YALC 2019 Review

YALC 2019 has come and gone, and it passed way too quickly for my liking. But you know what they say? Time flies when you’re having fun!

I’ve attended YALC for the past four years, but this is the first time I went as an exhibitor at the Fairyloot booth. And, even though I was working the booth I still had plenty of time to attend signings, check out others booths and the rest of the YALC floor.

Last year I reviewed YALC 2018 and brought up a few issues that I’d like to see changed. You can check out that review here! I’m really happy to say though that a lot of the issues I listed seemed to have been resolved this year, but there were a few that could still be improved upon.

There’s lots to cover, so let’s get on with this shall we?

Layout

This year probably had my favourite YALC layout yet. I thought last year was very easy to navigate and spacious, but this year was even better. It was ridiculously spacious, an easy to navigate floor plan and provided a lot of room for the chill out zone and signing queues.

As opposed to previous years, the Waterstones booth was up the top of the hall where the chill out zone usually is, and the Chill out zone was moved to where Waterstones and the panels area previously used to be. It also looked like the panel area was reduced in size, but I could be wrong about that!

I truly have no negative comments regarding the layout itself and I actually hope they use this layout in the future.

However, next year it would be useful if the floor plan graphic was released a lot earlier. This year we got the floor plan a mere two days before the event took place. As I mentioned previously, I attended as an exhibitor this year with Fairyloot, and I only found out where our booth was located when I was on the train on my way to London. I can understand if they were waiting on some things being confirmed and that’s absolutely fine. But, if that is the case then a quick tweet or Instagram post to let attendees know would not go wrong.

Booths & Exhibitors

This year we were spoilt for choice when it came to the amount of exhibitors at YALC. You can see in the floor plan how many there really were.

Bigger publishers, such as; Penguin, Hodderscape, Harper Voyager, Team BKMRK, etc had much bigger booths than others and those were really fun to check out. They did such a great job in setting up their booths with lots of books, early releases, competitions to win arcs, etc. I’ve attached some pictures below so you guys can see for yourselves what some of them looked like.

Some of the smaller booths were equally as awesome. BookishBurns had a beautiful stand with a variety of candles for you to choose from and buy, including an exclusive book festival candle which smelled divine. There was a stand for booksleeves by Paper and Word shop, Geeky Clean were selling their bath, body and candle products, and Fairyloot and Illumnicrate were also there hosting lots of exciting competitions to win arcs and special editions. Fairyloot also announced two very exciting upcoming special edition books that will be available soon and Illumnicrate hosted two author signings throughout the weekend.

Giveaways

In my YALC 2018 review, I mentioned how I liked the new giveaway system YALC had introduced. Instead of doing arc drops at random times throughout the weekend and giving them out to first come first served, a raffle system was introduced to keep things fair.

The only downside of the raffle system was that every booth was doing it and eventually you had a plethora of raffle tickets spilling out of your pockets and it was almost impossible to keep track of which ticket was for which giveaway. I thought that it would be a lot more handy if publishers had a specific colour of ticket assigned to them, or if they wrote the name of the giveaway on the back of the ticket.

That’s what they did this year and I was very happy about it! I was able to keep a hold of my raffle tickets and know which one was for which giveaway.

Some other booths mixed things up a little and introduced other types of giveaways, for example; lucky dips and photo challenges. I personally really enjoy the photo challenges, especially the ones over at the Hodderscape and Harper Voyager booths because they gave you a chance to get creative and have fun in the process.

Author signings

Author signings can get a bit crazy. That’s no secret to YALC attendees. This year YALC introduced a more organised approach to the signings and I think it went a bit better than previous years, I know opinions on this were mixed, but I rather liked this approach. In the morning, there would be a table with tickets for the authors signing that day, and it was simple really, if you wanted your books signed, you went to that table first thing and got a ticket for the queue.

If you missed the tickets getting given out in the morning then you could get one from the author’s signing queue later that day. I thought this was a great way to control the busy signing queues and I would like to see this carried on into future events.

Seating

Unfortunately, seating was one thing I had a small issue with this year, and I know I wasn’t the only one. I was thrilled to see that the chill out zone this year was massive enough to accommodate the amount of attendees in the hall. But the lack of seats was a bit ridiculous. You can see the seating area in the photo below where a majority of people are on the floor with only one chair in sight.

I did see an inflatable chair or two, but these were always taken, and as I said I only saw two at the very most.

Seating is something we’ve lacked every year and it unfortunately continued this year. YALC is a very busy and exhausting weekend and I don’t think it’s asking too much for there to be more seating provided, especially for attendees who may be living with walking difficulties or back problems. More seating would go a long way!

Food & Beverages

There’s not much to say about the food and beverages this year as it’s been the same as previous years. There was an overly expensive cafe in the YALC hall and a Tesco across the street if you wished to get food. Or, alternatively, if you dared to venture into the Comic Con halls downstairs, there were plenty of areas to grab food too.

I chose to buy my food the night before so I didn’t need to worry about rushing to the Tesco in the morning to grab food before it was all gone, and also so I wouldn’t have to spend a small fortune at the cafe in the YALC hall.

Overall thoughts

Honestly, this YALC was the best one yet, but that is my personal opinion. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to experience being an exhibitor for the first time with Fairyloot after being an attendee in previous years. Being reunited with my wonderful friends also contributed to making the weekend as fantastic as it was.

I thought that on the run up to the event organisation could have been improved by releasing the floor plan a lot earlier than two days before. However, at the actual event I found it a bit more organised than previous years and that was great to see. And it was nice to see that the tote bags were being given out on day one again, as opposed to last year when their collection day was moved to day three.

Again, the layout this year was fantastic, I really liked it. It was different to previous years and still managed to meet attendees wishes by having a bigger chill out zone and more booths. But, in the future, I hope the seating is improved because this is very important to attendees and has been for the past couple of years.

YALC 2019 Highlights

• Getting to experience being an exhibitor for the first time with Fairyloot.
• Reuniting with dear friends.
• Meeting Taratjah!
• Meeting Adrienne Young for the first time (ticking one author off my 5 authors I’d love to meet list!)
• Seeing Samantha Shannon again.
• Celebrating BookNest‘s UKYA blogger win!
• Meeting some awesome followers!
• Leaving the event feeling ridiculously inspired.

If you attended YALC this year I would love to know what you thought about it. What did you love? Was there something you thought could be done better? I’d really love to hear your thoughts!

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