The librarians — a full 15,000 of them — were in Seattle this weekend for the American Library Association midwinter meeting. The exhibits filled two large rooms in the Convention Center downtown. I roamed through them, stopping by our distributor's booth from time to time, and I couldn't help but feel a bit at sea with so many books on display. I've never attended Book Expo and only have been to a few large regional shows, so this exhibition space was by far the biggest I've seen (grizzled publishing veterans may laugh at me here).

It made me think a lot about how small presses can stand out amid the din. We can't keep up with the flash of the larger publishers (although having our distributor, Consortium, on our side is a big plus — their booth was one of the most interesting and eclectic, and I'm not being paid to say this).

I didn't come up with any concrete strategies while walking through the halls, but I did find a publisher that gave me hope:

Tara Publishing: This Indian publisher had some of the most high-quality, innovative children's books I've ever come across. The production quality is excellent, and thus, the books are not cheap. But it was refreshing to see a house do high-end work. The website's two-dimensional photos of the books don't do them justice. This house spends a lot of time on material selection and comes up with innovative ways to produce books that share a lot of qualities with our very own literary objects.

That was the needle in the haystack for me. And it gives me hope for CMP's future.