Did BookTok Just Have A Bridgerton Ball-Esque Experience At A Million Lives Book Festival?

Remember the time a bunch of kids were severely disappointed (and low-key traumatised) by the Glasgow Willy Wonka experience? Or what about when a heap of Bridgerton enthusiasts paid $150 USD for tickets to a ball that looked worse than my public school year 10 formal? Well, there might be a new flop event to top the lot.

This week, a book festival for fantasy lovers called A Million Lives Book Festival kicked off in Baltimore, in the United States. Over three days, authors and readers were set to commune and revel in their love for fantasy worlds. But following the festival, attendees and authors have taken to social media to slam the badly organised events, dubbing it the “Fyre Festival of Book Festivals”.

According to the event description, the three-day affair included a vendor hall filled with dozens of authors specialising in fantasy, romance and mystery. The itinerary featured writing workshops, fandom cosplay meet-ups, special talks and music performances based on fantasy novels.

Tickets to the festival were priced in a tiered system:

• $50 USD for a “Page Turner” ticket, which included “access to our vendor hall, cosplay meet-ups and content creation room ONLY on May 3rd.”
• $150 USD for the “Cloud Walker” ticket, which also included access to “panels, event swag bag and content creation room on May 2nd and 3rd.”
• $200 USD for the “Dream Maker” ticket, which included access to everything listed above, along with exclusive access to the Lavender Romance Ball event.

For authors, it wasn’t a free ride either. According to fantasy author Perci Jay, who attended the festival, obtaining a table at the event cost around $150 USD. Then, to sponsor the event and receive various promotional releases and have her hotel stay covered, Perci claimed she paid an additional $250 USD.

Sadly for Perci and the many other authors and book-enthusiasts attending the event, their money and time went tits up when the event turned out to be a dumpster fire. It was so bad that a heap of attendees have taken to TikTok to outline what went wrong and why it was so shit.

These videos have captured the attention of not only BookTok, but TikTokers all over the world.

Speaking to Newswire, author Samantha Heil (who co-writes under the name E.S. Rosalynn) said that she knew it was going to be a disaster from the moment she arrived.

“Friday, going into the event, kind of knew it was going to be a mess. No one knew where they were supposed to be or where they were supposed to go,” Samantha said, noting that there were easily double the amount of authors to attendees and much less than the amount of punters the authors were told were attending.

“No DJ, no decorations, nothing. The worst part came afterwards. The amount of lies coming out were wild. Huge tall tales about why this happened.”

In a four-part series on TikTok, Perci broke down each day of the event, claiming that not only did the organisers not decorate the event, but they also did not provide necessary items like chairs for audience members to sit on during panel discussions.

However, the most outrageous event was the Lavender Romance Ball. The event, which cost $200 USD to attend, saw ticket holders and authors get all dolled up in their best fantasy garb to find an empty conference room with a few books and fake rose petals scattered on conference tables.

You can check out the vibes in the videos below.

According to Perci’s account of events, music was provided by a JBL speaker brought in by one of the conference hall’s security guards, who felt bad for the attendees. Perci also claims that despite the price tag associated with the event, the attendees were not served dinner.

Instead, they could purchase drinks from a bar and snack on a range of desserts laid out on a table.

After this complete shitshow, the organiser of the festival, Grace Willows, made a video apology on social media in which she said she’d give unhappy attendees refunds.

“I want to issue a formal apology,” she said.

“I do understand that the ball tonight was not set up to standards. There were a lot of issues with getting set up, and it was not set up well. If you would like a refund, please contact me and I will issue a refund immediately.”

In the fourth and final part of her TikTok series on the disaster event, Perci shared an email allegedly from Grace to authors and vendors at the Million Lives Festival, claiming that she did not make any money from the event.

“I did not make any money off of this event, I put thousands of dollars into this event. All author fees and ticket sales went directly to bills for the event. The author fee of $100 included the $40 charge of your table and $15 charge per chair and everything on top of that went straight into the convention centre costs,” the email read.

“There were 603 tickets sold for this event with an attendance of 140. I do apologise for this because the ticket sales were there, but the attendance was clearly not.”

She then stated that authors would receive the “attendance fee, compensation for travel and to cover the hotel issues”. However, Perci alleges that this apology didn’t cover the further $250 USD she and other authors paid for marketing.

As a result of all the hullabaloo and scamming allegations being lodged towards her, on Thursday (local time) Grace followed up with a formal statement from her company, Archer Management.

“We take full responsibility for the way AML was handled. We are doing refunds for every attendee, author and vendor,” the statement posted to TikTok read.

“We are also cancelling all of our future event and will be processing refunds for those as well.”

Well, I guess that’s a good shout. Fingers crossed that the independent authors who lost money attending this event can use the extra media attention to make it back in book sales.