I’ve been flipping through a book called The Making of a Bestseller: Success stories from authors and the editors, agents, and booksellers behind them by Brian Hill and Dee Power. The book is something of a mish-mosh, and most of the information is not relevant to me, but something said by the only YA author quoted in the book struck a chord with me this afternoon, and prompted me to put down the book and get on the internet.
In the section on promotion authors were talking about in-store signings. Christopher Paolini said that in-store signings are not very lucrative for writers and can be real hit or miss affairs. He pointed out that he has always done much better with school visits. Paolini noted that at store signings he would be lucky to sell 40 books, but visiting schools he often sold 300 books or more.
My internet search brought me to this post at Author 2 Author that just happened to be posted today on school author visits. How’s that for timing? Anyway a little more hunting did turn up some more school author visit information at Cynsations, with this interview with picture book author Toni Buzzeo on her school visits. Finally here’s a video with some footage of a visit by Chris Crutcher (if you scroll down on Crutcher’s website there is a link under For Educators that has some information on his school visits) to a high school that I dug up on YouTube:
Because of my day job (I sell books to libraries.) I know more librarians than bookstore owners, and I although I am still more than a year away from having a book of my own to sell, it might be time to think seriously about this school visit thing. Especially for an author starting out, I don’t feel I would want to charge a lot of money for school visits. If they were schools that I could drive to within, say, 2 hours (and I’m lucky enough to live in an area where they are a lot of schools that fit this bill) then travel expenses would be pretty minimal. Obviously, for further away visits I would have to charge additional money. Well, it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about this now. Have you done school visits? What are your thoughts on this?
My Books
