Ah, Tuesday. Tuesday after BEC. Though lack of energy might swing some of the content in this post from my modest aim of ‘comprehensible and mildly amusing’ to ‘pre-verbal,’ I still have tasked myself with recounting the thrills and chills of this year’s BEC.
First off, the afternoon sessions of Another Country were targeted and quite valuable (at least the two that I attended). Monique Trottier was generous with her online marketing advice and created a seminar that had a huge amount of take-away value. Monique’s emphasis is on taking marketing efforts to task by demanding as much from your website. An intriguing idea and a well-executed presentation.
I was also able to attend Ben Vershbow’s afternoon seminar on Author/Reader collaboration after some hockey card-like trading of tickets with my fellow BookNetters. Ben did a great job of creating discussion and making some pretty advanced concepts accessible and clear. A quick aside: I’ve read in other places that some BEC attendees were frustrated that there were still really basic questions being asked in these sessions. And that’s true…but my feeling is that better asked than unasked. It might be the case that some of these questions get asked 100 times. Better than none.
Sunday and Monday are a bit blurry with tradeshow goodness. Monday was a big day for thinking—the big question coming out of this year was whether changing BEC’s month might help boost attendance (and keep it a viable project for Reed). What say you? Let’s let the poll do the talking, shall we?
