We aren't offering every possibility, we are offering this possibility.

Hello Friends in Publishing!

Cardyn and I (Heather) have had a couple of meetings to kick-off planning for the 2025 Write Women Book Fest. We are excited to build on the lovely experiences of the 2023 event. So many thanks to all of the beautiful authors who have been a part of our event and contributed your talent, and lovely energies to the vision of amplifying women in publishing.

We had a meeting last week, read our notes as well as went over feedback from last year. We wanted to address a few points that came up so we can move forward knowing we have tried to communicate further what we are offering. We of course want to make everybody happy, and sometimes Cardyn has to remind me that that isn't possible. I always want everybody to feel welcome and have a good time so I can tend to expend a lot of energy figuring out how to meet everybody's desires. That's when she said to me, "We aren't offering every possibility, we are offering this possibility." 

I'm going to start with what we offer first, then if you want, you can read on to the part where we address some of the critical feedback we got, which we thank you for providing, good and bad. 

WHAT WE OFFER

• An inclusive, supportive, diverse, LGBTQ-friendly event that lifts up the voices of women authors.
• The opportunity for authors to table, sell, and sign books and promote their work.
• Vendor spaces at a rate we researched and deem in-line with other similar events.
• The opportunity for authors to be on panels and attend workshops.
• The opportunity for new authors to table alongside more seasoned authors in a safe and helpful space. The same with panels. It's a great event for newer authors.
• An event space that provides rooms, an adequate sized ballroom, and ample free parking on the premises. We aren't subject to the whims of weather and wheeling your things into the space will be fairly painless with the parking lot being right there!
• We will be providing vendors with light breakfast items, coffee and tea on Saturday, lunch on Saturday, lunch on Sunday, and an after-party on Sunday.
• The opportunity to enjoy whatever perks we can provide via partners - in the past that has been a Barnes & Noble partnership and a Prince George's Community Library partnership.
• A small thank-you note and bag from Cardyn and me. And truly, we are thankful.

If all of that sounds like your kind of event, we are so happy we've found each other!
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CRITICAL FEEDBACK RESPONSE

We often get conflicting messages since the experiences can be so varied based on a variety of factors related on a vendor's past experience. We don't take the feedback personally, we use the bits that we feel we can absorb and improve where we can because we want this event to be a positive experience for you and we want it to be the best work that we do, too.

Below is some of the feedback, paraphrased, and our responses.

You should have the event at a venue with more passerby foot traffic.
One factor outside of our control is weather. That's the biggest reason we moved indoors, and thankfully we did because while we lucked out with beautiful weather the previous years, in 2023 it was pouring. We have people fly in or drive a long way from all over for this event. We know the effort and expense involved with attending one of these events, being authors ourselves. Hotels in the city with more foot traffic are over double the cost of the hotel we are at now, which in 2023 was about $13k for just Saturday. Also, having a location with more people walking by does not necessarily mean more book buyers, and if it's raining or too hot, or too cold, then we've paid all that extra money for nothing. And while Cardyn and I paid for the event the first couple of years, that was not a sustainable model for us as we moved to a hotel. We are working on getting sponsors to cover the expected increased costs of 2025, and if you know of anybody who wants to sponsor the event, please send us a note at t[email protected]. Sponsors help keep it affordable and allow us to get day-of staff and pay for things like storage, office supplies etc.

We also chose the location for 2023 and 2025 because they had experience hosting book events in the past and have ample free parking right next to the hotel. If you've ever had to wheel your stuff from a dark garage two blocks away and pay $40 a day for the privleged, you'll understand why this was one of my priorities. The Comfort Inn is very close to BWI and not all that far from DC. It's a location we likely will stick with for a while based on it meeting our top priorities in a venue.

You should make the tickets free.
We have found that having free tickets does not equal more attendees. We also feel the price for tickets isn't so high that it would prevent people who have a book budget from buying books. We were free for four years. In addition we offered multiple discount opportunities - I sent out coupon codes several times to share with readers and followers. In some cases it busted the prices down to $5 and I shared all of that through email and the vendor blog I set up just to keep communication with the vendors nice and flowing. We had multiple ticket sales from authors sharing those codes. It was very cool!

The vendor fee is too high.
We researched the vendor fee, then took into consideration our expenses such as storage, office supplies, domain name, signage, marketing, day-of assistants, decorations, swag bags, printing, and of course the hotel fees--and settled on a price that helped us cover most of that and made up the difference with a couple of sponsorships and ticket sales. We couldn't have the event at all if the vendor fee were any lower.

The tables are too narrow.
We made sure everybody knew in the registration form that these tables, while six feet long, were not as deep as the tables some people are used to. These are the tables the hotel provides to us at no extra cost. If we had to rent tables it would have cost a good bit more money. I don't recall the amount, but I considered it quite high, plus delivery fees and having to get the tables back to the rental company. It was not something we felt we could afford or manage our first year at the hotel, which is why we put the notification in the registration so people would know they were getting an 18" deep table.

You didn't advertise enough.
We advertised as much as we could afford to, mostly in the form of Instagram boosts and Facebook boosts. You also can look back at our social media to see how many times we posted. We sent out newsletters, we sent out information to the local press to try and get features, we invited city council members and Cardyn even reached out to the Lt. Governor's office. We truly did our best with what we had. We don't have big bucks for advertising just yet. The best money in my opinion is the money we spend using Eventbrite because so many people use it to find events. We will continue to make our best effort to market the event. 

You shouldn't expect us to market the event.
We don't have direct access to your fans, your readers, and potential readers. When we market to book lovers in the area, we might miss out on people who want your motorcycle sweet romance, or your non-fiction tale of growing up in London. Yes, we expect people to market  to their followers, fans, and readers to let them know where they can find you live and in-person. We were honestly a little perplexed by this particular sentiment and we feel like if Beverly Jenkins is posting about all of her events on Twitter, then we are being reasonable in the expectation that those who participate with our event will also let their readers and followers know about it. We understand if this isn't something you want to do, but it's something we would like our participating authors to do.

We hope all of you will have an amazing 2024 and we hope to see you in 2025 at the fest! Y'all are the best!

​Heather & Cardyn