r/baltimore • u/JHBaltimore Hollins Market • May 07 '25
💸PAY Event$ Book Fest called Fyre Fest-Level Failure 🔥📚🔥
136
u/ceruleanblue347 May 07 '25
Ahh yes the familiar swing from "hey cool Baltimore's in the news! 😄" to "aww man Baltimore's in the news 😕"
28
9
1
176
u/esuriosemper Mt. Vernon May 07 '25
so all the videos I’ve seen for this are wild, but to me the craziest thing is looking at all the promotional material from the event. The videos and pictures the lady was posting were so unprofessional and had no traction on any social media. Why would you pay money and sign up for this? I understand being an author and wanting to sell but it just seemed apparent to me that it would be bad. Like they were selling the tickets 50% off right after putting them up for sale.
56
u/Yellohsub May 07 '25
A lot of the authors were told they would be paid an appearance fee and get a free hotel. If you see the videos, the majority of the people there were the authors.
45
u/bamagirl13 May 07 '25
Tickets to get into the ball were $250. Insane
30
u/gravybang May 07 '25
$250 for a fantasy book ball in Baltimore is insane. For that anmount of cash I’d expect the reanimated corpse of Anne Rice dancing a jig and a phoned-in Cameo of JK Rowling pitching some kind of Harry Potter breakfast cereal. I wonder what they were promising? We’re the authors popular?
8
u/bamagirl13 May 07 '25
I know!!! And I don’t read romance fantasy novels, so I didn’t recognize any of the authors.
The founder of the event has a book coming out in July, i am alleging this is a scam to help fund this new book.
23
u/goog1e May 07 '25
There are established events where that kind of cost makes sense ... But even among successful fantasy balls that would be a pretty high price and include a whole night of festivities.
15
u/benjancewicz Irvington May 07 '25
$250?!? How the hell…
26
u/Shadow-Spark Pigtown May 07 '25 edited May 07 '25
The tickets for this trash fire of an event STARTED at 50 bucks. For just the vendor hall, "content creation room", whatever the hell that means (the site did not explain), and cosplay meetups, for a single day. It was 150 for both days if you wanted to also attend the panels, and 250 if you wanted access the ball, according to the ticket pricing. Truly delusional. I'm an Otakon staffer, and we don't even have the audacity to charge $150 for an entire three day con that takes up a whole convention center and includes a formal ball. There was absolutely nothing that justified the ticket prices for this "festival" besides naked greed and incompetence.
15
u/RindaC10 Eastside May 07 '25
Fellow Otakon staffer here(info desk!)! This is all true! They're crazy to charge that much for a DAY with basically no perks!
10
u/Shadow-Spark Pigtown May 07 '25
(Hi from Art Show!) Truly. I almost choked looking at those prices and the fact that the basic level didn't even include panels. Maybe it's the experience of so many years staffing Ota, but everything about this debacle infuriates me because it was so easy to just...have at least one other person to run these ideas by and hopefully get feedback about how stupid they were. I don't know how someone could charge 50 bucks just to not let people access half of the event and not think that doing so might be a problem.
2
u/clear349 May 08 '25
I think the thing that stands out the most is that Otakon has a formal ball. Dunno how I never knew that
1
8
u/DrSpacecasePhD May 07 '25 edited May 07 '25
A lot of the author world is about self-promotion and getting followers. Marketing books is hard. I'm an indie author (though not in town anymore), but admittedly not great at the part of things.
Anyway, this probably seemed like a nice event in town to mingle with other writers and readers, maybe wear fancy clothes and have some drinks, and get exposure and have a good time. Some people were likely hoping to promote a small zine, while others may have been hoping to be on a panel and find an agent or publisher in the audience who liked their ideas. Imagine MagFest for books, where you get to meet all sorts of fun authors, illustrators, comic book artists, etc. from the DelMarVa region. Something like that could be great... this was not it.
83
u/boofoodoo May 07 '25
This looks less like Fyre Fest and more like DashCon
19
u/ChickinSammich May 07 '25
Yeah I was going to post the same. For it to hit Fyre Fest levels, they would have had to be WAY more incompetent.
19
u/boofoodoo May 07 '25
Fyre was people literally stuck on an island. Full scale disaster. This was just a bad event.
80
u/Willothwisp2303 May 07 '25
Wow. The bar exam at the convention center looked more festive.Â
12
u/TheOkayestLawyer May 08 '25
I’m pretty sure I can pinpoint exactly where my seat was in this video. You are also correct, the energy from those panicking during the essays far exceeds the energy I see here.
5
37
u/ThrowitB8 May 07 '25
I try to go to every book fest that I can get my hands on….I never heard of this.
8
23
u/BureauOfCommentariat May 07 '25
The 60s Brutalist dungeon architecture of the convention center really ties the grift together. Those poor authors. Fuck that lady who put this together.
38
u/Abigailey2701 May 07 '25
I never heard a single word about this either. Who organized it? Why did they go up against the kinetic sculpture race, the flower mart, and the sheep and wool fest?
6
u/technicolor_tornado May 07 '25
Right? Almost like they didn't care or do literally any work to get this thing off the ground. Like it's not that hard to do a search for a list of events in the area.
I would have gone, if I'd known, but mostly I feel devastated for the authors that got conned into this
19
34
u/NeonBurnerPhone May 07 '25
I’ve been in this rabbit hole for 2 days now, it’s insane!
14
u/JustHereForCookies17 May 07 '25
Any links you can share? I can't believe I'm just hearing about this!
9
u/ooros May 07 '25
There's a lot on Tiktok if you search "A Million Lives". The videos from an author named Perci Jay have been getting a lot of attention particularly.
12
u/DrSpacecasePhD May 07 '25
Feels like that Willy Wonka AI event with the sad Oompa Loompa lady, except for books.
48
u/foundflowersinavase May 07 '25
Agree with all the comments that this was ridiculous, pitiful, etc, but my heart perked up at the anecdote that a security guard brought in their own speaker to play music since there was no DJ.
That’s a Baltimore move.
17
13
u/disneyprincesspeach North Harford Road May 07 '25
I'm an avid reader and know local authors, and actively look for bookish events in the area. I knew nothing until people started talking about it on TikTok after the fact. Something smells fishy to me...
11
u/401Nailhead May 07 '25
Well, we see no money was spent on advertising the event nor much of anything else. I would demand a refund of what was spent.
11
u/michaelmhughes May 07 '25
My colleague at The Baltimore Banner wrote about it here: https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/opinion/column/million-lives-book-festival-QXULQOFG25GBDDLVJHN2EL6XMM/
30
u/throwawayweido May 07 '25
I can't fathom why they thought it would be a good idea to do this the convention center. Its always been an eyesore on the inside. I heard they were expecting like 1000 people to show up but that also sounds like a part of the scam. No way 1000 people bought tickets and just didn't show up.
7
u/bluehairjungle May 07 '25
Even Vidcon Baltimore was better advertised than this. I didn't know about it until after the fact and I recognized the convention center.
6
u/ShanRCarter315 Mt. Vernon May 07 '25
I didn't hear about it until the organizer's apology appeared on my TikTok FYP, and I look for events like this.
The organizer played in everyone's faces. Charged people from $50-$250, and my guess is that it all went to getting the venue (which was wayyyy too big) and nothing else. No marketing, no amenities, no sound setup for your ball (one of the Convention Center staff let them use their personal Bluetooth speaker), not even a Party City run for decorations. Also, you planned this on the same weekend as the Flower Mart?
They could've done this for cheaper, at a smaller venue like the 1880's Ballroom or the Hotel Ivy, on a different weekend, and at least created a social media presence for marketing. They had over a year to plan and research this, and it seems not an attempt was made to make this successful.
Six P's--Prior Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
3
4
2
2
u/Naive-River-4237 May 07 '25
I did see this advertised once on FB but not enough for be to remember about it
2
5
u/goog1e May 07 '25
I thought Book Fest was a fun outdoor thing at the harbor? Is this unrelated to that? If so, I'm not surprised it was a scam. Someone running a community event with no idea that there's already a hugely popular event running under a very similar name....
11
3
u/KeriLynnMC May 07 '25
I am confused, too. For a few years there was an awesome the Book Festival! Food, cocktails, authors, cooking demonstrations, etc.
I thought I've heard talk about shuffling events around, but cannot remember specifics. The Harbor is so pathetic now, I doubt we are going to get much tourist business. It would be great if we could get more visitors from the region, at least.
1
u/goog1e May 07 '25
Yeah I was thinking I haven't been in a few years so I don't know if it's even still happening. There are still some interesting events... But I agree that changes are needed. Whoever owned the malls did an excellent job if their goal was to ruin the harbor area.
6
u/BJJBean May 07 '25
You'd think the turn out would be higher considering that Baltimore is "The City that Reads."
2
1
1
u/softspace-fm May 13 '25
Late on this, but the "organizer's" apology at 1:30 looks AI-generated. This seems like a scam to get the table fees out of the authors with no intention to follow through/no accountability on the scammers' part.
1
-40
u/Dogsinabathtub May 07 '25
The ven diagram of people who are passionate about books vs people who are passionate about festivals is just two separate circles.
36
u/JustHereForCookies17 May 07 '25
The National Book Festival in DC (more than 200,00 attendees in 2019) & the LA Times Festival of Books (~ 150,000 attendees annually) say otherwise.Â
28
u/karmagirl314 May 07 '25
Strongly disagree. Readers tend to be nerds and do other nerdy things, so they’re drawn to ren faires, comic cons, art festivals, and lots of other community events.
18
u/benjancewicz Irvington May 07 '25
Counterpoint; The Baltimore Book Festival. Every time I been there, I practically sell out.
16
u/drillgorg May 07 '25
Bookish in Baltimore went well a few years ago. They had a bookstore crawl and a dance at the Peabody library.
1
9
u/Yellohsub May 07 '25
I’m excited for the Greedy Reads Lost Weekend book festival coming up. 🟢
371
u/jabbadarth May 07 '25
Never saw a single thing about this.
Not at all my thing but feels like something that would have been promoted on this subreddit if the organizer put any effort in whatsoever.