Yesterday was the first day of the Book Expo of America and I spent the day in seminars as the exhibitors franticly set-up their displays. I learned several things in my classes. An important one for us, is that authors are more into websites, blogs, Facebook, Youtube and social media activities than the publishers. The message to the publishers was they need to pay more attention to these new ways of reaching out and put more money into these activities.

The future may find us seeing book trailers in the bookstores as you shop and more podcasts, both with and without videos. The e-books are still moving forward and new readers are being presented. Some big publishers are looking closely at e-books but so far it is still a very small group. The concenious seems to be that people still want to hold the paperbooks.

I spoke with Gunnar Siewert from Germany. He has an intregueing new website, BookRix, that launched ten days ago. He described it as a My Space for writers/authors. The program allows you to load your book in a formate that presents it as a book on the screen. Front and back covers, table of contents, chapters, pictures, and the ability to change the fonts, colors, covers, etc. The reader can read the book on line or off and can increase the fonts to make it easier to read if necessary. The books looked great on the screen. The author decides how much of the book to load and can connect to the site with a widget. The book cannot be copied.

The author can create a friends list and give them special access if they chose. Comments are encouraged. We will be looking to cross linking with Gunnar Siewert’s BookRix. Networking is so great!

Bill Tancer is the General Manager at Global Research, Hotwire and an author of a new book called Click. He is a techno geek, who loves numbers and crunching them to find trends. His presentation was terrific in the things he was able to discover by studying the clicks we make on our computers. His new book will be interesting. One discovery of his was that Fanfiction.net drives more book sales than publishers or author sites. That is a social networking site and these sites are having a huge impact on book sales. Ifyou want to learn more check out his website at Ilovedata.com. We hope to be reviewing his book, Click.

I went to seminars on Blogging and LinkedIn. They were informative. Still not comfortable with LinkedIn but I will work at it when I get home. The seminar on Crowd Sourcing was facinating. How groups of people can make decisions and changes on the net and have them be good decisions. Technology encourages this. The definition of Crowd Sourcing is taking a job or question outsidethe normal situation and placing it in an “open call” setting on the net. You will get results from your crowd or community that might surprise you. Even to the point of providing the service. I love the new law/rule I heard about - Stergeon’s Law “90% odf everything is crap!”

Naomi (musesacres) reporting from BEA in LA, CA