21 February 2006

One Book Events

Last night was the second of our One Book events - a "meet the writer" event. The previous Friday we had storytelling with cellist accompanying - a small intimate group of about 30 people.

Our author talk had an audience of over 100 people. The boss left me to be the MC - my co-workers seem to have a fear of public speaking, but I think my experiences of addressing lecture theatres full of bored students on orientation days, regaling them with the benefits of using the library have stood me in good stead.

However, this event was about the
author - she was very warm, unaffected, and entertaining with her anecdotes of her experiences that helped her write the book.

One thing brought home to me was the importance of promotion and how to angle the advertising for our events. We'd hoped for a larger audience for Friday's function. On the poster I'd put "for ages from 12 upwards", which probably made people think that it was aimed at teenagers, which it wasn't. Also, the word "storytelling", really didn't do justice to the reader's rendition of the book, which made the characters come alive, and gave them voices, accents, intonations and insinuations that were defintitely not aimed at a young audience.

Note to self: keep this in mind for next time.

3 comments:

flexnib said...

Did any Curtin people make it? I'm sorry I didn't!

Sputty said...

No Curtin people, but I ran into someone who was at library school with me a few years ago....

Anonymous said...

Went to the Author talk in Kal, you had a crowd...myself and 7 others listened with interest to her tales. Needs more promotion up here as well. TB-)