Behind the Scenes

Bringing Canada Fiction Fest to life has been an enormous undertaking. I essentially worked two full-time jobs while putting all the back-end technical stuff together and building the website and sign up forms for the participating authors. And even then, I still needed lots of help to make this event happen!

Special thanks go to:

My incredibly talented daughter. A self-taught digital artist, she’s the one who made our amazing book-and-leaf logo! She’s also still a kid, so we’re not sharing her name online.

Steve Hugh Westenra who volunteered his time to help host the virtual sessions for Fiction Fest, and who also helped with site and form testing prior to the site going “live”.

Vanessa Ricci-Thode who also helped with the site and form testing and provided moral support with my many angst-ridden stress emails.

Tessa Hastjarjanto and Katherine D. Graham for sharing general wisdom regarding large group ventures and technical tips about panel discussion livestreams. 

The following photographers, whose work was used on the site, via the noted stock photo repositories:

• Life of Pix (Pexels)
• Zachariah Garrison (Pexels)
• Jenifer Kramer (Pixabay)
• 0xd1ma (Pexels)

And, finally, the fine folks over at Tally.so who created such a fantastic form-building app. The author sign up form for this event was originally done with Google Forms and I ran into so many technical issues with the data collection and processing that I had to go hunting for a new app. Tally took a bit of time to learn, but their help desk was very quick to respond to my questions. I completely rebuilt the form with their tool and the results were SO worth the effort — the form itself was much easier for users to follow, and the data exports were so much cleaner. I could not have built the showcase or the gallery without Tally, and if you’re looking for online form builders I highly recommend them!