Last night I was thinking of things that I could do to prepare for the Book Expo. I started following it on Twitter, and I took a look at who was tweeting about it (#bookexpo). That got me thinking about who I would like to meet with and talk to at the expo.

I have a few ideas in mind, but when I take a serious look at my knowledge of the children’s book industry, it’s really lacking. So to prepare for the Expo, I just order 2012 the Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market off of Amazon. I should have this in a few days, and hopefully this book will give me a good idea of who I should try to talk to at the expo (and even before or after the expo).

I also downloaded the Book Expo App last night, called BEA Mobile. So far it looks great. You can use it to view all the different activities like the special events, autograph signings and exhibits. It also has an agenda function that enables you to scroll through all the offerings, pick the ones you want to attend, and add them to your agenda. This way on the day of the event, you can take a quick look at the app to see what is happening where.

So far my agenda has the “Children’s Book & Author Breakfast” from 8am to 9:30 and “A Conversation with Neil Young” from 12 to 2. I still need to go through the long list of autographing singings and other events going on that Wednesday to see what else I plan on attending.

Aside from that, I’m still writing and holding off the urge to do any major SEO to this site. Right now I’ve started writing by 4th book, and I’m constantly going back to and tweaking my first three. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has also been a hobby of mine for years, so it’s really hard for me to not try to optimize and link to this site. The reason I’m resisting is that #1. I don’t want my ideas getting a lot of attention until I’m able to capitalize on them and #2. I don’t want to invest a lot of time building and optimizing this site if I’m never going to publish a book. That would be pointless.