qmarkHola my fine bloggish friends!

Hot on the heels of my fabulous experience attending the amazing KidLitosphere Conference (thanks again Mother Reader) held here in DC this weekend I’m already excited at the prospect of being able to participate in more great events of this nature.

It’s been a bit of time since Trish (of Hey Lady Whatcha Readin’ fame) and I put the first feelers out to the community about this so I wanted to take the opportunity to update everyone on where we’re at.  There has been increased buzz on Twitter as people are starting to talk about BEA and making travel arrangements and we thought it would be a good time to let you all know where we are in the planning process.

In our initial research we’d found a venue that was a bit further away from the Javits that could accommodate up to 100 people.  We got a quote and put together our initial survey about people’s potential interest and as you can all imagine the response rate of interested participants quickly rocketed well past that 100 person limit. Not wanting to turn anyone away we had to shift focus and start researching other venues that would allow for us to accommodate more.  In doing so it became very clear that holding the convention in a hotel was not going to be our best bet.

At the moment Trish and I are working with two different convention center type locations that specialize in meetings of this nature.  These facilities are meeting centers only and are not tied in any way to hotels or rooming accommodations.  As one would expect it’s not a fast process, we’re in the midst of exchanging emails and phone calls to iron out particulars and come to an agreement on which of the two is our best bet.  We’re scheduled to hear back from the last of the two this week (we’ve been told Thursday) and hope to have a definitive location on the books by next week.  I can’t guarantee this, however, as we are really at the mercy of the sales people of these locations.  If they want to call or email they do and if they don’t they don’t.  We’re trying to be as forceful as possible but we’re also well aware of the fact that we don’t have any control of it.

Once we get this final discussion out of the way we’ll be able to choose which location and ultimately which date the convention will be held.  It’s important to note that based on feedback from the survey, date preference for the convention was literally 50/50 down the middle, haha. So we’re going to leave that decision to what the ultimate venue has available.  Could be Monday, could be Friday we just don’t know yet.

Further, at this time we’re not going to be able to negotiate a room rate that is better than what BEA is offering so we are stopping that effort and are focusing solely on the function facilities.  We had hoped to put something together for everyone but it’s become increasingly clear that we simply don’t have the kind of buying power that will allow us to do that.

Having said that, that doesn’t mean we can’t all be in the same place.  I am going to be looking at where I’ll be reserving a room this week and will happily let others know where that will be when I confirm the details.  I’m sure any hotel will be happy to reserve rooms with all of us on the same floor so we can have a large group together.

As always if you have any comments or questions you can leave them in response here or email me directly.  My contact info is all over the blog!