Date: June 7, 2008

Location: Miles Nadal JCC

For authors and illustrators who can afford to self-publish/print their own works as well as others, this event is useful for networking with peers and marketing to collectors and the public.  For unique, unedited, small runs of poems, stories, artworks, comics, novels, catering to a smaller specialty target market, vanity press or self-publishing is the best way to start.  Big publishers are mainly interested in commercial success and the general public which would make it worth the printing of a work in thousands of copies.  Most artists and authors should try submitting, but eventually with enough rejections, the option is to try these smaller presses willing to do a small run, or to save enough to pay a printer.  There are small book stores that will accept copies on consignment, where payment will be shared per sale, as well as online distribution stores such as Lulu.com with connections to the big book stores such as Chaperts, Barnes & Noble, Indigo.  Schools are a potential bulk  market but often a university book store will only store academic books in curricula.  Interviewing Ruth Tait, using 'Rutz' as her pseudonym for comic books she wrote and illustrated, this book fair has been around several years and this is the first year hosted at Miles Nadal JCC, a bigger space.  Some of them also do readings in coffee shops, usually to launch a book or magazine.  For a special gift, $20 and under, these books would appeal more to those who like unusual instead of popular, although with the right marketing and funding, some of them may make it to mainstream book stores and schools.  With titles such as 'Why Can't I Be Normal' and 'Men Are All Muderers, Women Are All Whores' by Justin Zaza, finding readers from the conventional mainstream may be a hurdle, ditto getting government grants.  A dvd of Baba Alla, a cult figure in the Ukraine according to her distributor, gyrating her fat in a bikini on the beach, is a parody of a bikini model enticing men but possibly only drunk men may find this amusing or sexy.  However, there are enough people who like strange and unusual that Ripley's Believe It Or Not is mainstream.

Refer to Justin Zaza 

Refer to Baba Alla 

Refer to Ripleys