As always, Calvin Reid and Heidi MacDonald provided a great overview of this year’s outlook for graphic novels at BEA. My additional random thoughts, based on a mix of GN- and non-GN-focused panels:
– Really liked the Evergreen Book Marketing Panel featuring MJ Rose, Gretchen Crary and others; super-interactive, generous, frank discussion of strategy and inspiration. As it happens, Rose did successful promotion for Audrey  (Time Traveller’s Wife) Nifenegger’s first graphic novel The Night Bookmobile, and said of publishers’ skittishness re GNs, “For the right author, genre does not matter.”
-The Hot Fall Graphic Novels Panel was also excellent. I’m biased here, since it featured shout-outs to several clients, collaborators and in-house authors of mine — Jim Ottaviani, Colleen Doran, Brooke Gladstone. But I’m also personally fascinated by how quickly GN publishers are expanding with quality material into categories they weren’t previously known for. Archaia steps into weighty YA with An Elegy for Amelia Johnson, and Dark Horse is likely to make an impact in true crime fiction with Green River Killer. Meanwhile, the Louvre Museum itself financed The Sky Over the Louvre, and panelist Leigh Brodsky volunteered that there’s still plenty of unexploited GN terrain where war and true crime fiction is concerned, since middle- and high-school boys flock to those categories.
At the From Publishing to Packaging Panel, Lena Tabori confirmed that graphic content is of great interest to publishers, and subsequently cited The Influencing Machine, by Gladstone and Josh Neufeld, in her HuffPo wrap-up.
Plus, you could walk the whole floor and experience no sudden amplified explosions, nor linewaiter fistfights between Green Lantern cosplayers. Everyone in trade publishing talks about how crazy BEA is, but by my lights, that’s low-key.
