No funds to bring Kathy Stinson to your community in person? If you have a high-speed internet connection, why not consider hosting her by Skype?
With costs of mileage and accommodation eliminated for school and library visits (and the fee for a Skype visit is lower than for an in-person visit), you may be able to host an author visit after all, so your students can still enjoy the benefits of “meeting Kathy Stinson” – hearing her read from her books and perhaps a work-in-progress, asking her questions about her and her writing, and being inspired to read and to write.
There is no fee for speaking to Book Groups. Kathy just asks that members purchase her books directly through her well before your meeting date.)
You don’t even have to be tech-savvy to host a Skype visit. Here’s all you have to do.
- Sign up for a free Skype account.
- Email Kathy to arrange for a mutually convenient date and time to meet, and for a school or library visit to establish a reasonable fee and who the audience will be.
- Add Kathy to your Skype Contacts list. (To make this step easy, she’ll tell you her Skype name during your email exchange.)
- A day or two before the Skype visit you and Kathy can do a test run to make sure mics and cameras are working well and that a good connection is possible. (Or 15 minutes before, if you’ve had some experience with Skype and are feeling confident.)
- The day of the visit, gather the students or your Book Group in front of a computer screen. Click on Kathy’s Skype name to initiate the call. When she says ‘hi’ introduce her just as if she were sitting there in the room with you and she’ll take it from there.
