Cat Rambo writes: “People I know of whose invitations were withdrawn from WeAreAllSF are myself, Caren Gussoff, Kris Rusch, and Dean Wesley Smith. I understand the con is new and that they bit off a lot, and I’ve got no hard feelings. Caren and I are planning on going to Vegas that weekend.
“My impression is that a large percentage of guests got cut.”
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Were there invitations withdrawn or were they just told their expenses wouldn’t be covered, and they told ’em where to put it as the earlier report did not? So the invited guests are now the only ones (the few) who are getting their expenses covered, like the GOH’s of every convention ever?
We are all SF… but some of us are more SF than others, I guess.
It boggles my mind that no one there can do really simple math. They desperately need a SMOF to help them out. They totally screwed up this simple thing, so it does not bode well for a successful con.
A friend of mine tried planned to go and asked me to share a room. I was considering it but no way would I spend the $$ and time on something that has “disaster” written all over it.
@Ita: I know. It’s not like people haven’t been doing successful cons all over the world for 75 years. Anybody looking at their original plans knew they were never going to work out. Small town (means getting there is expensive), small facility (not many members), and they thought they could actually pay for all those guests? Math!
I think this thing exploded on Karen Junker in ways she didn’t expect. When I got my invitation as Music GoH back at the start of this process, she was talking about a 300-350 person convention, with an if-they-get-lucky upper range of 600 or so. And, being local (and having founded and run nwcMUSIC, the geekmusic festival at Norwescon), that seemed workable and a good target. We even met a couple of times, so I could throw some advice at her about the music side of things, and the scale of a first year, and so on.
And then a few months later I was hearing about a membership cap and a much larger guest list, and was very surprised to hear that. And I was thinking, “wow, this thing is blowing up in ways they didn’t expect, I hope they’re ready for that.” I suspect they just got ahead of themselves and are having to walk it back in a fairly embarrassing way – I don’t know, that’s just what it looks like from the outside.
I do know that Anna and I are both still oh the guest list. But that makes sense from a money standpoint – no airfare since we’re in Seattle, they asked us a couple of months ago about transportation and we said we’d just drive, and so on. It fits the theory, at least.
(Unrelatedly, looking for old comments, I noticed there seem to be tags in previous posts for both Dara Korra’ti and solarbird – to confirm, those are both me. H’lo. ^_^)
Well at least they are starting to revisit the situation and while embarrassing it’s better to update people before plans get finalized so decisions can be made. It did seem wildly ambitious.
Lady Jaynes books while not uninvited was told they probably wouldn’t be a good fit because of all the authors being there (wtf?.) We built our business on supporting authors and fans? The original dealers room person , that we have known for many years, told us we would be more than welcome .. Many of the prolific authors have most of their body of work out of print .They understand the need we fill.
I agree with Dara on this.
There were a lot of people invited. I don’t think that they expected such a enthusiastic response. The original expectation was about 400 people and that suddenly tripled.
While it is embarrassing to everyone, it was addressed as early as possible. Yes some people will feel hurt but I do hope that they will forgive this new convention. Things simply spiraled out of hand faster than expected.
These people are amateurs, not professionals, doing this out of love of their hobby and wishing to share that love and enthusiasm with others. This is a new and inexperienced con. It got out of control, and some nice people are probably feeling sheepish and embarrassed but they are trying to get it under control in time, to their credit. But this is FANDOM, so the lynch mob with the long knives and snarky unhelpful comments must swoop in….. Fandom, where the Number One Rule is : no matter what you do, somebody will BITCH……
KBK, you aren’t actually doing them any favors with your, er, defense.
Not the first convention to be overambitious and underfunded. At least they realized it and are dealing with it before the convention. I’ve seen the alternative, which is much more exciting.