This past weekend proved an event can be personally rewarding, while being a huge pain in the @&%*. By all measures Hydra Publications had a fantastic weekend. Sales were up and the publishing house managed to make a nice return on investment.

Personally, my novel, The Hand of God, did incredibly well, finishing as one of the top sellers for the entire convention. Word of mouth increased during the convention and people were coming to our booth just to find my book.

But look under the hood and you find problems. Especially with the Literary Track. We were supposed to have our QR Code on the badges handed out to vendors. It wasn’t. They were supposed to put our Literary Track Panels in the program guide. It wasn’t. They were supposed to make sure there was signage to show what rooms the panels were taking place. Not only did they not do this, initially the told everyone the wrong room numbers.

Several people, including author Stephen Zimmer, went to great lengths to make sure panels were informative, entertaining and staffed. The powers that be at FandomFest did nothing, and I mean nothing, to show they cared.

They didn’t bother to make sure staff had a map of the convention and a list of where every thing could be found. If you asked most people in a yellow crew shirt where something was located, they couldn’t tell you. At one point, part of their own literature had the descriptions for Mr. Marvel, Stan Lee and of Captain Kirk, William Shatner, backwards.

One can only hope as the event continues to grow each year, they will get better at the process of running the show. I know I’ll be back next year. There are others who will not. Time for the powers that be to learn from this year and make the corrections. After all, it only benefits them if we all do well.