Acknowledgments

This book is offered freely under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It owes its existence to knowledge that was written by no single author and does not belong to this book.

To the lead planners who taught by letting someone carry the binder. Nearly everything technical here — the order you strike a room in, why you put the family photos before the ceremony when the light is bad, the reason you never let the couple hold the rings, the trick of telling the band 8:15 when you mean 8:30 — came out of an oral tradition passed from planner to assistant across decades. Nobody published it. Nobody was paid for it. It survived because experienced people decided to teach.

To the vendors who are not planners and who make the day happen anyway. The caterers who feed a hundred and forty people out of a tent with two convection ovens. The florists who are up at 4 a.m. at the flower market. The rental crews who load a truck in the dark. The photographers who have shot nine hundred first dances and still find the shot. The bartenders, the sound engineers, the shuttle drivers, the venue managers, the people who set 140 places and then set them again because the seating chart changed. This book spends a great deal of time on how to work with you well, because the planners who do are the ones whose events run.

To the couples and clients who let people learn on their day. Every planner's first event belonged to somebody. That somebody trusted a person who had never done it before, and mostly it went fine, and the trade continued.

To the authors whose books mapped this territory first. The published literature on event planning is thinner than the industry deserves, but it is not empty, and the works listed in the Bibliography — particularly the practitioner texts by Judy Allen and the design work of Preston Bailey — established that this could be taught from a book at all.

To the professional associations that have done the unglamorous work of building standards, ethics codes, and certification pathways in a field that could easily have gone without any: they are named in Appendix C, and they are worth your membership dues.

To the people who will correct this book. It is open source for a reason. Trade knowledge decays, prices move, software gets bought and ruined, and a description of a cultural tradition written in general terms is always poorer than one written by someone who grew up inside it. If you work in this industry and you find something here that is wrong — or right but three years out of date — the contributing guide explains how to fix it, and fixing it is a genuine contribution to everyone who reads this next.

Every couple, vendor, venue, and event named in this book is a composite created for teaching purposes and does not depict any real person or business.