ICRS, part 5

Captain’s Log, Supplemental

Blog book giveaway:
My Thursday book giveaway is TANGLED MEMORIES by Marta Perry.
My Monday book giveaway is DIVINE STORIES OF THE YAHWEH SISTERHOOD edited by Michelle Medlock Adams and Gena Maselli.
You can still enter both giveaways. Just post a comment on each of those blog posts. On Thursday, I'll draw the winner for TANGLED MEMORIES and post the title for another book I'm giving away.

ICRS, part 5 (continued from part 4):

ACFW had a breakfast get-together on Monday morning, so I dragged my lazy butt out of bed and sagged against the wall as the elevator dropped me 33 floors in less than 30 seconds (that’s just kind of scary to contemplate). A friendly guy rode the elevator with me.

As I walked out of the hotel, in the entry foyer I saw RiverOak editor Jeff Dunn! He greeted me with a smile and a hug. I was so glad to see him because the last I’d heard, he’d had gall bladder surgery and couldn’t make it to the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference this past April.

Jeff introduced me to the guy who had rode down the elevator with me, Tom Beard, the manager of events and publicity at Cook Communications. Small world!

RiverOak has stopped its current fiction line so I’m guessing Jeff was at ICRS for Cook’s nonfiction line. We chatted a short time, but we both had to get to our respective breakfast meetings. He is the nicest guy. He’s known me since I first shopped around my really badly written chick-lit, The Corinthian Rules, at Mount Hermon years ago, and he’s always been so encouraging to me.

Walking in downtown Denver near the Convention Center is a little scary. Some very weird people and some scary looking homeless people. {shudder}

The ACFW breakfast was so fun! I saw next to Brandt Dodson and across from Beth White, whose novel with Zondervan is going to be released with mine next year (I’ll be riding the marketing coattails of Beth and Lori Copeland—lucky me!). I also sat next to Bryan Davis’s daughter Amanda.

Walking the floor at ICRS was amazing. Not as many people as I expected ther to be—and actually, Brandilyn Collins commented on her blog that there were less people than last year.

Tons of booths with all kinds of stuff for Christian retailers to look at, to order for their stores. The trinkets and gifts were neat, but my favorite booths were, natch, the publishing houses. It was fascinating to see the posters and the books on display, to see what titles are coming out, what recent titles the house is highlighting, which authors will be signing.

Oh, and the free books are pretty cool, too. :)

Some market observations:

I zeroed in on the chick-lit, and there were definitely several titles at each booth. I have no clue if the chick-lit genre is doing well, but it seemed every major publishing house had a form of chick-lit in their catalog.

I did notice quite a bit of mom-lit and also several mystery chick-lits. Not as many straight chick-lits. Looks like the publishers are leaning toward those sub-genres.

Thrillers, mysteries, and suspense novels were also highlighted, and for some of them, the publishers were targeting the male readership—I suppose figuring that the women who read thrillers would buy the books anyway, so they concentrated on increasing their male demographic.

There were also lots of historical novels, but these were grittier and a bit different from the Christian historicals I’ve read before. Not always single women in a romance—a couple titles had married couples, some titles looked more like historical fiction or historical women’s fiction, even. Flawed, wounded heroes and heroines.

It’s going to be a great year for fiction!

Next: Meeting with my editor Sue Brower and some marketing tips.