By:Steve Webner Staff Writer for World Liberty TV

Book Expo is a reflection of the community we serve; what you see at the show should be what you see in book selling and publishing. Mass market brick and mortar retail continues to suffer; consumers are in charge of what, when and how they read; authors have more channels to reach consumers; and publishers are working hard to find new ways to get content into their hands.

These continue to be tumultuous days for our industry, but in these tumultuous times, the closer you are to the reader, the better you will fare. As booksellers, no one is closer to the reader than you; you’re listening to consumers every day and steering them towards the books they crave. Thus, it’s essential to have you at the center of BookExpo.

Today’s market realities make trusted content curators and purveyors of culture like you more important than ever before. We’re doubling down on you and your fellow ABA members.

We need you and your team at the event making meaningful connections with authors, exhibitors, peers and publishing staff. These connections will improve your business and underscore the vibrancy of BookExpo and the indie bookselling community.

For a show like BookExpo to be relevant, we need to foster meaningful connections between the key players of our industry. We know that BookExpo can be a huge, noisy cacophony and we are trying to focus that energy and concentrate on you.

We want BookExpo to become a large scale yet intimate environment built on the foundation of business interactivity and community enrichment for independent booksellers. And we want BookCon to become a massive pop culture spectacle that directly connects creators and fans that raises the profile of books in media and culture at large.

If we can pull this off, you’ll all smile and we’ll have a reinvigorated BookExpo that couples with a breakthrough BookCon to create the End-to-End solution publishers require to successfully launch books to you, consumers and the media.

BookExpo provides a focused professional environment to discover emerging authors and the next blockbuster titles, engage with the world’s most influential publishers and learn from industry leaders and peers.

BookExpo culminates with BookCon, our two day Fan event where storytelling and pop culture collide.

See more about Book Expo in our World Liberty TV Book Review Channel by Clicking here.