A Weekend at the Bookstores

I spent most of my weekend visiting bookstores around Singapore. Thanks to Bookaburra, Times Centrepoint and Playdate for hosting my visits. Also a big thanks to my distributors Denise and Kelvin from Closetful of Books for arranging my in-store appearances.

Asian Festival of Children's Content 2012 is Here!!

The Scholastic goodie bag attendees will receive!

Well after months of planning and lots and lots of hard work on the part of the NBDCS team: Mr Rama, Kenneth, Faith, Vasantha, Celine, Filzah AFCC 2012 kicks off today. I think it's going to be the best festival yet!

I headed down to the airport yesterday to pick up keynote speaker Leonard Marcus from the airport, and I checked the timing of the flight before I left for the airport  and it was on schedule for 5:15pm but  when I arrived, I was more than half an hour late because the flight arrived early! I feel so badly about that and I am so sorry, Mr Marcus. Anyway we got to the hotel with out any further incident, thank goodness.

Books at Bookaburra

Festival Manager Kenneth Quek and Author/Illustrator Susanna Goho

Norman Jorgensen, Dianne Wolfer, Festival Director Mr Rama and Susanna Goho 

Celine and Vasantha and Faith getting everythig ready for the big day

The Registration Booth

After that I headed down to the Arts House, the venue for AFCC where everything seemed to be progressing nicely. Here are some of the snaps I took today. So I hope to see everyone there tomorrow...Good night.

Tools of Change Conference

Warren Buckleitner. (Not my photo)

So over coffee and juice and pastries, Cheryle and Denise told us about their trips to Venice and Rome before heading over to Bologna. While waiting in line I met Warren Buckleitner, the editor of the Children's Technology Review. Mr. Buckleitner who is the Editor of the Children's Technology Review, and one of the judges for The Digital Razzie Award (Not to be confused with the Hollywood Razzie Award) chatted with me about his trip to Singapore, where he attended last year's Asian Festival of Children's Content. It's always a pleasure to meet an industry bigwig who is so gracious and down to earth. Thank you, Mr Buckleitner.

Russell  Hampton

Then we headed in for the keynote address by Russell Hampton of  Disney Publishing.  After that we broke up to attend the different sessions before hitting the buffet table for lunch. OK the food was good and the line was long. Kenneth, I hope the food will be as good at this year's AFCC. 

Lunch

We caught up a bit with Cheryle and Denise from Bookaburra. After lunch I headed for Kate Wilson's of Nosy Crow talk 'A Year of Appiness'. She's an incredibly good speaker and very funny to boot so I hope that she eventually makes it to AFCC one year. She's got an incredibly inspiring success story.


I also attended Nat Sims', Night& Day studios, talk which was equally enjoyable. The conference wound up at about 6pm and Kenneth had to attend to a commitment in town before we headed back to the hotel. Exhausted and stuffed from all that eating, we decided on having a light dinner of a gigante gelato before collapsing for a hopefully a good night's rest...we were both up at around 4am the next day, though.