Dozens of authors and book lovers poured into Baltimore this weekend dressed in glittering gowns, ready for a romance-fantasy book convention that promised a formal “fantasy ball.”
Instead, attendees of the A Million Lives Book Festival said they found themselves standing awkwardly under bright overhead lights in a sparsely decorated space that looked more like a concrete warehouse than a ballroom.
Videos of the first-time event quickly gained traction on social media as attendees expressed disappointment at being met with barren rooms, shoddy programming and drastically fewer attendees than promised.
“If the bar for events was on the floor, A Million Lives Festival sent the bar straight to hell,” said Perci Jay, a romantic fantasy author who attended. “We had no signage directing us around the convention center, no decorations, no badges — nothing to signal that our event was even happening. I was shocked and bewildered constantly because every 30 minutes, something else went horribly wrong.”
The gathering last Friday and Saturday at the Baltimore Convention Center became the latest event to go viral online for its disastrous planning, joining the ranks of the widely mocked Fyre Fest, the Willy Wonka-themed “Chocolate Experience” in Glasgow and the “Bridgerton”-inspired ball in Detroit.
Grace Willows, the organizer of the event, issued an apology on her event planning company’s social media pages this week.
“I do understand that the ball tonight was not set up to standards,” Willows said on TikTok. “There were a lot of issues with getting set up and it was not set up well. I want to apologize.”
Archer Management, the event planning company behind the festival, said in an Instagram post on Monday that all refunds should be processed by May 31. Willows did not respond to a request for comment.
But some attendees, including Jay, say that a refund wouldn’t be enough to cover for the financial hit they took just getting to the event.
After spending more than $2,000 on flights, event fees and food for the weekend, Jay said she flew from Texas to Baltimore (which required “tremendous effort,” as she’s pregnant with twins) only to realize she and her friends had been “completely misled” about the event they had been anticipating for a year and a half.
The festival had been advertised online as “the perfect event to make more bookish friends,” teasing a vendor hall, speaker panels, a content creation room and a cosplay competition. Tickets ranged from $50 to $250.
Upon arrival, however, several attendees who spoke to NBC News said the only decorations in the room were pink flower petals lined along the tables. In lieu of the planned DJ, one small portable speaker played music from someone’s phone. The promised “content creation room” was just an empty room. Badges and swag bags were mysteriously lost. And due to an absence of chairs and tables, some panel speakers and audience members found themselves sitting on the floor.
Several attendees said they were told by Willows that 500-600 tickets had been sold. The exact total number of attendees is unclear. But those who spoke to NBC News estimated less than 100 people showed up, leaving many authors — who had to order books in bulk and pay fees for tables to sell them at — eating their losses and scrambling to ship their unsold books back home.
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Baltimore Convention Center directed NBC News to a social media exchange between an attendee and the venue’s director of sales, Krystine Bussiere, in response to accusations that the convention center was responsible for losing event supplies such as swag bags and snacks.
“I can tell you that we didn’t receive information from the event organizer about missing boxes from the event,” Bussiere wrote in an email. “I checked in multiple times with show management and heard nothing but positive comments about how things were going on-site.”
In the aftermath, attendees banded together online to share their experience and petition for answers. Some people created a page online to solicit public support for the financial recovery of authors who “were left with financial debt due to flights, hotels, shipping their merchandise, and table fees only to be mislead by the turnout of the event.”
Author Stephanie Combs, who decided to attend the festival after seeing social media posts advertising it more than a year ago, said she bought eight boxes of books to sell and left with six still full. Instead of the packed convention that she expected, Combs estimated that only about 50 attendees dotted the “ginormous dungeon” of a room.
“I feel like I vacillated between tears and laughter the rest of the night, because it just felt so unbelievable to me that someone would set this up and think that it was an acceptable ball,” Combs said. “There’s no music, there’s no decorations other than a few scattered rose petals. And you just have a bunch of people in a room, you know, eating a couple pieces of chocolate.”
Carmen Seantel, a narrator who moderated a panel, said she had to hold the talk in a room with “no chairs, no tables, nothing.” She said the eight panelists and 15 to 25 audience members ended up sitting on the floor for the hourlong panel without any microphones or air conditioning.
“I took time off work, took time away from scheduled family events to attend this fest- it’s not a festival, to attend this FIASCO. As bad as that might seem, it is NOTHING compared to the thousands of dollars authors lost,” Seantel wrote in an email. “I want to highlight that this event financially crippled 100+ independent authors. I know some authors planned family events, book releases, and other things around THIS. But for what?”
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