This is your friendly reminder that tickets to the 34th Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts go on sale on Wednesday, May 25 at 8 am.

Tickets can be purchased by telephone at 604-885-9631 or 1-800-565-9631 and online at www.share-there.com/writersfestival.

The full schedule of events is here.

To keep the process moving along, please have your order ready and your credit card in hand. If you're like me, don't forget your reading glasses.

There is no advantage to using either telephone number (604-885-9631 or 1-800-565-9631). We will have eight telephone lines open. That means we can talk to eight callers at a time. This temporary telephone system has the capacity to keep an additional 16 callers in a waiting queue for up to 20 minutes. That’s 24 callers accounted for. We know that hundreds of attempts are being made simultaneously.
 
There might be bumps in the first hour but the eight operators are receiving calls and processing orders constantly. Our patrons have been asking for online sales for years and we hope this second option will relieve some pressure.

Online sales are subject to processing fees of 9.6% (5% to share-there.com who have built a secure site for ticket sales and 4.6% to PayPal). This will be shown in a separate line on the check-out page. All prices include GST.

If you order online, please call the office after June 15 if you would like your tickets mailed to you. We encourage you to let us hold onto your tickets for you. Postage is expensive and having them held here eliminates the possibility of the tickets being lost or forgotten. We will hold your tickets until you come for your first event at the Festival. You will receive a confirmation from share-there when you order online but you still need a ticket printed by the Festival of the Written Arts to attend an event.

Tickets will ready for pick-up on Wednesday, June 15. 

This is the first year we have offered telephone and online sales. The inventory of tickets and passes will be split between these two options. The most challenging period will be the first few hours of ticket sales. A representative from share-there.com will be set up in our office and we will be doing our best to keep an eye on the numbers. We will juggle and adjust the inventory when possible. 

Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Festival office as of Thursday, May 26. The office is open Monday to Friday, 9 am to 4:30 pm and is located at 5511 Shorncliffe Avenue in Sechelt.

If you have special seating requests, please call the office to make those arrangements between June 15 and August 10.

Thank you so much for your continued support of the Festival of the Written Arts. We look forward to talking to you in the weeks to come and to seeing you again, August 11-14, 2016 in Sechelt.