BEA Bloggers 2013!

I attended the BEA Bloggers 2013 Convention today and it was a ton of fun! Since I'll be going to the next few days of BEA as well, I thought it would be fun to recap the awesome things that happen each day and link to some of the cool people that I meet. Here's today's recap!

Got up at the ungodly hour of 6.30 this morning to make it into Manhattan for the conference. Luckily, I don't have to transfer trains and, although the walk was a bit longer than anticipated, it was easy to find. I got my badge, got my swag bag and went into the hall for the opening keynote and some breakfast.

I ate breakfast with some delightful ladies. Mary (BookHounds) is lovely, Pilar (Ordinary Servant) is really nice and Liberty (Taking Libertys) is really awesome. We had some great chats before the keynote started.

The keynote speaker was Will Schwalbe, who gave a really interesting, funny and well thought out speech about his experience with bloggers and just all around book enjoyers and what different kinds of success are. I really enjoyed his speech and it was a great start to the day.

At this point, the morning sessions began and I started the day at the Adult Editor Insider Panel, where we heard from people from Mulholland, Tor and Harlequin about exciting books that were coming out in the near future. I'm pretty excited about The Shining Girls from Mulholland (which I managed to snag a galley of!) which looks amazing and a mysterious book by J.J. Abrams (also from Mulholland) called S. Tor got me excited about a book of essays by Jo Walton on rereading classic books and The Incrementalists which I could not describe to you but they are super hyping. Harlequin is excited about The Returned which actually sounds quite good, if not very much like a French tv show I watched last year.

Also met during this session Natalie (Books Are the New Black) who has an amazing blog where she matches book covers to outfits and Marty (Every Day Writer) who does a little bit of everything. The three of us had planned the same schedule for the day so I ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the conference which was really fun. It's always great to make new friends.

The next panel was the Adult Book Blogging Pros panel, which was fun if not super helpful. All the panelists were great (Mandi from Smexy Books, Rebecca from Book Riot and Sarah from Smart Bitches) and the moderator, Jim Hines (JimCHines.com) was great. It was a fun panel.

Lunch was lunch. I think we were all pretty hungry. Natalie, Marty and I explored what we could see of the rest of the expo. Very excited for tomorrow!

After lunch, I went to Taking Your Online Presence Offline that turned out to mostly be about supporting your local indie bookstore, something I think a lot of us already do. Oh well.

After that was Extending the Reach of Your Blog Online which was actually quite good, bringing up different ways of getting a new audience. I enjoyed that one.

I wasn't sure what to think about Randi Zuckerberg being the closing keynote but her keynote was actually really interesting! She spoke about trends in social media and ways to use (and abuse) it. Even if things were a bit off topic for book blogger, it was still a very interesting and engaging talk that was probably one of the highlights of the day.

After that was happy hour where I had a Coke and chatted with a bunch of different people who's business cards I did not get and thus have sadly forgotten. I do look forward to running into them over the next few days, especially as I did not have business cards today and am going to be armed with them tomorrow.

It was a great first day, filled with meeting tons of interesting people and I'm even more excited for the rest of BEA. Should be great!