Did anyone receive any "Advance Reader Copies" at Bouchercon? Anything not-a-book? It occurs to me that in trying to figure out what's being promoted, what's meant to be "hot", that the publishers might have offered more ARCs than I saw. I only got one ARC - which, I have to say, i'm just about done with and it's damn good. A first novel by someone amed Rochard HAwke called SPEAK OF THE DEVIL. One interesting note is that on the back where it talks about all the things the publisher's gonna do to promote the book, under "publicity" it says "National review coverage" which, as Stu said, means "we'll send lots of ARCs out to newspapers and other publications" (coverage doesn't mean SQUAT in this context, does it?) BUT under "miscellaneous" it says "ARE giveaway at Bouchercon" (ARE - "advance reader's edition".) It's always so surprising to me that Bcon has gotten KNOWN and is spoken about now; publishers now acknowledge the power of the convention world at times - didn't used ta even know what "Boocheron" was.

So anyone get anything worth mentioning ? I'm sorta trying to finish an article on Bcon and instead of being able to say "This was the theme, that was the hot book" I'm feelig like this year, what we saw, based on who was there and waht WON was the huge range that mystery covers; I mean hard-bolied won here and there, but so did Harley's book. Go figure out what THAT pattern means.