By Liz Everly
I’m just back from New York City. I was invited to attend a BEA party by Kensington, my publisher. So I took the opportunity to go and meet with my agent, editor, and as it turned out, much of the Kensington staff. The party was lovely and I met so many wonderful people that work at Kensington. At these parties everything is such a blur and it was not an event where you brought your business cards to hand out, so I’m not going to mention names, just say that everybody was wonderful.
So along with getting to know the folks at Kensington and e-Kensington, I attended the biggest book event in the US—Book Expo America, or BEA, as it’s commonly known. I zoomed in on some erotica and erotic romance publishers. I went to their booths, asked questions, and took some photos.
I stopped by the Ellora’s
Cave booth and spoke for a bit with Ellora’s Cave CEO Patty Marks.
Along with its sizzling hot e-books, they are known for “cavemen,” the hunks who are extremely muscled and available for portraits and so on. Not really my cup of tea, but I posed with two very friendly cavemen. (Sorry, not going to share that here. hahaha.) Patty and I chatted about how EC was really one of the pioneers in e-publishing and how it is still going strong. And I picked up a calendar for just for my aunt back home. Heh. (Check out Ellora’s Cave.)
I also stopped by Samhain Publishing’s booth, whose booth was more intimate, and Lindsey Faber, the publisher, was happy and excited to talk to me about her titles. She seemed most excited about erotic romance westerns. I agree that it’s a fascinating genre. Also, she pointed out a couple of other books she had that look VERY good. (Check out Samhain Publishing.)
Last but not least, I spoke to Hazel Cushion of Xcite press. It was the British publisher’s first time at BEA. I walked away with several of their books that I (or one of the other Lady Smut bloggers) might be reviewing in the future.
Also, Hazel showed me this nifty 3-dimensional hologram book called the Kama Xcitra.
A reader can scans pages from their book into their iPad, where it becomes 3D, as well as interactive. The couple from the book is suddenly on your screen and you can change the hair color, skin color, positions and so on. And the figures are actually moving and “demonstrating” the positions in the book.
(Interestingly enough, I saw another demo like this, but at Guinness Book of World Records, whose next release will also be three-dimensional and interactive.) The lovely and very proper Hazel went on to tell me how easy it is to take your device into bed with you and manipulate it, how ever you want. Xcite press was the only one of the erotic romance publishers that had such a book. (Check out Xcite Books.)
Fascinating to see the way in which books are becoming more interactive. I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing. But it sure is interesting. What do you think?
In the mean time, I ran into a couple of other good blog posts summing up BEA and I thought I’d share the links here.
One writer’s reaction to BEA.
Check Wendig, one of my favorite bloggers, on ten things he learned there.
Hank Philippi Ryan with a very positive blog post on BEA and books in general.
