This past weekend I had the luxury of participating in two outstanding book festivals! Earlier, I posted about the National Book Festival. On Sunday, after sleeping in for just a few extra hours, the J Crew (my husband, John, and my boys John-John & Justin) drove up to Baltimore for the Baltimore Book Festival.
My main reason for attending this event was to see two panels I was particulary interested in: The Wonderful World of Book Blogging and More from The Book Club Toolkit.
First, the Book Blogging Panel: This panel was moderated by Heather Johnson, known to many of us as Heather from Age 30 Books. Also on the panel were the following individuals. I’ve linked to their bios that were posted on the Festival Web site:
Nicole Bonia
Candace Levy
Serena M. Agusto-Cox
Celeste Sollod
Dave Rosenthal
A wide variety of topics were discussed, including why they blog, how they got started, how to be professional about writing negative reviews. Although I’ve been blogging for over two years myself, I learned a great deal from these bloggers. What I really found beneficial was the diversity, not only in the people but in the blogs they wrote.
Candace from Beth Fish Reads
After the blogging panel there was a short break, so we all enjoyed lunch catered by my husband. He served jerk-chicken, one of the dishes he’s known for:
After lunch, it was time for the book club panel. This panel, once again moderated by Heather, was made up of the following people (once again I have linked to their bios on the Festival web site):
Faye Houston
Heather Johnson
Melissa McCrory Hatcher
Swapna Krishna
Julie Peterson
This was such a wonderful panel! I’m in two book clubs myself, one face-to-face an one online and I took away quite a bit of suggestions to take back to my book clubs. These included:
- creating theme nights to spice up your book club meeting. Julie mentioned that her book club had a Mardi Gras meeting.
- Pair books up with foods (or wine!) to add some spark to the meeting
- Include information about the author and the book at the start of the meeting. This is helpful to everyone, including those who might not have the chance to have read the book.
- The optimal book club size is 6-15 members: just enough to have a good turnout at each meeting, but not too large that it becomes overwhelming!
Here are a few photos from the book club panel:
The entire book club panel
Swapna discusses her face-t0-face book club and her Skype book club.
Following this panel, my boys finally had the chance to meet up with Heather’s son, Kiddo, and we walked around the festival grounds a bit. They had a great time; John-John & Kiddo plan on starting up their very own Skype book club!
The festival wasn’t only about panels though! We met some great authors including:
Michael Buckley, author of the N.E.R.D.S and Sisters Grimm series.
John-John got his copy of N.E.R.D.S signed!
I finally got the chance to meet Amy Brecount White, author of Forget-Her-Nots. I’ve been trying to meet Amy for some time now!
So there you have it, a complete wrap-up of my wonderful bookish weekend. The J-Crew and I are definitely planning to drive up to the Baltimore Book Festival next year; we had such a wonderful time!
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