AFTER THE WHIRLWIND Chrissie Sains
I started in the pandemic, so all of my first school visits were virtual. I offered a free ten-minute Q&A session to classes who were reading my book via twitter and a lot of teachers took me up on the offer. Q&A sessions were actually a great starting point for me. It really put me at ease once I’d done a couple and it was also really useful to find out what the kids were interested in hearing about from me. It really helped when it came to putting together my author presentations!
Schools opened up again a couple of months after An Alien in the Jam Factory came out and I started by contacting all of my local schools to see if they’d like a free visit so that I could practice my in-person author talk. Two schools took me up on the offer. I was so nervous, but they actually went well and I discovered that I quite enjoyed them! It was also hugely useful to trial my author talk on them and really gave me a lot of confidence in doing it again.
I found that as a debut, I didn’t have a huge network of teachers and schools and so I started building that up via twitter. It wasn’t too tricky because the twitter reading community are just so lovely. I offered to send letters, emails, bookmarks or stickers to classes that were reading my book and that was always very much appreciated. It has lead to a number of requests for school visits both virtually and in person and I’ve made some great friends too. I’ve put loads of resources on my website for schools to use, which is often commented on. I was so proud recently when one school asked me to be their patron of reading – what an honour!
A year in and I can say I really enjoy school visits. I might have started out with crippling nerves but now that I’ve eased myself in, I get so much pleasure meeting children and hearing their thoughts and ideas. I’m finally getting unsolicited requests to go into schools from outside of my network and that’s just brilliant.
What’s next?
I’ve just had two new books come out, Treasure Under the Jam Factory (the second of the Jam Factory series) and I Got This, which I’ve co-authored with the incredible Cara Mailey so now I’m creating more resources and visiting a lot more schools! I’m really excited to engage and chat with the kids about the new books – it’s become one of my favourite parts of the job!
*
*
Website: www.shannonillustrates.com Instagram:@shannon.illustrates
*
No comments:
We love comments and really appreciate the time it takes to leave one.
Interesting and pithy reactions to a post are brilliant but we also LOVE it when people just say they've read and enjoyed.
We've made it easy to comment by losing the 'are you human?' test, which means we get a lot of spam. Fortunately, Blogger recognises these, so most, if not all, anonymous comments are deleted without reading.