Book Expo America 2013 Day 3 Recap

No video of my BEA books yet because of REASONS but it’ll be up…tomorrow, maybe? I’m waffling between making individual videos for each day/box of books or of combining everything into one huge video. Which is better? Smaller bite-sized videos, or one big one so you don’t have to click a million links?
Previous recaps: Day 1 is here | Day 2 is here
Day 3 of BEA was the last BEA day. It was also the Power Reader day: a day when the public could get in for like half price or something. There were a LOT of Power Readers, which was pretty cool! I met some very nice ones in the entrance line, including a newbie blogger who regretted not going to the other two days, too.
After plunging through the 9AM chaos, I went to my NetGalley Wellness Challenge meeting. I met up with Tarah and we went over my profile together. She gave me some tips on how to improve it so publishers would be more friendly towards sending me eARCs– basically, include relevant stats (visitors, subscribers, even comments is cool) and links to both your blog and your various social media accounts. She also said that if you (/me) had any contacts with publicists, you could ask them to add you to their auto-approve list.
The most useful thing I got from the meeting, though, was what to do about DNF books! Here’s what you do: submit feedback like normal, only instead of copy-pasting your review, put why you couldn’t finish the book. Tarah said that publishers are always looking for info/feedback, so if a book didn’t work for you they want to know why. Submitting why you DNF’d something both helps pubs AND it keeps your stats from getting weird (keeping your books requested/books reviewed stats even is important because it shows you aren’t just requesting books and then doing nothing with them.)
My first signing was for The Testing; I’d gotten the sequel on Thursday so I figured I should get the first one, too. I met some REALLY nice people in that line, as well, so it was worth the time spent!
Some other highlights of the day was talking to a nice editor at Sourcebooks about Anne of Green Gables (they’re rereleasing the books with new covers!) and a future MG book with roller derby in it, getting my picture taken with a Scientologist pirate, and finding out about a potential telecommuting internship with Spencer Hill Press.
Around 2pm the exhibit hall was dead. For all that there were tons of Power Readers, nothing much was happening. Since it was so quiet, and since I knew the line at the post office would be INSANE if I waited ’til the very end of the day, I decided to cut out early. I needed to ship all my books right then because I was switching to a cheaper hotel way uptown, and I didn’t want to haul all my books up there. Yay planning?

My cheaper hotel was actually a hostel: the Hostelling International New York, to be exact! It was AMAZING and lovely and uptown is SO MUCH NICER than midtown, y’all. I know midtown is more convenient to the Javits, but uptown is so peaceful and green and lovely that I’m tempted to stay there always. (More about the HI NYC will be posted to my travel blog next week.)
That evening I had dinner with Jenny! JENNY IS SO NICE and she came all the way up to see me near my hostel and we had pizza at a nice pizza place and it was great! If you don’t know Jenny, you need to go check out her blog NOW and start stalking her for sure because she’s great! And she’s going to do lots of fun things in the future, including a podcast!
And that was day 3 of my BEA trip. I’ve got another day, actually, because I stayed until Monday morning so I could do a little bit of sightseeing. I’ve decided to post that part over at my other blog because it’s not really book related. That’ll be up tomorrow, if you’re interested!