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Surprise Guests of Honor
Oct. 6th, 2021 03:28 pmOne of the ways in which the Tonopah Westercon bid was different was that we said from the start that we did not intend to have guests of honor. For the relatively low-budget convention we intended to hold, we would not be able to afford them, and we wanted to keep costs down so we could sell relatively inexpensive memberships. Even though we said this while we were bidding, people who hadn't paid attention were surprised when we confirmed this after we won.
We would have continued without guests of honor, but we were presented with something of a windfall when the Utah Fandom Organization, parent non-profit corporation of Spikecon/Westercon 72, gave us a grant that, relative to our rather small budget, was very substantial. After looking at ways we could improve the convention, we decided that the grant could be used to fund two guests of honor. We discussed this with our committee and evaluated a number of possibilities. In the end, we choose two people, one from Reno and one from Las Vegas, one an author and one a bookseller, and yesterday we announced that Kevin Andrew Murphy and Myrna Donato would be Westercon 74's guests of honor.
I had to apologize to both of them for a longer-than-I-expected time between confirming their invitations and making a public announcement, but finally this past weekend I got everything set up. If you had been looking at just the right time (and it was only for a few minutes), you might have been able to notice that the first place where the guests were posted was on the westercon.org website, followed by the westercon74.org site, followed by the news post on westercon74.org, then Twitter, then the convention's Facebook page, and then by e-mails sent to selected mailing lists and news sources. I always think that news announcements should first be placed on a convention's web site before being announced elsewhere, so that the announcements can always direct people to the website. But doing so can be a bit tricky, and I admit to being somewhat nervous when making big announcements, lest a technical failure gum up the works.
We would have made the announcement on Monday, but due to the Great Facebook Failure, I decided that we'd waited several months and could wait one more day.
At one point I'd planned for us to roll this and some other news into a single progress report, but given that most people (not all, I know) get their news about such things online, I decided that we'd do this announcement now. There will be more news between now at Westercon 73/Loscon 47. I'd rather have things right than have them quickly.
We would have continued without guests of honor, but we were presented with something of a windfall when the Utah Fandom Organization, parent non-profit corporation of Spikecon/Westercon 72, gave us a grant that, relative to our rather small budget, was very substantial. After looking at ways we could improve the convention, we decided that the grant could be used to fund two guests of honor. We discussed this with our committee and evaluated a number of possibilities. In the end, we choose two people, one from Reno and one from Las Vegas, one an author and one a bookseller, and yesterday we announced that Kevin Andrew Murphy and Myrna Donato would be Westercon 74's guests of honor.
I had to apologize to both of them for a longer-than-I-expected time between confirming their invitations and making a public announcement, but finally this past weekend I got everything set up. If you had been looking at just the right time (and it was only for a few minutes), you might have been able to notice that the first place where the guests were posted was on the westercon.org website, followed by the westercon74.org site, followed by the news post on westercon74.org, then Twitter, then the convention's Facebook page, and then by e-mails sent to selected mailing lists and news sources. I always think that news announcements should first be placed on a convention's web site before being announced elsewhere, so that the announcements can always direct people to the website. But doing so can be a bit tricky, and I admit to being somewhat nervous when making big announcements, lest a technical failure gum up the works.
We would have made the announcement on Monday, but due to the Great Facebook Failure, I decided that we'd waited several months and could wait one more day.
At one point I'd planned for us to roll this and some other news into a single progress report, but given that most people (not all, I know) get their news about such things online, I decided that we'd do this announcement now. There will be more news between now at Westercon 73/Loscon 47. I'd rather have things right than have them quickly.
