HOW TO DO SCHOOL VISITS AS A UK YA AUTHOR

I am going to be honest with you: when I started arranging school visits to discuss my debut Young Adult novel, The Nicest Girl, I was straight-up nervy. I’m a fledgling author with absolutely zero teaching experience, and all of a sudden I had questions. BIG QUESTIONS.

How was my book supposed to translate to a classroom? Was I expected to walk in with some sort of vast, in-built knowledge of the current curriculum?? What if I made a presentation that was supposed to take forty minutes but ended up taking ten? Would anybody intervene if a child said, “THIS IS BORING” or “I HATE SOPHIE JO, I WISH WE’D HAD MATHS INSTEAD”???

As you can imagine, these kind of questions became a bit overwhelming. I didn’t want to ask for advice publicly, on Twitter or Instagram, because it felt like an admission of Not Good Enough or Not Professional Enough. But I didn’t want to crack on solo, assume I knew best, and get it wrong, either. So I buried my head in the sand for a few months, finally asked for help, sat down and got on with a plan, fine-tuned it, and THEN came out ready to go – and now, multiple school visits down, I’m writing the blog post I wish I’d had a couple of years ago.

Work out what you want to talk about

This is the most daunting part of it all – but often, there are people around who can help you work it out. For example, do you have a friend who works as an English teacher or a librarian in a school? Is your publisher happy to send you some examples of presentations from other authors they work with? The more guidance you can get to sift through, the better. I spoke to a lovely fellow author, who sent me some ideas from her own school visits and gave me some reassurance that I was on the right tracks.

However, if the answer to the questions above is a hard no, you’re gonna have to suss this out yourself. And you know what, THAT’S OK. YOU CAN DO IT. I would recommend starting with a lil mindmap of what you think your visit could be about. No pressure, just thoughts n vibes. Here’s what you could provide for schools:

A class session to discuss the themes of your book
A writers workshop (what is the apostrophe situation here? writer’s? writers’?? Who knows. Not this writer, that’s for sure)
A talk about you, your work and your journey to publication
An assembly for multiple classes or yeargroups
An author signing of sorts, e.g. something in the library at lunchtime

Have a think about which of these you’d like to offer. Maybe it’s all of them, maybe it’s a few, maybe it’s just one. I personally cannot stand the idea of speaking about myself for twenty minutes to an entire assembly-hall of children. The thought makes me feel physically ill. However, in smaller groups, where I’m focusing more on the book itself and hosting a bunch of activities, I’m a hoot.

So, that’s fine. We can play to our strengths. You know how some stuff is scary-but-definitely-doable-and-worth-it, and other stuff is scary-in-the-kind-of-way-where-you’d-definitely-be-waking-up-at-4am-to-worry-about-it-for-a-solid-month-in-advance? My advice to you is: go with the former. You shouldn’t be forcing yourself into stuff you’re not comfortable with – you want to be excited about your visits, AND you want to be providing the best possible sessions for your teens and teachers.

There’s other stuff to consider as well, but I’d say the best question to ask yourself is what the students – and the school – are going to get out of this. A 60-minute talk about how great you are and why they should definitely buy your book? Probably likely to lose your teens. But an in-depth session that covers how you achieved your goal and how they can apply it to themselves? An interactive discussion about a topic from your book that genuinely affects them? Much better.

I like stuff that’s THEME-BASED. Say, for argument’s sake, that your book is about bullying. If you wanted to get an hour-long class session planned out, you could consider:

Themes – What are the themes of your book? e.g. bullying, friendship, kindness, found family, relationship dynamics, etc etc. How could these themes translate to class activities that get everyone involved? I know I mentioned the curriculum earlier but I was v much joking – what you provide here doesn’t need to be ticking boxes in terms of that stuff. Your session is supposed to be different from the norm! An author visit! A treat! If it’s well-delivered and fun and engaging, that’s great.
Activities – I like to do a game called ‘Nice or too nice?’, where I read out fictitious scenarios and ask the class to discuss and vote on whether they think someone was ‘nice’ or ‘too nice’. It’s normally pretty divisive and it helps to get them to grips with what the session is about, while also providing some good ~learning opportunities~ about boundary-setting without it feeling too preachy. But the best part is that it means they’re not just sitting or listening for ages – they’re actively invited to get involved.
Readings – I am a big fan of doing readings from my book, The Nicest Girl, as we go through, because it helps to contextualise the activities that we’re taking part in. It’s also just a lovely thing to BE READ TO. Kids of all ages get a lot from it, I really do believe that.
About you – What do you want to tell the class about yourself and your work? I find it’s nice to do a super-short intro right at the beginning of the session, so they know who you are and what to expect – but I mean SUPER-SHORT; in my opinion you can’t expect a group of teenagers to care about you and your achievements at the get-go. They have bigger fish to fry. It’s more fun to finish with a Q&A, when they’re more invested in you as a person and they have a bit more context.
Learnings – What would you like the class to leave your session with? An understanding of the topics of your book? A better knowledge of the publishing industry? A new take on a subject? I think it helps to work that out first, and then go back to fine-tune the detail.

Make a school visit guide to send out

When you’ve got an idea of what you can offer to schools, put together a visit guide and get ready to send it out as your calling card. I used Canva to make mine – you can put together a pretty decent-looking pdf for free on there and download it. Here’s what I include in mine:

Front cover – Image of the book / Title and your name / Age-group (e.g. 12+).
Page 1 – About the author / About the book.
Page 2 – Visit options – List everything out, with a brief summary and a price. Think ahead about what your schools might want, e.g. a half-day or full-day option, a one-off visit, etc. Can you be flexible with your pricing? Will you offer a discount if they book two back-to-back events?
Page 3 – Extra details – e.g. travel costs, book suppliers, your contact details, stuff you’d like them to confirm in advance of the day (we’ll touch more on this later!).

Work out your pricing

This is another hard part, because everyone feels very differently about this kind of thing and the UK is notoriously bad at discussing money, so it all feels a bit hush-hush.

Some authors offer their visits for free, especially if they’re a debut, because it’s more about ‘getting the word out’ for them. I personally charge for my visits, because I think it’s important to value the preparation time and hard work that goes into them, and I think this is generally the more common view to take. That said, it’s important to remember that schools are struggling massively with budgets at the moment – so consider if you have any potential wiggle-room to offer. For example, will you offer a discounted rate if a school books two back-to-back sessions rather than a one-off?

This Society of Authors has some really helpful guidance for authors visiting schools and libraries, with additional info about rates and pricing:

Here’s some other stuff you might want to consider:

Are you taking time off work to do these visits? Will you lose out on money as a result?
Conversely, are you a full-time author? If so, this is a big part of your author earning potential. What feels comfortable as a day rate or hour rate?
How much time are you putting into your visits? Most of the time it’s several hours, minimum – liaising and admin, prep, PowerPoint presentations, rehearsals, travel time, the session itself, follow-up, invoicing, etc. I’d say each hour-long visit involves something like five hours of ‘other stuff’ for me.
Will you have the opportunity to sell many books at your session? For example, if you’re guaranteed 100 book sales because you’re doing an assembly and the books have been pre-ordered, you might feel it’s appropriate to charge a little less for the assembly itself.

Approach schools

I did this by literally walking to my local secondary school to say HI, I AM A LOCAL AUTHOR, CAN WE BE FRIENDS? Luckily the librarians said yes, sure, come on in, so I had a coffee with them and donated a book to their library. We talked about a school visit and arranged something there and then, and they also very kindly passed on my details to a few other nearby schools, who got in touch as a result.

I’d recommend having a school-visit-specific email address or contact form on your website, so that teachers and librarians can contact you directly. Also, make use of your contacts! If you have friends or family members with school links, that’s definitely worth exploring. Lots of people use Twitter to ask more publicly, too. You could also approach your old secondary school, if the thought of returning doesn’t strike fear into your sweet sweet heart like it does mine.

Another thought, particularly post-pandemic: will you do your sessions face-to-face or via Zoom? What do you prefer – or maybe you’re happy to offer both? I personally am a Zoom hater – I find it makes me kind of dissociate from the scenario at hand, whereas in person I feel very engaged. Other people much prefer online sessions, because they can present from the comfort of their own home and easily build relationships with schools far and wide. There’s no right or wrong answer here, but worth considering.

Approach bookshops

An author visit is a rare opportunity to get your book into the hands of your target audience – but how are you supposed to rock up with 30, 50, or even 100 copies of your own novel? The answer, my friend, is: LOCAL BOOKSHOPS, who are super well-versed in this kind of thing and will likely be very happy to help.

Here’s how it works, in my experience:

The author speaks to the school and works out how many books are required.
The author checks if the school has an existing relationship with any local bookshops. If yes, the school may prefer to contact the bookshop themselves. If not:
The author contacts the bookshop, introduces themself and asks if the bookshop has capacity to order in and deliver X amount of books to X school on X day. Sometimes the bookshop will offer a small discount on these – for example, if you’re expecting to sell 30 books, the bookseller might agree that these can be sold at £6 each, instead of the usual £7.99.
If the bookshop says yes, the author then passes the details of their school contact (e.g. librarian) over to the bookshop, so the bookshop can liaise with the school contact and work out when/where to deliver the books.
On the day of / day before the visit, the bookshop delivers the books to the school.
During / before / after the event itself, the author will tell pupils that they are able to buy a book if they’d like one. Often the author will sign these books for individual pupils as they’re purchased.
Any books that aren’t sold will be collected by the bookshop, along with their money from book sales. The bookshop will then keep the remaining books to sell in-store or potentially return them to their stockist.

One absolutely vital tip: work out in advance how you’ll take payment! It can be very easy to assume that it’ll all be FINE and SIMPLE and that everyone will turn up with EXACTLY £6 IN CHANGE – but realistically, that absolutely won’t happen. People don’t use cash so much anymore, and parents are busy. Would you like the school to take payment for you? Can you ask them in advance to advise their students to bring cash? How will they offer change when someone inevitably drops a £20 note on the table? Will there be an I-O-U? Does the school have a ParentPay-esque option they could make use of for this event? Do you have a portable card machine you could bring?

I know it feels like a lot to work out, but it will make things so much easier on the day. It also means you’re more likely to get sales, because you’ve made the book-buying experience easier for your audience.

Be prepared

What do you want to take with you? I have a gigantic backpack that I pack the night before with:

a copy of my book, and a proof (just looks cool to take two of the same book with a different cover)
a couple of book stands, so they’re upright when I display them and easier to be seen
a few whiteboard markers and some flipchart paper
a USB stick, with my presentation on. Tip: also upload your presentation to some kind of cloud, in case your USB doesn’t work on the day or isn’t accepted on school computers.
a signing pen
some postcards of my front cover – this is an idea I got from Alexandra Sheppard’s insanely helpful blog post on this same topic. You can get your own book-y postcards printed and hand them out at the end of the lesson. I find a lot of students really like these and will often ask for them to be signed (<3). It’s also a nice way to include everyone who’d like to be included – not everyone will be able to afford a book, and not everyone will come from a household that is engaged with these sorts of visits.

Good luck!

Your bag’s packed, your presentation’s ready and your school visit is good to go! Sending you lots of luck and confidence for your sessions – remember, you are an AUTHOR with some WISDOM and some GREAT THOUGHTS TO SHARE. Your visit won’t be every pupil’s cup of tea, and that’s fine, but it will also be what leaves some children excited to go home and read, or inspired to write their first chapter, or even just seen and a little bit more understood because of the themes you’ve been discussing. That in itself is the coolest thing in the world.

Enjoyed this post? Wanna read some more of my writing? Cool! I wrote a Young Adult romcom, RED FLAGS – I’d love for you to check it out.