Harper Collins @ Hotel Ocho

On Wednesday night, Oct 28 2015, your fearless hero traipsed over to Hotel Ocho for the annual Harper Collins publishing event and open bar.  These guys don’t have party photographers and don’t care if you know about it because it’s their exclusive soiree.  But I cared though and so I got the inside scoop to share with you.  And by attending this event I met a gauntlet of writers, agents, publishers, and book editors.

Hotel Ocho is 195 spadina Avenue and is a brilliant space, modern yet old fashion the building itself.  Events in this space are usually held upstairs in the space above the bar.  I made sure to wear a blazer because I sensed it was going to be swanky affair filled with people who like to talk as much as me.

HarperCollins Canada had 42 top-10 books on the Globe and Mail bestseller list with seven hitting number one, including Finding Me by Michelle Knight with Michelle Burford, Looptail by Bruce Poon Tip, The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom, One Direction: Where We Are by One Direction, Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent, and 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup which sold 670,000 digital copies.

As I show off pictures with these Harper Collins people, perhaps I’ll keep their names out of print; they didn’t go to the party to end up in my blog. It just happened that way.

Above is my own book agent Sam Hiyate and his new assistant Jen

Upstairs at Hotel Ocho, in the unisex bathroom was the famous quote ‘Do what you love’ with the ‘love’ doubling into ‘love what you do’, and of course that is the secret to being happy and prosperous in this life.

One of my favourite quotes, it nicely framed my experience at this event as I could see that most folks here were very happy with the chosen vocations.

Finally a photo with decent lighting of my outfit.

Doug, an editor at Harper Collins was trying to get us all to drink more at night’s end because they were under budget. Apparently you cannot carry your booze tab over to the next year’s party.

There were lots of very interesting people at the party.

Here’s a cool guy. I forget what he does aside from being a hot Scot silver fox.

Unfortunately I didn’t bring a real camera with me, and even more unfortunately, book agents do not know how to blog or even pose for pictures for blogs. I have a lot of blurry photos I cannot bother using this is the only one I will showcase just let it be known there could have been some good ones. 2016 will be better.

David Layton, Olga, and Jen.  Olga in the center with the blond hair works with Sam at The Rights Factory and she is lovely very. Jen is just one year older than me so she can relate to me and my influences and she gets my humour. The Rights Factory is an agency that deals in intellectual property rights to entertainment products, including books, comics & graphic novels, film, television, and video games. All day everyday they work directly with publishers, producers, studios, game developers and other rights-buyers all over the world. Cool job.

This lady’s son is 23 and 6’5 and once had a twitter account parodying Chad Kroeger and all he did was tweet Chad Kroeger’s name incorrectly all the time and people thought it was really Chad Kroeger. The account got linked somewhere officially as Chad Kroeger’s twitter account then blew up but now it’s gone and that was basically my favourite story of the night aside from her guessing I was in my early twenties.

This bromance I liked and I was like hmm maybe that is how to charm an agent – cling to them!

I think I recognized one of these guys here. Do you? I then told a story about the one I think I recognized as if it was truly him. Zero people will remember it anyway.

Striking a pose. This is pretty much where I was standing when I locked eyes on Sam and waved at him, he looked all around me everywhere as if I had an invisibility cloak on and meanwhile I was waving at him, gesturing, waving and waving and he didn’t notice me! People behind him did and I was beginning to get embarrassed so I walked over and put him in a headlock. Social functions, am I right?!

Later on, I made him take these pictures. Thank you for being so compliant Sam!

See you next year Harper Collins an Hotel Ocho just try and stop me!