At my current school, the library usually hosts 2 authors visit a year, one per semester. They take a lot of work, but the community appreciates the opportunity to meet authors and performers.

Enter a Google search of “how to make the most of author visits” and you get tips from many different sources, including school and librarian publications, publishing companies, and even authors.  While these are useful, I’ve had to learn about the details myself the hard way.

We are in the process of deciding our author visits for next year. We are considering two authors, one who wrote the play the MS drama department will be staging next year, and the other more geared to the elementary school. That author wrote one of the books in our “one school, one read” short list.

Other considerations for choosing author visitors are curriculum tie-ins. We recently had Ying Chang Compestine visiting the middle school. She writes historical fiction and she led writing workshops for the grade 6 who are engaged in an historical fiction literacy unit. She was also able to talk to the 7th and 8th graders of her experience as a child during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and enhance their social studies units.

When I was in the elementary school, I found that the most memorable authors were the ones who were also performers. We try to kick off the author visit with a whole school assembly. This is not always possible because of calendar limitations, but when we do have that assembly, it’s the authors who put on a show that are the most effective in engaging with students. Some great presenters have been Steve Skidmore, Kenn Nesbitt, Giles Abbot and Harry Baker. That’s not to say that other authors who have visited have not been engaging; it’s just that these have been particularly good performers.

Now to the nitty-gritty of the author visit planning. Here are some of the things I do: (Note that we’re an international school and our authors most always come to us from abroad.)

• logistics (I’m lucky enough to have assistants to help with this)
  • letter of invitation to author, setting out details of fees, dates, lodging, transportation – all this has been negotiated with the author, but I find it essential to have one document to collect all the information.
  • hotel booking – our school gets a business rate
  • airfare – we have an embedded travel agent at our school, but sometimes we set an amount for a travel stipend and the author books his or her own
  • transportation
    • from and to the airport at either end of the visit
    • to school and back to the hotel
    • to evening entertainment
  • visas
    • our embedded travel agency has people to meet our visitors and walk them through the visa-on-arrival process
• student engagement
  • we purchase extra copies of the author’s books so that we can promote their reading before the visit
  • we set up a schedule of sessions for with the different grade levels. In the elementary school, it has worked best to have grade level assemblies with each grade. In the middle school, teachers have preferred a writing workshop model instead of a performance.
  • we hand out bookmarks with the timetable on the back to help build up anticipation

• community engagement
  • we set up a special session for parents
  • we set up book signings after school with books by the author sourced through local bookstores
  • we share lots of photos of the visit during the time the author is at school through our social media
• promotion
  • we use Canva and PhotoShop to create posters to post around school and bookmarks with the author schedule on one side. (I’m lucky to have an assistant with a good sense of graphic design to take care of this, but in my previous school I did it myself. With online publishing services like Canva, it’s quite easy and even fun.)
  • we post the posters on social media, starting about 3 weeks before the visit
  • we post items in the school newsletters
  • when possible, we have our library student advisory board/s announce at assemblies in the run up to the visit
  • we let our advancement office know; they arrange for photos and interviews for their own publicity to parents and alumni
• post visit
  • we elicit feedback from students and teachers
  • we post summaries of the visit, with photos
  • we keep one poster, autographed by the author on the history wall of our workroom
  • we keep a display of books by the author for a couple of weeks to capitalize on interest
• author hospitality
  • receive at airport and transfer to hotel (our embedded travel agency handles this)
  • we schedule evening meals and/or entertainment for the author with different groups of teachers
  • we introduce the author to our embedded travel agent in case they want to sightsee at their own expense before or after their time with us
  • souvenir gift and promotional materials like posters and bookmarks

It’s a lot of work, but ultimately, it is very satisfying to connect students with authors.