Although I write for both adults and kids, most of the book-readings I do are kids’ books, both to audiences of pre-schoolers and to audiences of school-age kids in after-school care. My usual M.O. is to bring with me small slips of paper on which I have printed the book’s title, the publisher’s website, and the suggestion that the parents buy their kids whatever book it is that I am presenting that day.Now, Roundtable is not my only publisher, and indeed it was another publisher altogether whose book of mine I was reading on Monday. The publisher had supplied me with a .jpg of a picture from the book, which kids could color in, and I had pasted the .jpg onto a Word doc with the ordering info I usually put on the small slips. I printed out a sufficient quantity of these to pass among the kids and went off to the book-reading armed with a stack of these promotional materials.
When I first started doing these readings, I used to wait till after I’d read the book before passing out the promotional slips. But if I was scheduled to read in the afternoon, it would often happen that several parents would come to pick up their kids in the middle of my reading, and they wouldn’t get the slips to take home. So Monday—another afternoon reading—I had the bright idea—I thought—to pass out the coloring pages with the ordering info on them BEFORE I started reading.
My thought was that the kids would color the pages after I was finished, and they would then bring them home to show their parents, who would see the book ordering info and maybe buy the book…. Well…. The best-laid plans…you know what they say about them….
After making sure that everyone had a sheet, I began to read. The kids listened raptly, and all was going well.
But then, about halfway through the book, one little boy in the front row began industriously turning his coloring sheet into a paper airplane. I interrupted my reading to gently chide him, “Hey, if you do that you won’t be able to color the picture,” but he continued his folding operation. Soon the other kids saw him and began to follow suit, and not long thereafter we had a room full of paper airplanes.
From the questions the kids asked during the Q&A that followed the reading, it was obvious that they had been listening to me even while constructing their aircraft, and also that they had enjoyed the book…but my plans for promoting the book were “grounded.”
I don’t think any of the pictures EVER got colored, and I seriously question if any of the papers ever made it home to the parents, who had the purchase power, either. <long sigh> But there sure was a lot of air traffic in that classroom.
Next time I’ll go back to just slips of paper.