BEA15 Part 1

This year at the Book Expo in NYC it was bitterSWEET. Bitter because it went by wayyyy too quickly and sweet because it was awesome! I am saddened that next year it'll be moving to a new location, a much further one—Chicago! I'm going to do my best to get out there but I've never in all my life flown on a plane so maybe it'll be my first experience traveling by plane to the Expo.

Alright so here's how Book Expo 2015 went....

Day 1:
 

I got up at 4 in the morning after getting off of work from my job at 12:00 a.m. the following night so I got approximately 3 1/2 hours of sleep!! Not a great start but I was so hype I didn't care, I was running off pure excitement. So I packed right after work because I'd been working like crazy the days before I didn't have any time to spare to do all that, jumped in the car and was on my way to NYC!! All was looking pretty good until I hit New Jersey. My car went KA-PUT! My alternator blew a few hours into my trip...and I hadn't even reached the city! SO 4 hours later, my car was towed back to PA, and I had to have a rental company pick me and my dad—who was with me—up from a sidewalk to drive us to the place so we could actually rent a car and make it to the city. It was a nightmare, I wanted to just say hell with BEA! BUT I knew things would get better once I actually made it to the convention center, and it did! I arrived professionally late around 11 in the morning, but I was finally here!! I MADE IT! I basically ran to the blogger's conferences and I jumped right into a session that had just started called "Tactics to Create Killer Content Fast", and it was informative and I learned some cool things, but, I ran into my blogger friend Jeanna from The Bucket List!!! So that immediately made my day better! She's very cool so check out her blog and follow her :-) 

It was however crazier this year on the first day of BEA because while we were in conferences they had opened the showroom floor for perusal which was unexpected because in past years the first day was usually just conference day! In-between breaks I went and checked out what they had, and picked up a few cool things from publishing booths but it seemed like they weren't doing too much since there was two things happening at the same time which was GREAT because I didn't want to miss out on more..I went to some awesome sessions but I have to say my favorite that I took the most away from was "Working with Publishers, Authors, and Promotions" with speakers: Meredith Burks (Viking/Penguin), Swapna Krishna, Bryn Collier (HarlequinTEEN), and Christine Riccio. They had a lot of awesome advice to give talking about the relationship between bloggers and publishers!

Day 2: 

The second day of BEA was a blur, it went by fast! I can barely remember details, but there was so many fantastic titles being dropped and I scooped up a bunch. This year my experience was a little different from last because they moved the author signing area all the way to the other side of the showroom floor so it was either pickup books you really want or wait in line for hours and meet 1-2 authors you really like if you're lucky! I didn't have time like most bloggers to make a set list of who I wanted to see so I walked around without an agenda and felt less stressed over having a schedule of times I needed to meet. I had alot of fun that way. I came across many books/authors I would have missed if I just spent my entire day going to the autographing tables. The only real bummer is that I had wanted to see Jesse Eisenberg but the line was way too long and since he was ticketed I didn't end up scoring one. BUT it just so happens that Sarah Mlynowski & Emily Jenkins had there signing next to his which I had wanted to meet them anyways so I got right next to Jesse! I did not however get any pictures, plus, the people who did photograph him were getting yelled at anyways. It was in line that I actually met some really cool bloggers Tawny & Kristen from Twinning for Books, and Morgan from Seeing Double in Wonderland!

Day 3:

The last day of BEA was a rush because time kept flying and by day three it still felt like day one! It was on the final day that I ran into one of my favorite childhood authors Scott Westerfeld! He was wandering around the Simon & Schuster booth waiting to surprise unsuspecting fans. It was very neat because I couldn't make his signing for his new book Zeroes but fortunately I got to meet him anyways! I feel like I fulfilled one of my teenage dreams, (even now though I love his writing! & I can't wait to devour his new novel!). But I think the biggest and most exciting moment was meeting one of my all-time favorite authors Richelle Mead! One of the first authors and series I fell in love with when I first started blogging was thanks to the Succubus Blues series—which I just freaked out over. Meeting Richelle has been at the very top of my list since I started reading each and every single one of her series so it was a gigantic fangirl moment!! It started with the Georgina Kincaid series and I've just devoured every novel after. I'm wonderfully stoked for her latest book Soundless! So, like every year, BEA 2015 was an exceptional experience, and it's the people who made it that way!

Authors I met this year include: Jennifer E. Smith, Richelle Mead, Scott Westerfeld, Jennifer Donnelly, Dahlia Adler, and Rae Carson +more!

Please feel free to leave a comment about BEA or my experience, I would love to hear what you all have to say!!

More to come from Book Expo...next post will be my MASSIVE HAUL & Bookcon which I attended the first day!!! Stay tuned...

-Seirra