Saturday, July 9, 2011

Free Goodies from ALA (American Library Association) Conference Part 1

I went to the ALA conference in New Orleans the last week of June and had a wonderful time. We stayed in the French Quarter,  which is amazing-unfortunately the 96 degree weather (with humidity =110) curtailed too much exploring. The conference was great and I enjoyed sessions on grantwriting, ebooks, planning library programs, and seeing the latest in library technology. The real fun came when I attended two panel discussions with some of my favorite authors.

The first panel was called The New Miss Marples and was moderated by Jane Cleland, author of the Josie Prescott mysteries, which all revolve around an antique appraiser from New Hampshire.
Panel members were: Elaine Viets ( Dead End Job and Mystery Shoppers Series), Nancy Martin ( Blackbird Sisters and Roxie Abruzzo Series), Rosemary Harris ( Dirty Business Mysteries) and Rhys Bowen ( Molly Murphy and Constable Evans Series).  All of these are authors that I own all of their books. They had a great discussion on cozy vs. hardcore mysteries and talked about their different points of view with the series they write. They also lamented that fact that their publishers seem to want to push them into writing darker mysteries which is not their inclination. It was an interesting hour and a half. After the panel discussion, the author gave away hardcover copies of their newest books and autographed them. Lucky me, I had held off buying three of the four books since I knew I was coming to ALA. Here's what my haul was:



 (Now If I could have gotten an advanced copy of  the new Blackbird Sister book from Nancy Martin, my life would have been complete....... ) Seriously, these are all excellent authors and their books are great reads. Our library has most of them, and if not, they can be requested from other libraries. Most of the earlier books in their series are out in paperback if you want to buy them.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where I talk about the Romance Author Panel and my even bigger haul!

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