BEA 2016! Day 3: My Experience

Friday was a big day at BEA for me. There were a ton of signings and highly-anticipated galleys being dropped!

It was the final day of this event (unless you were going to BookCon which I was not), and I didn’t want it to end! But we picked up a lot of titles that I can’t wait to read this year.

Here was what my schedule looked like:

830am – Waltzed into McCormick Place with plenty of time to spare. Even though it wa a half hour before the opening, there wasn’t as bad of a line as the day before. We grabbed a spot towards the front with a busy plan in mind.

9am – Hall opened! We rushed to grab the morning galleys from Little Brown Books and Abrams along with the day’s galley-drop schedules. I then ran over to the Macmillan booth to see if there were any tickets for the morning signings, but unfortunately, they were all gone… oh well. So we decided to walk around and view all the publishers.

1130am – My Best Friend’s Exorcism: A Novel by Grady Hendrix signing! He was great to talk to, and he was wearing a spiffy white pinstripe suit.

12pm – Since I wasn’t able to get tickets at Macmillan for the Caraval signing by Stephanie Garber, I decided to jump into the signing line for Eleanor Hoffman’s new book, Empire of Dust. Thankfully I did because the line began 2 hours before it was supposed to happen! And then my phone goes off to say that my mom was allowed to get a leftover copy of Caraval!!

1pm – Since I was at the beginning of the Harelquin Teen line, I was able to sprint to Penguin to get in another line for Sabaa Tahir’s A Torch Against the Night! And as soon as I get there, my jaw drops. It was about 2 hours before the signing and yet there were over 100 people already sitting in a line. I looked around, and the worst thought came to mind: I would have to wait until its release to get this book which was one of the highest on my list *inner waterworks exploded* but I decided to stick it out and wait just in case there would be enough tickets handed out…

When it was FINALLY 2pm, the tickets were handed out and I GOT ONE!!! *eek* The publisher must have anticipated this because there was a stack of tickets leftover and maybe 200+ people in line. It took me 50 minutes to get to Sabaa when the line began to move.. that’s how bad it was.

While I was standing in that line, on the other side of the booth, my mom was waiting for David Arnold’s signing of Kids of Appetite.

3pm – Since her line was ALOT shorter, I had her stand in line for one of the longest lines for Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. She told me that that line began around 1230, and the book wasn’t going to drop until 330… crazy!

BUT thank the book gods, she was able to miraculously grab the book!

And that was the end of three LONG, SHOULDER ACHING days of the best event of my life. BEA was definitely worth the money and time to attend. I met so many new authors and fellow book bloggers. As you can tell I received over 125 books and even more bookish goodies (SOOOO many totebags) 🙂

I am striving to attend next year’s (2017) BEA held in New York City, but it’ll depend on my resources when it gets closer. If you are a book blogger or any type of member in the book community, I HIGHLY encourage you to attend BEA. It has only been a few weeks past and I am already missing every minute of it.

I will be writing a post on ALL of the books I received at BEA hopefully later this week. So stay tuned here or on my Twitter @KatsTBReviews for links to the post! You can also subscribe below for email notifications on all of my upcoming fun, bookish posts 🙂

Happy Reading,