#GALLEYSNATCHER - BEA- TUESDAY NIGHT

My trip to BEA has been all I could think about for at least a month now, maybe longer. So the day comes today and I am joyfully bouncing around my house with anticipation. I imagine myself hugging Kareem Abdul Jabbar at the Disney Publishing dinner. I also fantasize that Walter Mosley finds me so captivating that he doesn't want to speak to anyone else in the room when I go to his event and that he corners me at a table and we talk for what seems like hours. Well, that is until I have to fly across town to the Disney party where Kareem hugs me. In my head everyone is overwhelmed with the genius work we are accomplishing at Little Shop of Stories and Sunny and I are the toast of the publishing world, she and I have officially left a lasting impression on everyone and the President of Harper Collins charters a jet to send us back to Atlanta, where a driver with our names scribbled on an Ipad awaits us at the airport. In my fantasy Sunny has millions of dollars in checks in her luggage that people have donated to On The Same Page, our city wide reading initiative. This is the idea in the mind of a girl who grew up loving books and now gets the pleasure of working in the book world as her actual real job.

 

Instead we land and head merrily over to check in to our beautiful room and fastly get ready for the Random House mixer we fear may be coming to an end. We jump on the elevator, go down from our 28th floor view, exit the elevator and casual slink into the mixer. Like all other books nerds we spend some time talking only to each other until  a marketing person from a Washington D.C. bookstore comes over and engages us in conversation as we sip on our wine. Then I see her, a woman walks by with a tag on her dress that says #GALLEYSNATCHER. I whip around and grab her by the arm. "Hello, I've been trying to ready you tag, I see it says Galleysnatcher and I'm the Galley Club Coordinator at Little Shop of Stories", I say with the first bit of confidence I've felt all night. Upon further conversation I discover, Donna is the Vice President and Executive Director of Marketing The Crown Publishing Group. Galleysnatcher is her pet project and when she's here's what we're doing at Little Shop she's as excited to meet me as I am to meet her. The Little Shop Galley Club allows kids to read the advance readers sent to us by publishers in exchange for a 5-7 sentence review of the book. Our Galley Club members also interview authors who appear for in-store signings. Donna goes on to tell me she can get our kids reviews in front of 90,000 viewers. She hands me her card and I walk back over to Sunny feeling really good about my first half hour at BEA. My reality is better than my fantasy. My reality may not be hugging my literary idols, although I plan on accomplishing some of that on this trip too, but my real life motivates young people to do exceptional things. My real life is spinning around to people like Donna so the quiet little galley club member who's writing I love gets seen all over the country. In that moment my real life felt heroic, and I had a totally new vision of why BEA was going to be so exciting for me. The moment I realized it was not about what I could get, but what I could give, boy did my plans change.