Hi! I’m the disabled author you mentioned! Thank you for addressing the disability accessibility regarding the event. The PA fee is to bring someone with us to help us throughout the day & in my case, as you said, for medical help & safety. So it’s not even someone the event/organizer was supplying, we authors source the PAs ourselves. So I was essentially paying to have a disability accommodation.

I would never trust an event with a site that looked so poorly designed. Like how you gonna promote an event when you can’t even promote yourself???

The convention said they had no knowledge of the swag bags and were never asked about missing swag bags....

After digging through their website, I, as a professional web designer, can see how this whole disaster was soooo predictable. It's giving 🌈 graphic design is my passion 🌈 The event organizer obviously has zero interest in hiring professionals.

As someone who works AV in the live event space - you are so so right when saying that planning events is SO much more involved than people think. These things take time, money, and so many people working behind the scenes.

Also a very good point about the crowd control aspect! Crowds can very easily become dangerous if not properly managed and obviously this event wasn’t

YouTube recommended me this video.

I am a Baltimore native and still live in Baltimore. I saw zero local advertising for this book event and this would be something interesting for me to check out as a local.

The first time I saw anything about this event was after the event occurred in a news article published about this book event in the Baltimore Banner, a local news website.

I feel just completely awful for all the authors and vendors who paid to have a table to display and sell their books and to interact with their fans.

It sounds like the event organizer has zero experience with operating an event at a convention center as it costs money to not just rent the space at the convention center, it also costs money for A/V stuff, better WiFi and internet for the event itself, and catering for both guests/vendors and attendees costs the event organizer money to have food and beverages for the event at a convention center.

The Baltimore Convention Center is huge, it’s two large buildings connected together via a skybridge and the staff there are highly experienced at hosting events.

There are two well-established events in Baltimore for books, BaltiCon and the Baltimore Book Festival both of which occurs every year.

The security guards are the stars here for sure! helping with directions, providing the music, etc.

At least it didn’t have an exotic dancer like the Bridgerton ball did

The fact that they had a white man moderating the BIPOC panel in BALTIMORE is absolutely insane. They really couldn't have found a single BIPOC person to do the job??? Huh???

Took a shortcut through the Indy convention center, and we got lost for hours. No signage at a convention center is just recipe for disaster

As a vendor at this event thank you for covering  it and sharing the link to support the authors ❤

$250? For 2 days and a ball? Not even Dragon con costs that much, and it's 5 days with multiple balls/raves/dances and concerts every night (all included) and that's not even all....

So she just had no business running an event… do people think these things just happen on their own?? Event planning is an entire career for a reason. With how few people showed up, I’m sure she didn’t have the budget to do what she promised, but a certain point you know this and should cancel as soon as you realize this.

i saw so many comments on tiktok of local people of the demographic that had NO idea this event was happening. i think this was just a way to scam indie authors. they just need to sue her.

this story is insane to me. I live in the DFW area in Texas and there's an annual book convention in Irving called the North Texas Teen Book Festival. I've been as both an attendee and as a volunteer so I got to see and help out behind the scenes. At the time I thought it went smoothly but I didn't realize just how incredible a job the organizers did until I heard about this story and just how terrible it can be. I definitely won't be taking NTTBF for granted anytime soon

I feel bad for those authors and I'm only half way through the video

That ball was the book ball version of the Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow last year💀

I cannot believe anyone saw that website and handed over their money 🥴

Alas…my swag left bagless yet again 😞

It's the book version of 2023 Wool & Folk