Here are my suggestions for how to attend Book Expo America, as a writer who becomes a publisher who goes to Manhattan in search of ad dollars.

Two days before the show, wrestle a four-year-old armed with a Batman boomerang toy that skins the tip of your nose. You’ll feel something, so ask: “Did you leave a mark? Is there a mark? Wait, come back here.” Throughout the tradeshow weekend, just try to forget about the fat square scab on the tip of your nose.

The day before the show, turn 38 years old. On your birthday, in this eleventh hour before the tradeshow, decide you must create a media kit that, once printed, you will discover has typos and later at the show, you will find no one wants to see it anyway. Take the rickety but fast local 1 subway train from 103rd street to 72nd street, and back, four times, between Kinko’s and other print shops. Pay upwards of $200 for it all.

Stay in your mother-in-law’s apartment on the Upper West Side overlooking the Hudson River while she stays “in the country” in Connecticut. Take the three-mile walk down Riverside Park, recently extended for bikers and joggers. It’s deliciously manicured with gardens and designer benches, best viewed when it's a long-awaited summer day in Manhattan. Here you can people-watch from behind sunglasses. Living in Portland, you'll notice the amazing diversity of people. There are families and dog-runs. Near the boat basin, find the group with cameras around a maple tree. They’re staring up at a giant red-tailed hawk and a nest the size of a bassinette. When you get to the massive grey floating boat museum, the Intrepid—it’s like a skyscraper fell and a small city arose—hang a left and go directly to the Javits Center for the tradeshow.

Go to the sexy, streamlined extended “booths” for Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Random House, and so forth. Get snubbed more than once when someone more important enters the vicinity of the conversation. Have fun chatting up folks to see where and how if at all possible they will buy advertising on your Web site. Get called “sport” and meet more than one VP who supposedly ran out of business cards.

Explore the ominously quiet section of the show dedicated to Arab publishers and their books. It’s obvious they are here to win the Most Expensive Elaborate Wrong Décor for This Year’s Economic Climate tradeshow booth design award. They have created a somber literary mood reminiscent of the Morgan Library. Their booths—if one can call them that—bespeak of bejeweled wealth. Wish them good fortune, to pay for such showmanship.

Walk the showroom floor with one or more literary agents and editorial professionals who know players from many of the houses. It will feel like you’ve taken the role of Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry McGuire, feigning insouciance, handshaking, and exchanging business cards. It’s good to reply quickly with some witty banter. Otherwise, shut up and listen and realize that you are not a publishing insider with keys to the kingdom.

Feel as though too many people in the big, corporate publishing world treat books like non-durable commodities for sale at the grocery store. Books, frozen OJ, sack of potatoes—there’s a demystification of the publishing world, and in this process something important is missing, though the exact flavor of it escapes you. Meanwhile, each of the big houses has brought along their stable of bestselling authors to sign free books and promote their latest work. Discover so many authors signing books in every major imprint where sideshow barkers accost passerby, that you begin to feel the entire scene is borderline spectacle on parade, with writers in monkey suits.

Don’t dawdle. Leave that for Sunday, when everyone looks to be in search of a hangover remedy.

Realize, in this economy, the promise of free books—“bring roller-cart luggage to the show for all the books you’ll get”—was hype.

Discover Portland, Oregon, is well represented. Every time you mention Portland, someone has a story about visiting or living there.

Go to a reading away from BEA and the big publishing scene. How about Pianos in SoHo, where MFA students drink PBR and well drinks while whooping to the poetry of their friends.

Meet up with a writer friend. Tell her BEA is the biggest publishing show in the country. She will look disgusted by the thought of it. She will suggest that the business side of books be left to the business folks, namely, her agent, editor, publicist, publisher, and all the other New Yorkers in Brooks Brothers suits.

Think of writing a blog post or essay named “BEAuties and the BEAsts” and think it quite clever until you read it again a few days later.