Hugo Awards, Worldcons, Graying Fandom and Commercialization
16. Feb, 2009 
25 Comments
I’m going to anticipate Cheryl Morgan here maybe a little and discuss something that’s been going around for a bit both on blogs and on the mailing list that shall not be named – but first a commercial announcement: Please buy one of my shirts.Well, actually, it’s not one of my shirts, (my shirts probably wouldn’t fit you anyway) it’s a shirt I designed that is available for purchase on Zazzle. It’s called The Classic Hugo Award Winners shirt – and you can get one here.
And speaking of crass commercialization:
the basic bone of contention seems to be the question of ‘relevance’ (starting to hate that word) regarding the Hugo Awards, Worldcon and FANdom per se.
Some hidden rulers of cliques have expressed concern over dwindling attendance at Worldcon, or the ascendancy of commercial cons (one of which was influential in getting Worldcon to change its hallowed weekend time frame) and/or the possibility of losing headliner guests to commercial cons, and/or the need to change the formatting of the con so as to attract non-book-based geeks (anime, gaming) and/or dwindling financial resources and/or the complications arising out of the fact that Worldcon changes its location every year and how this affects marketing, advertising and lack of commercialization.
Let me be VERY clear.? Discussing these things and floating possible solutions does not necessarily mean that I endorse said theory.? I come from a game design and ‘worst-case-scenario’ school of problem solving, which essentially says that if you really want to be creative with your solutions, you throw all of the ideas onto the table and kick them around to see how they affect your desired outcome.? Even the bad ones.? Often most especially the bad ones, because as it turns out, figuring out good and logical ways to REJECT the bad concepts often provides the root of your actual (good) solution.
So don’t confuse the message with the messenger here.
Before you can solve a problem, you need to define both the parameters of the problem itself (maybe it really isn’t a problem) and the parameters of your eventual solution(s) (like, no solution costing more than $100 bucks is acceptable).? It does us no good to come up with the perfect answer if it won’t be available for another thousand years.
In my view, the problem can be defined thusly:
1. Worldcon now has competition where it was once a monopoly
2. Worldcon’s target audience is a social network that will not tolerate many (most) commercial solutions as they are seen as antithetical to core values
3. Worldcon is entering a negative feedback loop; non-commercialization diminishes its footprint, which negatively affects attendance, which reduces revenue, which negatively affects both the ability to promote and its perceived relevance, which diminishes its footprint…
4. Worldcon has failed to identify new audiences or, at best, has failed to find a way to reach new audiences effectively
5. Many of Fandom’s core values – volunteerism, non-commercialization, maintaining an intimate sense of community, disregard for self-promotion – negatively affect the ability to compete in an open marketplace
This is a classic problem.? In a nutshell, what we have going on is the original product – the ‘real deal’ – being buried by competitors who have no substance but are willing to throw massive dollars at advertising and promotion.
An acceptable solution will have to provide Worldcon with a path to increased revenue, a means for effective promotion – one that clearly differentiates it from commercial operations and allows it to reach/develop a new audience – while still maintaining the sense of intimate community and, at the very least, keeping the financial aspects of the operation at arms length.
I see parallels here with the situation that AT&T faced in 1984 when the company’s monopoly over long distance carriage was in court.? I worked for AT&T at the time, both for several years before the break up and several more afterwards.
As a department head, I frequently attended meetings that were designed to explain and plan for life-after-divestiture (the break up of AT&T).? EVERY single one of those meetings consisted of higher management reassuring themselves that Judge Green would never, ever break the company up.? There was NO WAY it was going to happen.
Then we scrambled.? I remember one meeting in particular (after the break up) in which we were asked to view a series of TV commercials that were designed to retain AT&T customer loyalty in the face of blistering ads from our competitors.? Those competitive ads named AT&T by name, accused them of having ripped off the American Public for decades, made the company look old, doddering, idiotic and incompetent and made it clear that the viewer would have a large neon ‘L’ flashing from their foreheads – visible to the entire world – if they stayed with AT&T.
AT&T’s multi-million dollar advertising response (which never aired, btw) was a limp ‘hi, we’re still here’ appeal.? It should have been something like “those goes had to go to court to FORCE you to switch carriers – and guess what, they RENT our long distance lines, so why not stay with the carrier that everyone already uses”)
AT&T stock plummeted, market share started heading towards the bottom.
What’s more, the company decided that since Bell Labs was AT&T’s Bell Labs, and since everyone already knew that ALL of the leading telephony technology originated with Bell Labs, they could safely adopt a strategy of waiting to see what the other guy was going to do and then copy it, rather than innovate.? (This, primarily in a raise-the-drawbridge response to falling revenue and market share – oh no! we can’t waste more money on innovation – let them prove the product first.)
So tell me, where’s Bell Labs now?
Exactly.? (Mostly because AT&T made the additional idiotic – market-driven decision to commercialize the labs. “On August 28, 2008, Alcatel-Lucent announced it was pulling out of basic science, material physics, and semiconductor research, and it will instead focus on more immediately marketable areas including networking, high-speed electronics, wireless networks, nanotechnology and software” Wiki)
People don’t care where the technology comes from, they just want to use the coolest, newest stuff.? And, if you’re the loudest voice in the room, a lot of people will believe that volume=cool.
That it is a problem is identified in both Kevin Standlee’s LJ and in an author’s blog that Chery mentions here.
Think I’ve identified the problem?
Solutions?? let’s run em up the flag pole.? Here are some of mine:
1. figure out how to definitively differentiate Worldcon from commercial cons.? My short list includes: don’t pay for an autograph, meet your idol in the lobby; the people running the show don’t care about you or your interests, just the money you spend at the door:? Worldcon is all volunteer; where do X & Y go when THEY want to have a good time?? WorldCon.? Their PR flacks MAKE them go to the commercial cons; Worldcon ORIGINATED the genre convention:
2. identify target markets that are reachable and share common interests and that can reach out or are in touch with the ‘younger crowd’:? my favorite is to start with all of the college and university SF/F clubs.
3. Identify/develop third-party revenue streams that are used for a specific purpose.? Such as finding a publisher willing to sponsor the out-reach program to college clubs – maybe underwrite a few memberships.? Get a club member to attend (cause it’s cheap or free) and they’ll bring the message back to their entire club.? Then include an on-going component that helps the club increase its own membership and fund the ability to get more members to Worldcon – maybe the sponsor would be willing to donate some books to be sold/distributed.
Key here is:? sponsorship does not have to directly affect, or even be present at, the con itself.
4. Sponsors.? The nice thing about sponsorship (versus straight commercialization) is that it gives the brand holder far more control (at least initially) over how the message is delivered.? But in order to attract sponsors, you need to have a market to offer them.? I would suggest that the difference between sponsoring/advertising through a commercial con versus the same at Worldcon is the difference between renting a billboard and mailing flyers to a mailing list:? Yes, a commercial con will put your name in front of tens of thousands of people – but those people only have a passing interest in your product; tomorrow they’ll be off on the next shiny-shiny.? Worldcon puts your message in front of ten thousand people +/- per year, and those people are there year after year and have already discovered their one true shiny-shiny. Flipside:? you probably NEED ten + times as many impressions at a commercial con to get the same sales volume as is produced at Worldcon.
5. More sponsorship stuff:? the Hugo Award ceremony could be semi-spun off as a sponsored happening.? The idea would be to raise the prestige level of the award to the point that publicists HAVE to send their clients to it.? You do that by spending money through your own publicists and advertising agency.? Maybe even adding cash awards to the winners.? (An SF author winning and receiving a check for $100K in addition to the trophy would sure get some attention…)? The only way to do that is to get someone else to foot the bill.? And the only way to encourage that activity is to give them something worth paying for.? Yes there are problems with that concept: how would perceived legitimacy of the awards go down if TOR were sponsoring and TOR authors won all the majors that year?? These are addressable issue though, once you make the decision to go the sponsorship route because most of them are perception issues and most perception issues CAN be solved with money.
6.? Participation:? as attendance dwindles, so the price to participate rises and so the attendance dwindles.? The other aspect of attendance is that, other than going, the only thing you get is the right to nominate/vote on the Hugo Awards.? Other means of participating need to be developed.? One such is simple:? I’ve started making licensed T-Shirts that allow people to ‘participate’ and that contribute a small amount of non-convention based revenue to the effort.? If I could sell a million t-shirts a year, WSFS would be able to underwrite each year’s con and have enough left over to pay for a small PR firm – or maybe cash prizes to Hugo Winners.? But I’m not going to sell a million t-shirts each year.
Another solution is – this past year, many publishers made versions of nominated works available to voting-eligible members.? If arrangements could be made for this to become set in stone, members would receive their fee back in free books every year.
Another route to go would be to offer something (sticker?) for a cheap. non-voting, non-attending membership (convertible).? Five bucks, ten bucks, somewhere in that neighborhood, gets you the nominations list when released, the right to buy the nominated e-books at a discounted rate, a T-shirt from yours truly – something.
7.? Location.? Maintaining the rotational nature of the con is a core value.? Mitigating the negative effect of this does need to be addressed.? One partial solution would be to formalize something along the lines of NASFiC – the con that takes place in North America whenever Worldcon goes overseas.? Many of the overseas cons have been existing conventions that got turned into a Worldcon – and many of them are still going.? Perhaps WSFS ought to ‘brand’ or associate more deeply with those cons and designate them as the local version of a NASFiC;? work towards coordinating the weekends so that everyone worldwide has an ‘affiliated’ con they can attend;? work up some internet connections/feeds between them all so that, for example, when the Hugo Winners are announced, they’re heard simultaneously at cons worldwide.? Maybe even find a way to give attendees at those cons voting privileges.
I think I’ve thrown enough on the table for now.? Time to pick it apart.
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO MY FEED
Thank you for encouraging SMOFdom to hang you from a lamp post instead of me. You have some interesting ideas there. I’ll try to get my post written while I’m in Dublin.
This is a problem that has continued to deepen since my first con, in 1979, when I was one of the youngest fans, and still shows now, when I am often still one of the younger fans. Whenever I discuss my feelings wth BNF, my concerns are tossed aside.
I am an old mom of young children and Worldcon (and all North American cons) are extremely unfriendly to me. From requiring me to buy a membership for a 4 year old to not discussing childcare arrangements after I send multiple e-mails, to having childcare be extremely expensive: the resut has been that we don’t bring our kids. It was a real eye opener to go to Eastercon in London last year and see that childcare was a right, and part of the system (we had left the kids behind, not expecting that). We also felt warm and fuzzy and enjoyed the concourse where we had the opportunity to actually meet and have a drink with authors that we read and enjoy. The only was that happens at Worldcon is at koffeeklatches or if one has a friend bring one into the publisher and Hugo parties.
I have been going to Worldcon since 1980 as it used to be the #1 place that I would meet up with my scattered fan friends. But when I walk into a fan lounge and no one looks at me, walk into a party and politely wait to join a conversation and find that folks don’t want to talk to strangers, I wonder how new people, that don’t bring their own groups with them, feel.
Perhaps the answer is to go to British cons or only small cons? If so, better have a lower price for supporting so that the Hugos retain some vitality (which I think should be done anyway- at this price the cost is just to high to support a con one is sure not to attend- as Japan and Australia were/are for me.)
I don’t think it’s true that any of the overseas Worldcons have been “existing conventions that got turned into a Worldcon – and many of them are still going”. European Worldcons (six to date) have often incorporated the Eurocon, but it’s a small element, and Eurocon is another floating convention like Worldcon. The three (and one impending) AussieCons have been one-off events. I can’t vouch for the Japanese Worldcon, which I think did incorporate the Japanese national convention, but certainly nothing spun off from it.
In any case, I think it extremely unlikely that either WSFS or the conventions themselves will want WSFS to become involved with any national or continental conventions — any movement in this area is more likely to involve separating the NASFiC from WSFS.
Fascinating stuff, and thank you. One specific factual point:
Which ones? I don’t know of any non-US Worldcon that were existing conventions converted into Worldcons. To my knowledge, they’ve all been stand-alone conventions. As far as I know, none of them continued thereafter as ongoing conventions.
G: What you’re seeing is a symptom of a resource shortage caused by Worldcon attendance being at exactly the wrong point on a power curve. If the convention were 8000, the cost per member would be much lower and it could afford to spend resources on free child care. Yes, the convention could get cheaper by getting smaller, because it could then move out of high-fixed-cost convention centers. But then with the lower cost, it would be more attractive, and would then grow into needing the expensive facilities again, so I don’t consider “shrinking to affordability” to be a viable future strategy. I expect there are a fair number of people in Worldcon fandom who are looking forward to it, however, because it means that all of those people they don’t want to see will have Gone Away.
Still, I haven’t given up hope. Some of the best minds in SMOFdom have agreed that an 8000-person Worldcon is not significantly more difficult to manage than a 4000-person one, and in some respects it’s easier, because it’s significantly cheaper per person, so you could afford to do things like give free child care.
G, pretend you’re chairing Worldcon. How would you arrange things? Would you guarantee free childcare? How would you set up your membership pricing per age band? What other changes would you make?
Whoops, there’s a formatting issue in what I said above — I forgot that less than and greater-than signs would be interpreted as HTML. What I meant to say was “If the convention were smaller than 2000 members or larger than 8000, the cost per member would be much lower….”
Here is my standard link for discussions on advertising to anime fans: a discussion between anime fans which touches on the differences they see between anime and more general sf conventions. See the forum discussion, too. They have positive things to say about the “big tent” conventions– and note that these are aspects that tend to come from being a non-commercial grouping of older fans.
On the graying of fandom: I have been going to cons nearly all my life, and I can remember there being worries about the graying of Worldcon all the way back when I was in my teens. Having lived the demographics, I can say this: As long as it costs money to travel, 20-somethings are going to be underrepresented at Worldcon. It’s just a fact of life that older people generally have more disposable income. And I don’t think you need to worry as long as the 20-somethings know Worldcon is out there and sounds like the sort of thing they want to go to when they can afford it.
I think the problem is more promoting volunteer fandom in general, so they go to their local general sf convention, which then feeds into Worldcon. (I have a brilliant idea for attacking this, but it would cost somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it’s not worth going into details unless I manage to win the lottery. But if the opportunity ever presented itself, I’d be willing to do all the work myself.)
@Mike Scott:
Yes, the Japanese national sf convention was combined with Nippon 2007. (Which is why the Seiun Awards were presented at Worldcon that year.)
No problem Cheryl – just come by and throw some tomatoes every once and a while – it gets boring swinging up there…
RE overseas cons: ok, maybe I conflated ‘groups of con organizers’ with ‘cons’; I do believe that Aussiecon I was the re-naming of an existing series, and I ‘remember’ the same for Loncon – but that could be false memory.
As an historical fact – yes, get it right. Other than that, it’s really just a distraction from the main issue, as the origin of those overseas cons hardly matters when it comes to globalizing the WORLD Science Fiction Society.
Cheryl – I wouldn’t call those radical concepts. RADICAL would be ponying up the bucks to hire a PR firm and an organization management firm and have them do all the business stuff so that the rest of us could just attend a nice party in a random city.
Steve: The “radical” element is anything that requires Worldcon committees to cooperate with each other for any reason at all. As I wrote on my LJ, Worldcons are like individual US states under the Articles of Confederation: Any “proposal for improvement” tends to be interpreted by individual members as “proposal to take away my Roscoe-ordained autonomy.” Try posting a link to this message to The List That Shall Not Be Named and see what I mean.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Pass-Along funds is an excellent example of a revenue-sharing scheme that seemed impossible until a group of people at the 1988 SMOFCon came up with it while lounging on the patio of the Phoenix Hyatt and the generosity of Noreascon Three in jump-starting it. We need a similar sort of selfless effort from at least one Worldcon, backed up by a series of Worldcons who recognize the value such a scheme provides to them and who are willing to do work that might not directly help them in return for their predecessors doing the similar sort of “pass along” work.
As a start, maybe if we could get the publicity and marketing equivalents of individual Worldcons (and bids, even) to start working with each other “across” the silos that individual committee form, we could get them thinking of Worldcon as a whole, instead of “ThisCon” or “ThatCon” as a single event.
Also, any such plan has to be robust enough to withstand an occasional setback, such as a Worldcon like Nippon 2007 that loses money (and thus has nothing to pass along) — such cases don’t cause PAF to collapse since it’s mutually-supportive.
For me the barrier to Worldcon attendance is not the cost of the membership. The barrier is air travel, hotels, and getting time off. I almost never have had a job where I can take five or seven days off every year in August. would not be surprised if this was the case for most fans younger than me.
I think this runs into a penny wise and pound foolish sort of problem. It might be less expensive to get a full membership early and than to get a Saturday and Sunday membership at the door. But it feels like a terrible waste. Don’t anyone point out logic here, this is how it feels not how it actually is. My boyfriend complained about this when Worldcon was in Denver and he couldn’t take the whole week off. I think we saved money on buying early, but he still felt cheated.
If the time issue were eliminated traveling to Worldcon is out of the question for me due to all the other costs rather than the membership. If I’ve got $400.00+ to blow on airfair to a US city and the $500.00+ to get a hotel room even the at the door cost of a Worldcon membership is a mere trifle.
But assuming it were local and I could get the time off, sure, then the cost of a membership is important.
My point being that the problem from my point of view is not the absolute cost. The problem is entirely one of the perceived value for the cost of attending. I think the problem is that even people who could be fans have not heard of Worldcon and/or fandom in general. I did my best to talk to acquaintances about Worldcon in Denver and even a month out I was finding people who’d not heard it was going to be in town and were somewhat excited once I explained it. But most of them did not attend because they heard about it too late to make plans.
I think the problem is that there is no value in being a watcher from afar. The WSFS membership is called a supporting membership and for paying the $50 you get the right to vote on the Hugoes and get some paper to clutter up your home.
I think that a lower cost or higher value for money WSFS membership would have the effect of making Worldcon something that people anticipated. If there were a great online community for WSFS members, for example. I also think that the community aspect is key. In addition to really big names it would make people interested in traveling to Worldcon if they knew they were going to meet up with people they liked from online, today’s equivalent of knowing a person through ‘zines.
The problem, I suspect, is that even renaming the Supporting Membership to WSFS membership would probably run up against the old foggies. And since I have no serious emotional connection to Worldcon I’m not going to jump into the fray.
Here’s my experience with being a younger fan and the cost of worldcon; I volunteered to work most of the cons I ever attended (once I figured out you could do so) and got comped on the entry fee. I almost always arranged to ‘crash’ with someone for little or nothing (never, ever crash in a party room…) and I almost always managed to drive myself or find a ride going that way; I’ve taken trains, busses, airplanes and shanks mare to get to cons. I know others who’ve filled the pages of their fanzines with their hitchhiking exploits.
And ironically enough, I attended more cons while a poor college student than I did as a very well paid corporate exec.
Now it is true that you can’t get away with stealing room service or eating someone else’s salad at Bonanza anymore, and it is true that a cheap airfare is still several hundred dollars but…
Mishalak:
Thanks for mentioning the time constraints, which I forgot. That’s another issue which hits 20-somethings particularly hard and will tend restrict them to their local cons.
I don’t think this means Worldcon needs to be shrunk. I did like the idea that was floated a while back (I think in a comment on Cheryl’s blog) to schedule the more industry-oriented and inner-fan-circle-type programming on the weekdays and offer a Saturday-Sunday membership for the benefit of the more casual and time-pressed fan.
Lots of good stuff there, but I’m not entirely convinced Worldcon the event needs a whole lot beyond some general tweaking/updating. Let’s not get bogged down in details until the big picture is clear.
What Worldcon needs is greater public awareness. There are 300 million people in the US, and 299,950,000 of them (give or take) don’t even know there’s such a thing as a World Science Fiction Convention. Sure, 150 million don’t read a book in any given year, but that notwithstanding there is still a huge pool of potential attendees who don’t even know there’s someplace to go.
The largest gathering of science fiction and fantasy authors in the world – coupled with the finest exhibit and sale of science fiction and fantasy art – is a fully marketable idea in and of itself. Promote what you have.
Barry – agreed, absolutely. Note some of the ’short’ items I listed for differentiating worldcon.
You’re basically saying ‘don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough’ (hate that expression), but one of the things that has become mandatory with any long-term successful enterprise these days is at least a two-team approach: one to implement the ‘good enough’ plan that’s out there now, and the other to figure out where things are going and what needs to change in the future. Contingency planning, if you will.
A benefactor comes in and underwrites a huge (effective) awareness campaign, worldcon get’s its 10k+ attendance regularly and then – what next?
So I agree with you entirely.
But I also think that the major issue right now is – getting the stone rolling to begin with.
OK, good. I’m glad to see this is actually getting talked about seriously, for the first time that I recall. There’s been talk – plenty of that, always – but little serious discussion of implementation.
I do not think, though, that Worldcon needs a (financial) benefactor to promote awareness, it just needs to do a much better job of communicating what it is to people who might be interested. Comic Con never spent much money promoting itself – it just helped and sometimes coordinated others to spend the money talking about them. Publishers, creators, and yeah, Hollywood – they’re the ones who spent the money to tell people what a great place Comic Con is. (Word of mouth from attendees didn’t hurt, either.) And there are many more inexpensive ways to get the message out now than there were back in the early 80s when CCI really started to put itself on the map.
What next when Worldcon passes 10k? That’d be a good problem to have.
I’m available to help push the stone.
I am not sure if I have come out elsewhere to state this, but if anything this will be the first.
I do think the Worldcon does need to do something to increase its status in the fan/sci-fi/whatever world.
Don’t think so?
I hate to say this, but take a look at DC or CC or even some of the larger anime cons.
They have news coverage on G4TV – for the ENTIRE weekend of events.
Talk about free advertising . . .
Need something else . . .
OK, I hate to use this as a compare/contrast item but,
DC ALREADY has a yearly parade. Thru downtown Atlanta. Each year.
What will stop them from coming up with their own awards that say might compete with the Hugos?
Not much that is for sure.
Another thing that an artist friend of my suggested, would be to have the art show “juried”. She felt that would add a sense of importance to showing ones art at the Worldcon.
This much I do have to say, it does open up a good discussion among people to see how we can better the Worldcon.
I don’t think your first observation (“Worldcon now has competition where it was once a monopoly”) is really all that valid. There have been alternative conventions for decades — the first Star Trek con, for instance, was back in the early 1970s. The convention you refer to as being “influential in getting Worldcon to change its hallowed weekend time frame” probably had nothing to do with many worldcons now abandoning Labor Day weekend — I believe that many fans, especially college students and those with school-age children, actually prefer an earlier date for worldcon. (In other words, it was the world that changed — the beginning of the scholastic year no longer waits until after Labor Day.)
Your second observation (“Worldcon’s target audience is a social network that will not tolerate many (most) commercial solutions as they are seen as antithetical to core values”) also seems a bit suspect to me. There have been lots of instances, over the years, of commercial sponsoring of parts of worldcons. Microsoft, for instance, sponsored a “first-night” wine party at the 1995 Worldcon. Many if not most book publishers sponsor hospitality suites or parties. The Souvenir Book for each worldcon is underwritten by the advertisements of the book companies, in large part. Speaking as someone who has been attending worldcons for three decades, it doesn’t bother me when a committee receives the largesse of some commercial interest. Good for them to find another way to assure themselves of keeping out of the red.
As for #3 (“Worldcon is entering a negative feedback loop; non-commercialization diminishes its footprint, which negatively affects attendance, which reduces revenue, which negatively affects both the ability to promote and its perceived relevance, which diminishes its footprint..”), it would seem that the world economy has at least as much an effect as that on attendance. Hotel and travel costs have risen by a lot, for instance, and it is affecting far more than just worldcons. (Many trade shows and professional conferences have also had a decline in attendance.)
Your fifth observation, though (“Worldcon has failed to identify new audiences or, at best, has failed to find a way to reach new audiences effectively”), I do agree with. But again, it’s not just worldcons. Many amateur press associations, for instance, which used to thrive a couple of decades ago have either folded or have had a decrease in participation. Regional conventions, such as the one in the D.C. area, have had a big decline in attendance. And the average age of the ones who do attend or participate is increasing. There are fewer younger fans, and that’s the real problem.
Finally, I’m not sure if your fifth observation (“Many of Fandom’s core values – volunteerism, non-commercialization, maintaining an intimate sense of community, disregard for self-promotion – negatively affect the ability to compete in an open marketplace”) is all that relevant. We’re not trying to ‘compete’ against anything. And the volunteerism and non-commercialism helps to keep attendance costs down. An attending membership at a worldcon costs somewhere around $200 or so. A professional convention on carbon capture and storage, coming up in May in Pittsburgh, would set you back about $1,000.
Rich:
Dragon*Con was not the only reason Worldcons stopped being exclusively on Labor Day Weekend, but they were an influence. Until the late 1990s, accepted political thought was that a non-Labor Day weekend for a North American Worldcon was the Kiss of Death and nobody would vote for it. Then Bucconner was forced to change dates by facility conflicts; they hung in there even with the changed date and were pretty successful. This showed that actually, fans would accept dates anywhere between the first weekend of August and Labor Day. Some people do, as you not, prefer it for the reasons you state, while others complain and say they can’t possibly attend unless they have that holiday in there.
Having a five-week range of dates that the electorate have deemed accessible helps potential Worldcon bids considerably. They now have five times more possibilities. We used to be on Labor Day because professional conferences wouldn’t book on holidays so the space was cheap. In some places, that’s still the case, but not always. When you’re a bottom feeder in the convention industry, flexibility is your friend.
Rich:
The point about how inexpensive Worldcon is compared to professional conferences is a good one, and I’ve made it myself; however, it’s a meaningless distinction to most people. The usual responses class thusly:
1. I don’t care, because I’d never attend one of those professional conferences.
2. I don’t care, because I can get lots of entertainment in the sf genre at events that cost less than one-quarter your size and that cater specifically to my one narrow interest, and I haven’t any desire to experience anything except my narrow interest.
3. I don’t care, because if I had to attend that expensive professional conference, my employer would pay for it, or it would be a deductible business expense.
In all of these cases, we’re not reaching people.
I tend to think of Worldcon as an acquired taste; however, giving people that first taste is difficult. I really liked L.A.con’s “taster” memberships as a way to introduce commute-distance members to the convention with a low risk. I only with LA had done more “exit polling” to try and find out if this brought in new people, or simply cannibalized the existing memberships and thus reduced total revenue.
On the convention cost issue: my knee-jerk response to “professional conference” would be – ‘my employer pays for it’
The professional ones I used to go to were either Vegas-based (expensive) or military/defense contracting – muy expensivo.
Everything is suffering because of the increased cost of oil; just in the past five years I’ve had to double the standard hotel per/nite cost swag of $65 to $130-$150; airfare from $250 rt to $600 rt
for paintball tournament expenses, it used to be that hotel/airfare/rental vehicle costs were on rough par with entry fee/paint per player. Even though entry fees have gone up also, that’s no longer the case.
This is one reason why I advocate some kind (SOME KIND – no specific kind) of meaningful ‘remote’ participation. I mean, with all the tech we have these days, there ought to be a fairly easy way to find locations convenient to a significant number of supporting member fans and set up a remote con – with live feed for the awards and what not. The current con can charge a small fee to underwrite the expense of set-up, the local con can fold that into costs and it will be less expensive than those folks actually traveling. They’re already paid members – and I think that anyone who can afford to go to the main con will still do so even if there’s a satellite in their area.
Satellite Con – Boston
If I were to go to Anticipation tomorrow, it would cost me anywhere from -
$1035 to $2020 – not including meals and extras
Attending a con in Boston would run me anywhere from (I’m using Boskon rates)
$306 hotel (2 nites
$120 gasoline
$18 tolls
$49 membership
$493 – not counting meals and extras
that’s if I stayed at the hotel – I’m close enough to commute, so
Now add in the supporting membership to worldcon and it comes to – $543
If everyone had to kick in the outrageous amount of $100 per person to ’support the worldcon’ – you’d still be saving a minimum of close to $400 bucks per head.
And I’m close to Anticipation.
Yes, you’d be going from spending $50 for supporting member to spending $500 – but all that takes is ’skipping’ some other local con.
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Kaylee
http://www.craigslistdecoded.info