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Booklist loved Cosplay: A History!

A brief book update

Booklist loved Cosplay: A History!
Superhero gathering at DragonCon 2019 / Image: Andrew Liptak

I have some good news: my upcoming book Cosplay: A History has garnered another great trade review, this time from Booklist!

Here's an excerpt:

"Seasoned writer, journalist, and historian Liptak dives deep into the research and history surrounding cosplay with this debut book. Delving into cosplay’s past and present, he also writes in detail about how this genre-bending art form will continue manifesting itself into the future."

You can read the full review here if you have an account. (It'll also be in Booklist's May 1st print edition.)

I feel very fortunate here: this review joins two other extremely positive reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, both of which have said very nice things about what I've written. These reviews are really important in the leadup to the book's publication: they're read by book buyers, librarians, and readers, the folks who're ultimately buying the book for their stores or organizations or personal libraries. (I often consult them for my own purposes, whether it's buying books or putting together recommendation lists.)

Cosplay is a project that's been sitting in my head since around 2016, when Joe Monti first came to me asking if there was a story to be told about the history of the 501st Legion: it's since become much bigger than that original scope as I began researching, writing, and interviewing. As the days shorten before this hits stores, I've been growing more and more anxious about how this'll be received: do my arguments make sense? Will people be receptive of the things that I talk about and include?

These trade reviews are a nice bit of validation that what I've written has come across, and that it's accessible and that my ideas maybe aren't quite so convoluted as my worst case scenario brain leads me to believe.

Here's the obligatory book pitch for you: the book's out on June 28th (it's currently getting printed up ... somewhere in the US.) You can get it in trade paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats, and you can preorder it from a variety of online and in-person stores. If you do preorder it, send me your receipt, and I'll comp you for a year's subscription to Transfer Orbit!

I'll also be out and about a bit in the next couple of months to promote the book:

If you're in or near any of those locations, come say hi! I (likely) won't have copies of the books available for Celebration, but hopefully I'll have something interesting to hand out.

I'll be back tomorrow with the regular roundup. Have a good rest of the day!

Andrew