Toronto International Book Fair - INSPIRE!

Hi everyone. Happy Monday! Today, I have a recap post for you all from the past weekend, where I attended the Toronto International Book Fair. I was originally planning on attending all three days, but I was feeling (and still feeling) quite poorly yesterday, so I ended up only going two days which is still a lot! If you follow me on twitter/instagram, I have posted some photos on there as well, but I took some photos with my nice camera and thought I'd share them with you all.

I believe this was the first year the event was held, so although I had a wonderful time with friends and meeting fellow book lovers, there are some things that should be improved upon for future shows!

The bigger booths like Penguin Random House and Simon Schuster were stunning. They had beautiful rooms decorated and seating area. There was so many lovely books on display! 

Entangled Publishing did it right the entire weekend. Everyday they were giving out a minimum of six free books and they had authors sitting there signing their books as well. What a lovely group the staff was! :D 

"I don't give a damsel" panel - featuring Meg Wolitzer, Gayle Forman, Sarah Mllynowski and E. Lockhart! 

Anne Rice on the Main Stage 

I received many books and not pictured are my autographs and event photos from E.Lockhart and Chris Hadfield, but that will come in a separate post! 

So what are the overall pros and cons? 

Pros 

• Great venue (I go there for conventions yearly) 
• Affordable pricing 
• Many great authors were present and they had wonderful panels 
• There was a lot of freebies from Entangled Publishing - more publishing houses should have offered this! 
• Lines were properly organized for the signings - especially the Chris Hadfield which I really appreciated. 
• If you couldn't attend all three days and missed a signing, there was signed stock available for purchase. 

Cons

• If there was an author on the main stage, and you wanted his/her signature, you had to purchase the book from the chapters kiosk there and they were not accepting books from home to sign which is unfortunate. As a book blogger, I not only receive many books but I buy many books as well and it really doesn't make sense to buy another one, simply to get an autograph. I know that it is all about supporting the author and what have you, but if an author for example has a series, it would be really expensive to have to buy the entire series again, solely for a signature. I know you can simply opt out to not get a signature, but it should be fair for everyone, especially if they have supported, bought the book, but simply not at the venue. 
• The re-admit pass process was a bit time consuming. I think if someone wanted to go the entire weekend, a simple wristband would have been a lot easier to manage, or a lanyard. 
• There should have been some sort of book blogger / book tube community opportunity. Obviously a lot of bookish people attended, but it would have been easier if TIBF organized a type of meet-up or meet and greet. And it would've been lovely with say, a famous author leading it all! 
• Food choices - the food choices were incredibly slim! So maybe broaden that a bit next year? 

Overall, for it's first run, I thought it ran really well. I had a lovely time with my friends and meeting fellow book lovers and I walked away with some great gifts and lovely new reads. 

Did you attend Inspire - Toronto International Book Fair? If so, let me know in the comments below what you thought of it! 

And be sure to keep your eyes peeled for my Chris Hadfield and E.Lockhart signing posts! ;)