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent for NBC news, Andrea Mitchell.

The fall catalog for Penguin Press describes Mr. Greenspan's book as a combination of intellectual memoir and analysis of the current global economy. It begins on September 11, 2001, when Mr. Greenspan, after ascertaining that his wife and his Federal Reserve colleagues were safe, turned next to the crucial task of preventing major economic damage –– including, at the worst, a collapse of the financial system. As it turned out, the financial system suffered no shock at all, suggesting to Mr. Greenspan that the global economy had developed into a remarkably flexible and resilient system.

The lawyer Robert Barnett of Williams & Connolly, who served as Mr. Greenspan's literary agent, said the interview promised to be fun and entertaining. "It's not a news interview, because the book doesn't come out until the fall," Mr. Barnett said. "It's going to be a discussion of him, and maybe their relationship, and how he wrote the book." Mr. Greenspan's office declined to comment.

Among the other authors and celebrities who will appear at BEA to promote their books are the comedian Stephen Colbert, the filmmaker Ken Burns, the Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the novelists Khaled Hosseini and Alice Sebold (both of whom are publishing their second novels, after best-selling debuts), the hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and the actress and talkshow host Rosie O'Donnell.

BookExpo was run by the American Booksellers Association, and referred to as ABA until a decade ago, when the convention was sold to Association Exhibitions and Services, a division of a British media company, Reed Elsevier Inc., and the name was changed. Today, BookExpo is rotated among several cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago; because so many publishers are based here, BEA usually takes place in New York every other year.

Over 30,000 people are expected to come onto the convention floor between Friday, June 1, and Sunday, June 3. Many from the industry will be local, but others –– booksellers from around the country, as well as publishing people from around the world, here to buy rights to American books –– will stay in hotels. Because of the rising costs of Manhattan hotels, the official ABA hotel this year is across the river in Brooklyn: the New York Marriot at the Brooklyn Bridge.

"It's a nice piece of business for the city," a spokesman for NYC & Company, the city's tourism, marketing, and events organization, Christopher Heywood, said of the convention. Mr. Heywood said the attendees occupy 5,000 hotel rooms on the peak night, and the convention as a whole produces 23,725 "room nights," over the course of the three days and the two days on either side. That generates around $15 million in economic impact, Mr. Heywood said.

For those in the publishing industry, having the convention in New York is convenient, but the Javits Center offers its own frustrations. The union rules are notoriously strict. "I live in fear of having to carry something into the convention center at the last minute and being tackled by a Teamster who wants to charge me $500 in fees," an employee at a major publisher, who asked not to be named, said.

On the floor, publishers have booths where they promote their fall books, often giving away free galleys and other tchotchkes that they hope will make a book stick in someone's mind. The marketing director at Vintage and Anchor Books, Roz Parr, said the house doesn't usually offer goodies, but they have some leftover beach towels that they made earlier to promote Scott Smith's novel "The Ruins," so they'll be handing them out. They will also have a special spinning display to alert booksellers to the 12 movies based on Vintage and Anchor books that are coming out between now and the fall. "Even a bad movie can sell a really good book," the director of publicity for Vintage and Anchor, Russell Perreault, said.

Much of the weekend's activity takes place off the actual convention floor. Publishers throw parties at which booksellers and members of the media can mingle with famous authors. Alfred A. Knopf, for example, is holding a dinner for around 160 people on Friday night at a loft space overlooking the Hudson River. Authors attending will include Mr. Burns, Nora Ephron, Oliver Sacks, Claire Messud, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Packer, and Richard Russo, and the dinner will be prepared by Susan Spicer, the chef of the New Orleans restaurants Bayona and Herbsaint, whose cookbook, "Crescent City Cooking," Knopf will publish in October. Knopf's director of publicity, Paul Bogaards, said that Ms. Spicer will go to the fish market in New Orleans on Friday morning before flying to New York.

At the tables, Knopf tries to seat the authors strategically near important booksellers, hosts of National Public Radio shows, and newspaper editors. "The book business still turns on word of mouth and the hand sell," Mr. Bogaards said. "If you can sit an author next to an influential bookseller, and the bookseller can go back to their store [with the enthusiasm from that conversation], the book can develop a heartbeat."

The Knopf dinner is a sedate and dignified affair compared to some of the BEA parties. The distributor Publishers Group West and its affiliate publishers have been known to throw some of the wildest parties in years past, including one, during a year that BEA was held in Los Angeles, at the Playboy Mansion. "Salman Rushdie was there –– it was right after the fatwa was called off," the co-owner of the bookstore Diesel in Oakland and Malibu, John Evans, said. "It was hysterical to see Salman Rushdie at the Playboy Mansion." This year, PGW, which was recently bought by the Perseus Book Group after its previous owner, Advanced Marketing Services, filed for bankruptcy, is throwing its Saturday night party at the refurbished Gramercy Theater on East 23rd Street. The musical headliners are Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

Amid the partying, some business gets done. The people in the subsidiary rights departments of publishing houses are particularly busy in the weeks around BEA, meeting with publishing people from around the world who want to buy rights to their books. "They come into the office the week before [BEA] and the week after, so for us in foreign rights it's like a threeweek thing," the director of subsidiary rights at Simon & Schuster, Marcella Berger, said.

"You're working 'round the clock." And whereas the visitors used to be mostly from Western Europe, now "they're coming from China, Japan, India," Ms. Berger said. "Arabic publishers are more involved than they have been in the past, and the former Soviet satellite countries in the last 10 to 15 years have grown enormously and really developed their publishing business."

The publisher of Ecco Press, Daniel Halpern, described the mood in the publishing industry at the moment as "guardedly optimistic." Publishers often pack a lot of books into the fall season (which is promoted at BEA), leading to hopes that a few titles will break out to be major sellers. The sales and marketing director for Knopf and Pantheon, Christine Gillespie, said, "We have a lot of stuff and I've read about a lot of stuff that seems to bode well for a good fall. The spring has been very soft," she acknowledged.

Whether Mr. Greenspan can engender the prosperity in the publishing business that he did in the country at large remains to be seen. One bookseller, at least, said she was not planning to attend his event. "Definitely not," a co-owner of Politics and Prose in Washington, Carla Cohen, said. "I feel that Alan Greenspan took a dive for Bush when he said that tax cuts would not be a problem and that it was good economic policy," Ms. Cohen said. "He didn't act in the best interest of the United States; he wanted to be popular with the administration."