One day while walking through an airport in Copenhagen, a young boy tugged on his father’s sleeve, excitedly pointed toward me, and exclaimed,
“That’s the man who visited my school today!”
My wife Krista joked that she felt like she was with a rock star.
How this all got started is a long story that began back in 2008 after the publication of my first book, Woolbur. Before that, I didn’t have an inkling that school-visits were a thing. But when Woolbur began receiving critical acclaim and winning awards, my editor Phoebe Yeh at HarperCollins encouraged me to do school-visits, volunteering to accompany me on my first one. And so began my journey to becoming an elementary school rock star.
School-visits, it would turn out, were a perfect compliment to my budding picture book career. I always loved working with kids, it was a great way to stay connected to readers, a venue to reach new readers, and an opportunity to sell books. Above and beyond all that, school-visits are incredibly rewarding on a personal level. Creating picture books for a living becomes so much more gratifying when you venture into the wild and see for yourself how much joy your books bring to children. It’s an incredible feeling when you read the letters you receive after a visit, and years later when you meet grown children who tell you about the positive impact your visit made in their life. And did I mention it makes you feel like a rock star?
But it took a while for the school-visit rock star thing to gain traction. In my first four years of being amongst the ‘published’ I only did a handful of visits a year.
I’m sure part of the reason I didn’t do many visits in the early days is because I was not great at presenting to large audiences of elementary school children. Speaking in front of a large group of people did not come naturally to me. It wasn’t for lack of effort. I put a lot of work into my programs. Maybe too much. I tried to cram my entire life-story into each presentation. I spoke above the student’s grade levels. I was overly technical in my description of the process. I talked too fast. I didn’t engage the students enough. When they got chatty, I would talk over them. I was looking inward instead of outward. I had yet to learn how to read the audience and make it about them instead of me. In other words, I was too full of myself.
Once I learned how to focus on the individual children in the audience, and not on what was going on inside my head, my presentations improved. But it took a lot of time, and a lot of good advice from people with more experience than I had working with children. One helpful bit of advice I remember receiving was from school-visit agent Jean Block who was with me at a visit to my old hometown. When she noticed I was nervous she asked, “Why are you nervous?” and reminded me that, “Three quarters of your audience eats their own boogers.”
My geographic location also had a positive impact on my ability to develop my skills as a school-visitor. Living in a region where visiting-authors are a tradition allowed me the opportunity to sit-in on many author’s visits when they were passing through the area. I would recommend to anyone thinking about doing school-visits do the same.
There was also a wonderful bookstore in my town called Book Tender’s Secret Garden. In time I got to know the owner, Ellen Mager. Ellen was selling a ton of Woolbur at Booktender’s Secret Garden and I did my first book events at her store. She thought I had a good way with the kids and began hooking me up with some of her school clients. She had seen hundreds of author visits and was a wealth of information. She gave me lots of good ideas on how I could make my presentations more interactive and engaging.
Up until then, I’d just taken what came my way, but as the importance of school-visits became more and more evident to me, I began marketing for them. I created a spiffy school-visit brochure that I handed out at book festivals and librarian’s conferences. I got my name on lists of visiting authors on the internet, like Kim Norman’s AuthorsbyState.com.
My marketing efforts gradually brought in more school-visit work. Then, because I was getting better at the craft, I began getting referrals from the librarians whose schools I visited. When I did an excellent job at their school, they would tell other librarians, “You’ve got to bring Lee Harper to your school.” Every visit was an audition for the next visit. Do a great job and the word gets out.
Then in 2013 I did thirty visits. After 2013 I stayed busy, averaging around twenty-five visits a year until the pandemic shut it all down.
My school visit routine has evolved organically over the years. I’d try a little something new with every visit, and if it worked, I’d keep it. If not, into the scrap bin it would go. I’ve now amassed enough keepers that I can pull one out of my hat whenever I feel the need to change things up. This helps keep things fresh, and prevents me from growing bored of my own presentations.
A typical visit includes three one-hour presentations in a day. Each one-hour presentations is divided into two main segments. The first segment consists of a PowerPoint talk in which I introduce myself, tell the story of how I became a picture book author/illustrator, explain where my ideas come from, and show how I make my books. This usually takes about ten minutes for the littles, up to a half hour for the bigs.
After the Powerpoint segment there is a five-minute intermission to allow the children to remove the ants from their pants. This process involves something physical like doing the ‘Woolbur stretch’ or singing the ‘Turkey song’.
The second segment of each presentation consists of guided drawings where the students learn how to use basic shapes to draw some of my characters. During this segment I am standing with a king size Sharpie at an easel with a large pad of paper and the children each have a pencil and three sheets of paper.
Drawing Woolbur is always a big hit with pre-K through 3. We usually make him a little extra scribbly and I let the little artists know that it’s OK if their drawing doesn’t look exactly like mine.
“Your Woolbur wouldn’t be Woolbur if he looked the same as all the other Woolburs,” I explain.
Older students enjoy drawing Oswego Pete, a character from a Walter Dean Myers book I illustrated.
The grand finale of all the guided drawing segments is always drawing Turkey, although I don’t tell the kids what we are drawing. Instead, it is a mystery to be slowly revealed. Over the years, this routine has evolved into a game show of sorts that involves me giving the students softball clues and asking them to raise their hand if they think they know the answer. Example:
Me: “This is a type of candy with red and white stripes popular around Christmas.”
Selected student: “A candy cane?”
Me: After asking a child in the front row to hand me the (imaginary) envelope.
“Drum roll please…. and the answer is…” I pretend to open and read an envelope.
“CANDY CANE! Give a big round of applause to the student with the correct answer candy cane!”
I draw a candy cane shape on the large pad of paper and ask the students to draw the same shape on their paper. This routine continues with lots of silliness until we have drawn a turkey. The funniest part is when we draw the turkey toes, and all the kids get grossed-out. I am not sure why this is, but I roll with it.
After we have drawn Turkey, I ask the children to raise their hand if they can think of something we might add to Turkey so Turkey doesn’t look like a turkey. The kids love showing me their drawings when we’re done disguising Turkey.
During a school-visit I will sign as many books as there are to sign. If there are a lot, I’ll begin before the first presentation begins, sign some at lunch, then if necessary, I will finish up after the school day is done. I draw a little doodle in each book if time permits. I have always liked to get everything done in one day, but sometimes if there’s more than a hundred books to sign, and it’s a school I can drive to, I will sign the books in advance.
I have never sold my own books, preferring to support booksellers. Using a bookseller who knows how to handle book sales for a school visit makes life so much easier for a school presenter and allows the focus to be 100% on the children and not on selling books. Booksellers, by the way, are excellent referral sources.
As my picture book career unfolded, school visits became my primary source of income for many years. It wasn’t until the recent explosion in popularity of the Turkey Trouble Series that book royalties became my primary source of income.
I’m now an old pro with over 250 school visits under my belt and still counting. I’d estimate that I’ve personally interacted with over 100,000 children. I’ve visited schools in faraway places like Oaxaca, Copenhagen, and Wyoming…
…and in nearby places like New Jersey, Maryland, and my home state of Pennsylvania, where it seems like I’ve been in just about every small town east of the Susquehanna.
I still love visiting schools, and surprisingly, many aspects of presenting to children have gotten easier for me. I guess after doing so many visits I have developed a level of confidence that I can handle anything thrown my way, and I worry less about acting like a turkey.
