Earl Grey Books

This past Saturday, the 8th of October, I got to attend Books In-Sight Melbourne, and I’m here today to tell you all about it and share the books I picked up.

My best friend Angel (from Angel Reads) and I had been eagerly awaiting this event for months, so we were there bright and early and ready for a day filled with books. We spent a little bit of time looking at the vendor stores before the doors properly opened—mostly at the Fiction and Friction table because we’ve both spent ridiculous amounts of money in their online store. I was tempted by one of the books—a gorgeous hardcover of Promises and Pomegranates by Sav R. Miller but managed to escape without buying it. The way this event worked meant that I’d pre-ordered most of the books from the attending authors already, and I couldn’t justify buying something for an author that wasn’t even there. But we headed in soon after the doors opened with our lists of authors to see, and right at the start on table one was Lillianna Anderson/Megan Wade, who was one of the authors I’d preordered from. You’ll see my haul at the bottom of this post, so I won’t go into which books I bought from who here, but if you’re interested, you can watch that video at the end or skip ahead to it now. The event took place in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt, so it was split over three sections with two or three stairs up/down between them.

The first section was pretty small, so Angel and I moved between each of the tables, chatted to each of the authors for a little and just sort of got our bearings. We decided after that we’d just stop at the authors we had books to pick up from, and then we’d circle back later to anyone else who seemed interesting to us. The next couple of authors were all ones that Angel had ordered from—we had a couple of crossovers but a few differences as well. One of the ones we stopped at was Elle Thorpe, who I’ve never read before, but I wanted to mention her because she was so genuinely lovely. She stopped and talked to everyone who came up to get their books signed, wanting to know which of her books they’d read, where they’d come from that day and was just really sweet. I definitely walked away from her booth wanting to give her books a try just because she’d been so nice. We moved next to Tanya Nellestein, where I was picking up some more books—we had a quick chat about some of her upcoming releases and the incredible little display of Viking-esque things she had on her table.

Next up, we headed to Mila Young’s table, where both Angel and I had books waiting for us. Mila was also extremely lovely—easily one of the nicest authors I’ve ever met. She talked through the books we’d ordered, told us about some upcoming releases of hers as well as chatting about two other romance events that Angel and I (and Mila) are all attending next year. She was genuinely so nice that Angel and I spent most of the day just gushing to each other about her. After that, we moved on to Jenna Lee, Megan Lowe and Keri Arthur, who were in the middle of the main section. As we were doing that, I noticed Louisa Masters table, who we’d somehow missed was going to be in attendance. She’s due to be at one of the other events, but since this one was significantly smaller than that one will be, we stopped to chat with her and pick up copies of Demons Do It Better. I was so excited that I’ve already read it, and my review should be up in two days’ time. We took a quick break after that to pack the books we’d picked up away, and Lila Rose’s friend/assistant came over to check that we were doing okay and very kindly gave us some free merch.

Our bags were starting to get pretty heavy at this point, so we headed up to the final section to meet our last author, Kaydence Snow. We had a quick chat with her and then headed out of the ballroom to take a seat, rearrange our books and decide what to do next. It was about 11:30 at this point and the event did go until 4, but we decided we were both done and that going around again would just result in us buying more books we didn’t really need. We packed up our things and headed out to a nice lunch, which doubled a little as a pre-birthday celebration for me and then both headed home.

It was so fantastic to be back at a bookish event and, of course, to get to spend that time meeting authors and hanging out with Angel. The thing that always hits me about events like this is how kind, supportive and passionate the bookish community is. But of course, it’s now time to move onto the haul!