Brad Hooper - The Librarians Guide to Book Programs and Author Events

B ehind the curtain, I await the launch of the author program. I am within a couple minutes of being announced as the program moderator by the evenings master of ceremonies. There are five of usfour authors and Istanding in a line, in the order by which we will be announced and brought out onto the stage. We wait in silence as we hear the master of ceremonies extend his welcome to the audience and express his appreciation for their attending this event, and he promises it will be an educational, even exciting, hour and a half of listening to four noted authors discussing their writing lives.

All the authors are recognizably pros at this; I notice that not one is showing signs of nervousness. These four authors, their handlers, and ALA conference officials, along with me, had assembled in the greenroom only a half hour before, but that proved sufficient time for enough acquaintance to be established among us to achieve a degree of comfort for all of us; in other words, we were already a team. I had indicated to the ALA conference officials the order in which I would like the authors to speak, and that, of course, indicated the order in which we now stood backstage. The order of speaking determined the seating arrangement on stage, and that of course was important for allowing the sound technicians to follow the plan from backstage: meaning, they knew when to turn on and turn off mikes for each of the speakers.

Author number one is introduced, who then, as rehearsed, slips out from the curtains that are held apart by a stagehand at the back of the stage, and amid applause she takes her seat. Five big comfortable chairs have been arranged in a shallow U-shaped formation on the stage. Author number two, number three, and number four. And then I hear myself introduced.

I step out onto the stage and blink in the bright lights; its like a TV studio. My sight quickly recovers and I find my chair, in the center of the U, and sit down. I look out over an audience of 700 people. I momentarily freeze. My goodness, I say to myself, what have I agreed to do? My well-rehearsed script, my knowledgeable preparation, abandons me for a second or two. High anxiety! Wouldnt I prefer doing anything else but this? Didnt the old adage that most people would choose a root canal over public speaking apply to me at this point?

There are few moments of dead reckoning as those you experience when walking onto a stage to come face-to-face with rows and rows of people staring intently at you, anticipating your performance. Public speaking, singing, acting, playing a musical instrument: all the same when it comes to the instant assault on your nerves from having to begin your performance immediately, because the launch of the program depends entirely on you, and is completely in your hands; nothing else can begin until you do. There can be no hiding now, no stepping back and letting events begin on their own. You tell yourself that most people in the audience are on your side, expecting your program to be wonderful, but then there is always that little voice in your head, telling you that there are always holdouts in an audience, and they dont expect much from you.

Once Ive opened my lips and the few dry words that have gathered there are expelled from my desiccated mouth, I find that the next words emerge smoothly flowing, indicating to the audience that those few initial dry words have been spit out and now will be followed by smoothly gliding, safe and secure words that indicate I am in control of the program.

At this point, I am on my way to successfully maintaining the audiences attention for the next hour and a half. My comfort voice, which resides in the back of my mind, congratulates me on a successful lift-off, and being perpetually in my corner, it reminds me that I am aiming my program at various levels of interest in the audience, some eager and highly expectant of great results as well as those who will remain skeptical until nearly the end. My comfort voice says, Youll want to score a direct hit at those skeptics, who assume they have nothing to learn here today. I am determined to prove those people wrong.

The above scenario is a typical situation faced by every public speaker, faced by every librarian who speaks before an audience, whether it is an audience of six individuals or six hundred individuals. This is particularly the situation of the typical librarian who finds herself, in the course of her readers advisory and collection development duties, placed into a public speaking situation; being typical, the librarian often approaches such a situation armed with little experience in speaking before a group, large or small. Generally, librarians are untrained in public speaking because it is not part of the typical library science or information science curriculum. Nor is public speaking a particularly essential quality in a practicing librarian. The one-on-one connection with a library patronthe classic reference interviewdoes not count here. Comfort in that situation does not necessarily translate to an at-ease attitude when speaking publically.

The public speaking scenario Ive just described to you was real. It actually took place, and new versions of that same basic programwith different authors, of coursehave continued to take place at every Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association. It is called the Author Forum and it occurs late Friday afternoon during Midwinter, just before the opening of exhibit hall, where it seems the entire publishing world is presenting their new wares in booths both large and small for the benefit of librarians attending the conference. The Author Forum program is more or less the official opening of the conference itself.