The national ESL convention was this past week. For what TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) is—an academic conference like other academic conferences, a time for peers to hear about other’s experiences and check out publishers’ new books—it is the only convention I know of that draws average folks from every state and every country. It’s a testament to the economic necessity of learning and teaching English. I gave a presentation with a teacher from Kabul in the audience. I arranged for free books to be sent to teachers in Rwanda and Haiti. There were American instructors from the UAE, and there were Taiwanese instructors from UW-Eau Claire. The State Department was represented. So were the Peace Corps, prep schools, and test-prep companies.
TESOL is really an incredible conference, exhausting for attendees but energizing for the same reasons. For exhibitors, though, the experience is much more bipolar. TESOL generates more sales leads than any other days of the year. But it also requires us to be on our feet from 9-5 for those days, to tend to thousands of strangers in a fragile set of booths that cost us thousands of dollars to ship and construct and maintain, and to know the answers to a thousand varieties of questions—from “Is the coffee free?” to “How does the vocabulary in your corpus-based text meet the competencies set for community college systems in Florida?”
We inevitably encounter people who test our patience in that challenging environment. It comes with the territory at all conferences, but every year, at least according to my more experienced colleagues, there seem to be more headaches—more books stolen, more time lost, far more nerves frayed. Therefore, I want to give some advice to attendees for understanding what exhibitors do—and how to better get what you want from them.
1. Know what you want. Avoid engaging exhibitors in the kind of conversation I had at TESOL this Thursday:
Instructor: Which of your books are for university ESL?
Me: All of them, on all of these shelves. What kind of courses do you teach? Listening/speaking? Writing?
Instructor: I teach everything. What can you show me?
Me: You can see the large number of books we publish. Could you be more specific about what you look for in a good text?
Instructor: I’d have to see a book to know.
Me: Perhaps you’d like to look over our catalog to know quickly what different texts we offer?
Instructor: No, I have to have a book in my hands.
2. If you teach at an elementary school, don’t ask college publishers what they publish for K-8 students. While certain college texts do indeed work for upper level high school students, take the time to look around a booth to identify an exhibitor’s focus. If see the words “College” and “Higher Education” (or no use of pastels in book covers), you can be sure the exhibitor’s products are aimed at college customers. And if you nevertheless fill out a sample order form for college books and list yourself as working in an elementary school district, you’re wasting everyone’s time.
3. Authors. Be aware that you are in the same academic field as the authors of the books you are looking over, and that, therefore, they may be standing right behind you as you comment about their books. For the same reason, if you have a detailed question to ask about a text, feel free to ask if the text’s author is in attendance and whether he/she would be available to chat.
4. Don’t ask for jobs. Little is more gauche than using your chance to learn more about available texts to instead solicit employment or to propose your own idea for a text. Anyone who does so belies their lack of knowledge of the industry and of the proper channels for inquiry.
5. Understand that publishers have different systems for samples and sales. Not all publishers sell books from the booth. Not all publishers have sales reps outside of America. Not all publishers give away free examination copies. Always, always, always ask the exhibitor if they sell from the booth or if they mail exam copies, and don’t be offended if the answer is no. (And don’t ever steal books and claim you thought they were free because they were free at another exhibitor’s booth—we watch for theives and tell each other whom to keep out of the booth, even from year to year.)
My company, for example, only publishes student texts; we don’t publish teacher training texts. Therefore, our goal is to get teachers to adopt our texts for use in class: we will send you a free copy, and we thus have no reason to invest in a system to sell books from the booth. Likewise, we will not give away copies from the booth—we need your contact information so that a sales rep can follow up and service your adoption if/after you begin using the text, and we need books to display. The only time we give away booth copies is if you are making an adoption decision before a sample copy would arrive by mail.
6. Budget time to sit down and look at books carefully. Conferences are terribly busy events. But if you want to get the most out of what exhibitors have to show, budget enough time to look leisurely through, say, at least ten books. It’s one thing to order a sample copy based on a table of contents; it’s quite another to try a few exercises yourself, ask an exhibitor what supplements come with the book, and compare titles from competitors. It results in better decisions for you and your students, and it saves exhibitors a lot of money in otherwise wasted shipping (money that, in the end, students have to pony up in future text costs).
7. Know that we have teaching experience. Most educational publishing employees are drawn from a single profession: education. Of the seven employees working my company’s booth at TESOL, six previously taught ESL. The seventh has been editing ESL textbooks for over a decade. You can ask us hard questions, and you can be sure we have your students’ best needs at heart.
These are just a handful of tips. But they’re all based on professional respect. Use respect as your guide, and the exhibit hall is yours.
