Event Recap: YallWest 2024

We’ve been attending and blogging about YallWest for all 10 years of the festival and were thrilled to attend again this year! This annual pilgrimage to Santa Monica means not only connecting with authors but with fellow bookish people, publishers, and other book aficionados! It’s been a highlight of the year for the past 10 years and I’m here today to share a few highlights from the day.

Sarah from The Clever Reader and I went together (wahh Kelly couldn’t go!) and agreed to take it easy. We still had a spreadsheet of things we wanted to do, books we wanted to get signed, and events we might want to attend. I came with only 5 books (and left two in my hotel room on accident – oops!) which is 1/10th of what I’ve brought in the past. That made for a nice day where we got to chat with fellow bookish people and see all our friends (authors and bloggers alike).

I came home with a small stack of ARCs. Big shoutout to Fierce Reads and Union Square for their systems and the books I took home from them! I also got to interview Aiden Thomas so stay tuned for that interview to go live. I didn’t end up in any panels and mostly hung out down by the author signings to see lots of Bay Area favorites!

I did not take enough photos of the day to fully capture it but I’ve included some below!