Tips for Teachers: Author Visits Part Seven – School Tours
In addition to school visits in their local city or geographic area, authors often travel and usually try to arrange tours of schools in other parts of the country. This can involve a working week in an area, with either full days at five different schools, ten half-day visits, or a combination of this.
Such tours can be a challenge for an author to organize, considering the bookings themselves and all the arrangements, which will vary from school to school, plus travel, accommodation, meals and so on. However, in the best case scenario, one teacher may make all the arrangements for the author, contacting his or her colleagues at other nearby schools, setting up an itinerary, arranging for transportation between venues and even organizing accommodation in someone’s home.
The author’s books might have proved very popular in your school. Your classes may have completed novel studies using one or more of the author’s titles or you might simply have loved the author’s work and want to make your students more aware of their books. Most authors have websites and blogs so are usually relatively easy to contact. Yet if they live in a different part of the country, you’ll incur additional costs on top of the author’s fee for a school or library visit.
However, although each school will be responsible for covering their own fee, other expenditures can be minimized if the costs of the accommodation and travel, for example, are shared equally between all the schools involved in the tour. It can certainly be a lot of work if you’re the one organizing everything in the local area, perhaps on behalf of up to ten schools, but an author tour can be very worthwhile, raising the profile of an author with children and parents. On many occasions the local media will also take an interest. They sometimes send photographers and reporters to cover one or more of the author’s appearances, giving valuable publicity to your school and its programs.
