Updated!
LBF2016 by Terry Freedman
The one thing I hate about the London Book Fair is planning my time there. There is so much to do, so much to see, and so much to listen to that it’s almost impossible to choose between all the options. It would be so much easier if I’d manage to perfect the art of being in several places at once (note to self: must meditate harder!).
The LBF people do make it as easy as possible though. You can add sessions to a personal calendar, or “favourite’ them, or both. You can print off the list of favourites, and save them as a pdf document. What I tend to do is print my list of favourites and then go through them more carefully to see which ones to not attend.
The full list of sessions, though not all of their details, are on the London Book Fair website. There will also be book blogger awards for the second year, on the Thursday at 3:30pm, though the location for that appears not to have been published yet. It’s brilliant that there are these awards, which I’ve written about here:
BOOK BLOGGERS, BOOKSTAGRAMMERS AND BOOK TUBERS
UPDATE: The UK Book Blog Awards will be held at the Bourne Bridge from 15:30 – 16:15 on Thursday 14th March.
In case it inspires anyone, my own favourites list may be downloaded by clicking the button below. I haven’t included the conferences that are on at the time, or other events running alongside or as part of it, such as the Selfies Awards for self-publishers. Also, not all of the sessions I’ve listed appeal to me or are relevant for my needs, but I thought they looked interesting enough to include in order to give a flavour of the variety of sessions on offer.
In the document, the selection I’ve made is divided into Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but for the detail you’ll have to open the section named “sessions”. Unfortunately the “Sessions” list does not come out in date order. Still, I hope it proves useful. UPDATE: I’ve uploaded an improved version of the list since this article was posted originally.
Incidentally, if you’re going to the London Book Fair, especially for the first time, you might find my guide to getting the most out of conferences useful. It was written for an education audience, but actually all of the advice should apply equally to any kind of conference. It’s available on Amazon.