A brief interview with Tom Best, vice president, marketing, at H.B. Fenn, on the death of BookExpo Canada
To what extent did Fenn participate?
H.B. Fenn and Company had been participating for over 31 consecutive years and we think we may be the longest running exhibitor at the annual event. We grew to become one of the largest exhibitors at BookExpo Canada.
Are you sorry to see it go?
Yes we are sorry to see it disappear. It was a unique, annual opportunity to meet with so many of our best customers and to discuss a wide range of issues of mutual concern. It was also a fair where one used to be able to really position the very best books on your fall list and to generate real excitement for a writer or a new book with the anticipation of enormous success in the fall and holiday season to follow.
Of course in its early days it was also very much a working fair where retailers would learn about the new lists and place significant orders there right on the trade floor, both for new titles but also the backlist selections for the summer and fall months.
Recently it was a good location to plan upcoming author visits and marketing promotions. It was also a celebration of the best in our Canadian industry and a chance to socialize with colleagues and customers as an industry. It will be missed.
Did you see this coming, and if so, why?
Yes, I think many of us knew that the show was on its last legs. H.B. Fenn and Company and Key Porter Books had elected to pull out in December of this past year and had informed the Canadian Booksellers Association and Reed Canada at that time that we were withdrawing from the 2009 Exposition.
Our decision was really based on the reality that the show was no longer of sufficient value to us to pay the extraordinary fees to exhibit there. Clearly attendance by independent booksellers had started to wane over the past few years and in many cases, with our major customers, we had already sold in our fall lists and had begun to make commitments for marketing and author events prior to the start of the fair.
More importantly I think there was a lack of true consensus by the major partners in the show about what the show should be. Independent retailers, Indigo Books and Music, large mass merchant retailers, major international publishers, Canadian-owned firms, wholesalers and even remainder dealers all felt the show was no longer serving their needs but could not really settle on what was required going forward. Especially during tougher economic times everyone is looking for ways to compete efficiently and save on costs where the value is not there.
BookExpo Canada ran out of gas and the business model that it ran on just was not sustainable. We are hopeful that some sort of consensus is reached in the future and the show is revived but I suspect it will be dramatically different and its size and scope much narrower. No doubt it will take a couple of years for that consensus to rebuild a new annual event for the industry.
