The Skim Trade
At New York's BookExpo, the Literary Event of a Lunchtime

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 4, 2007

NEW YORK

It's a classic moment at BookExpo America, the nation's biggest book industry confab. Two moments, actually, happening simultaneously at Manhattan's Jacob Javits Convention Center.

On one side of a long aisle lined with publishers' booths sits the mild-mannered, white-shirted British novelist Ian McEwan, playing the role of Celebrity Author. McEwan smiles gamely and perspires a bit -- the cavernous Javits seems not to have figured out that it's June -- as he signs his latest, "On Chesil Beach," for a line of fans that stretches out of sight.

On the other side of the aisle, just a few yards away, stands Alexis Akre, the head book buyer for Olsson's Books & Records . . . not buying books.

Akre has been chatting with Craig Popelars, who represents a modest-size publisher called Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Popelars seems not at all perturbed by the buyer's failure to buy.

"Nobody does that anymore, do they?" he says. An order placed here would be an occasion for celebration: "We should have those bells in the booth, like when a bartender gets tipped."

Welcome to the paradox known as BEA, which exists to bring authors, publishers and bookstore folk together, but at which few books are actually sold.

There are exceptions, of course. Small-town bookstores that don't get many visits from publishers' reps, for example, may take the opportunity to place orders.

But to spend a few days at BEA with a buyer for an urban independent bookstore chain such as Olsson's, which consists of six stores in the Washington area, is to observe the less quantifiable but no less important kind of transactions occurring there.

They're all about face-to-face contact, about sharing ideas and forging connections that will help you later on. These connections, one editor in attendance explained, tend to be made and maintained through serendipity, "and if the serendipity doesn't happen for you, BEA is a waste of time." This would be equally true, another pointed out, if you were talking about "the association of storm-door manufacturers."

Akre has her own phrase for the seemingly intangible benefits of bringing the book world together in one humongous, sweaty mass.

"It's all about social capital," she says.

* * *

"Sometimes you're planting seeds that you don't even know," Allison Hill is saying. "A few months later, you remember you met someone at breakfast and they're going to have the information you need."

Akre, as it happens, is sharing a Thursday morning breakfast table with Hill, who manages a bookstore in Pasadena, Calif. They're building social capital by chatting about a problem all people in the book business have: So many books. So little time.

Despite the fact that she's coming to a convention where free reading material will be thrust at her constantly, Hill packed no less than 12 volumes from her to-read list. Akre was a little more restrained. She brought four.

Hill shares a trick she uses for deciding what to read: She looks at a book's very last word, and if that feels right, she'll give the book a shot. She's a sucker for "home" and "love."

"I have staging piles," Akre says. No way will she get to everything in even the most ruthlessly winnowed pile. She'll farm many out to Olsson's colleagues. Others, fortunately, she can order blind.

"I don't need to worry about the next James Patterson," she says.

Thursday is the day before the main conference opens, but the American Booksellers Association has put together a day of educational sessions at a Brooklyn hotel. It boasts such topics as "What to Do When the Competition Comes to Town" ("That's old news," Akre says) and "Participation in the Digital Revolution," which is the first one she opts to attend.

It's a quick run through what the speaker, ABA Education Director Len Vlahos, calls the "key concepts driving change." Among them Vlahos lists print-on-demand technology, which is "changing the distribution system for books," and the rapid digitization of "everything that can be digitized."

There's not much in the way of social capital to acquire here. And while the presentation is forceful and well received, Vlahos doesn't say much that Akre didn't already know. She's young enough, at 33, to be at ease with technology in a way that some of her older peers are not.

A Barnard English major who grew up in Alexandria, Akre worked a variety of jobs in New York before landing back in the Washington area. In late 2001, still unsure what she wanted to do, she got herself hired as a clerk at Olsson's, thinking it would tide her over temporarily.

Oops.

Before long she was a store manager. Last December she became head buyer and general manager for books. That future she was going to figure out seems to have taken care of itself.

As for the capital a better-paying career might have brought -- well, she may have to make do with the social kind.

* * *

"This is the senseless wandering portion of BEA," Akre explains.

It's Friday morning and she's just hit the main floor at the Javits Center. Her plan is to cruise the seemingly endless aisles and see what serendipity will bring.

The first familiar face she sees belongs to Geoffrey Hughes, who's in the Harcourt booth. Akre greets him warmly but doesn't even think about buying anything. He'll come to Olsson's later.

"You and I are going to sit down soon and talk about cabbages and kings," Hughes tells her.

She heads down a center aisle, turning into a side aisle only when she sees something that catches her eye. Ducking into the Hachette Book Group, she gets caught in a crush of ambling conventioneers. Her Olsson's colleagues Tony Ritchie and Andrew Getman, who are wandering with her, are temporarily lost to sight.

"I have no idea where we are," Akre says a minute later, pondering a BEA-provided map with tiny print.

No matter. Wandering on, she spies Ingram Publisher Services and her stride gets purposeful. Ingram, one of the major book distributors, does a lot of business with Olsson's. She makes a date to come back later and talk.

She zips past a display for "The Dorm Room Diet Planner" ("I figured I'd skip that one") and loses Ritchie and Getman again. When they reappear, Ritchie is clutching a holiday title called "Alien Xmas."

"I'm not impressed," Getman tells him. "It's all computer-generated."

They pass the giant Random House booth, which sits opposite a huge, colorful Google display. An Elton John look-alike wanders by, advertising something they never figure out, and Akre stops at Lonely Planet. (Washington, she explains, is "a good travel city.") A minute later, colleagueless again, Akre is hugging a woman named Jean Wescott, who left Olsson's a few years back and now works on the publishing side.

"She has a pretty glamorous life," Wescott says of Akre. "I miss that life. I have to be here and say, 'No, we don't accept unsolicited manuscripts.' "

Another aisle or two and there are Ritchie and Getman, chowing down fudge and talking to a woman in an apron that says "Politics & Pot Roast." This would be Sarah Hood Salomon, who hopes to convert Mamie Eisenhower's fudge recipe and other politically connected delights into a bestseller (in Washington, at least).

On they wander. Akre chats up Grove/Atlantic President and Publisher Morgan Entrekin ("a connected man"). She grabs lunch with her liaison at Publishers Group West, which distributes the books of numerous small publishers. She talks with Penguin about a buy-two-get-one-free paperback promotion Olsson's is planning.

By midafternoon she's fading. She decides to skip the most-hyped BEA event of the day: novice Penguin author Alan Greenspan being interviewed by -- stop the presses! -- NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

"I'd like to go, but I need to decompress," Akre says.

Besides, she doesn't need to see Greenspan field softballs from his wife to know the former Fed chairman's book will be big.

* * *

Why the Friday afternoon fatigue? It's no secret. The accumulation of social capital requires a lot of party-going.

Thursday night it was the bash thrown by the newly renamed Grand Central Publishing, formerly Warner Books, at (of course) Grand Central Station. TV laughmeister Steven Colbert, author of "I Am America (and So Can You)," due out in October, was said to be there, but Akre never saw him. She did get her picture taken with humorist Amy Sedaris, though.

"I did it for my friend," she explains. "She's taking care of my cat. It's the least I can do."

Friday night's big event, thrown by Knopf, is in a funky converted warehouse on West 28th Street with views of the Hudson. When Akre arrives, she stands around for a bit having what she calls an "Oh jeez, I'm not in my league" moment. There she is, supposed to rub shoulders with the likes of Ken Burns, Carl Bernstein, Michael Ondaatje, Nathan Englander and Mary Gordon, not to mention venerable Picasso biographer John Richardson.

Akre spends a fair amount of time building social capital with fellow book buyers from Wisconsin and California. She isn't too shy, however, to extract some good yarns from Richardson, who charms her with tales of his days in Provence, when the great cubist painter and his entourage used to drop in on him.

Nor is she too tired to repair to a bar called Cowgirl afterward, where she meets some friends.

* * *

Another day, more wandering -- but Saturday's is a bit more purposeful.

Akre has an early meeting, so she doesn't make the Book and Author breakfast featuring Burns, Khaled Hosseini, Lisa See and the elusive Colbert, who had the early-rising crowd in stitches with, among other things, a not-so-gentle putdown of the earnestly long-winded documentary-maker.

She isn't invited to the hush-hush, undisclosed-location lunch with novice young-adult book author Jenna Bush, in town to woo a selection of booksellers and librarians. BEA attendees are mostly from independent bookstores and they lean politically to the left, so Bush's publisher, HarperCollins, knows she'll have some work to do to win them over.

Nor does Akre make it to Saturday's Book and Author lunch, where the headliners are Russell Simmons, Paul Krugman, Alan Alda and Valerie Plame Wilson. America's most famous former clandestine operative draws loud laughter and applause when she shares her to-do list since her recent move to New Mexico:

"Pick up dry cleaning," Wilson deadpans. "Get kids camp stuff at Target. Attend the oral arguments for our civil suit, in which we sue Vice President Dick Cheney. . . . Go to Home Depot. . . . Sue the CIA."

Akre has her own to-do list, which she's written down in a rare spare moment. There are more meetings (including one at lunchtime) and more wandering, this time bearing a list of mostly smaller publishers she wants to check in with.

"Look, hair metal!" she says, stopping to admire a rock-and-roll opus put out by a press called Feral House/Process.

"Nice to meet you, we're Small Beer, have a catalogue," says the man at the booth for another wonderfully named outfit.

But really, there's no time to list all the social capital Akre will acquire before BEA folds its tent on Sunday. There's certainly no time to recount the fabulous tale with which Jamie Byng, publisher of a Scottish press called Canongate, regales her on Saturday afternoon.

Byng's story is about how he came to present a fancy limited edition of a book about cocaine dealing to Queen Elizabeth II.

It is exceptionally long and extremely funny.

And hey -- the publisher has relatives in Bethesda, and he promises to stop by Olsson's sometime.