We Are ALL SF Con Cancelled

We Are ALL SF Con has been cancelled, but may be revived next year. The message was posted yesterday by Quincy J. Allen on Facebook and also appears on the con website —

Dear Sponsors, Convention Guests and Interested Parties,

There’s no easy way to say this. We are sorry to inform everyone that the We Are ALL SF convention, scheduled for November 2016, at Ocean Shores WA, will be cancelled.

We aren’t going to go into the details, as that is not important at this time. Instead we want to thank everyone who has supported us as we moved from a crazy idea to something larger than we ever dreamed. We also want to say how sorry we are that things didn’t go as planned.

We felt it best to stop now and begin the process of refunding all sponsorship and registration fees for the 2016 convention and regroup.

The convention isn’t dead, it’s just delayed for a year while we reevaluate how best to make this crazy idea become a reality. Refunds will begin to go out as soon as possible. We are truly sorry, and we hope you will give us another chance to prove what a great convention we can be next year.

Thank you.

We Are ALL SF con began with a long list of announced guests of honor. In January, despite a failed Indiegogo funding appeal, the organizers said they were going forward. But in February, Lou J. Berger announced that the con had withdrawn some benefits offered to some guests of honor. This cost-cutting, and public complaints by a few of the guests, resulted in an even wider discussion of the odds on the con ever happening.

10 thoughts on “We Are ALL SF Con Cancelled

  1. I am sorry, though unsurprised, to hear this. I hope that the organizers can figure out a way to make the event economically and logistically feasible — SF/F cons are not a zero-sum game, and there is plenty of room for new events. Each con brings its own flavor and benefits our community.

  2. We are ALL unsurprised.

    Scale back the ambitions to meet the budget and locale, and maybe they’ll have a shot next year.

    @Elizabeth: that link requires you to be logged into Facebook to read it. So I and many others can’t.

  3. Been there, done that, threw the frisbee in the empty huckster room …

    http://fancyclopedia.org/sf-expo

    “SF Expo was intended to be a professionally-run sf convention “a professional convention run by professionals” which was scheduled to be held in Manhattan at the New York Hilton hotel on June 25-29, 1976. It was intended to be annual, sometimes billing itself as “SF Expo ’76”. (Amusingly, their logo looked like it was “SEXpo”.)”

    Read it all, fun times!

  4. In 1980, when I went to Norwescon, I took a sidetrip to Ocean Shores. It was lovely, but unless you had a car, the only way to get there was by bus from Olympia; the nearest airport was Sea-Tac.

  5. Yes, PLEASE make that article available to Facebook Resisters. There are far more of us out here than you think.

  6. Pingback: We Are ALL SF Refund News | File 770

  7. Would have been nice if they kept the FB page up to see the announcement. I didn’t know what was going on until the FB page came down and I saw a refund in my account. Also, maybe an email to folks would have been a better way. I know they had my email with my registration. I had to do a googlefu to find out WTF was going on. And landed here. Not all of us are plugged into social media and what not 24/7. Oh well, maybe I’ll keep my room and make it a writing retreat all the same. /sigh.

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