Points for Good Behavior

by Joan Frank

This year, for the first time in my fairly long writing life, I agreed to perform volunteer work helping recruit authors for a longstanding, local annual book festival.

Innocent-sounding, yes?

It meant, on its surface, contacting writers, inviting them to discuss their work on Festival day. It meant I'd give them directions and descriptions and schedules and parking information.  

More grittily: it meant entering into a vast world of logistics. Who'd read where, when. Venues, times, arrangements, props, publicity. It meant meeting weekly to hammer out this stuff with other volunteers. It meant seeking accommodation by city government and local merchants. It meant working the event, making introductions, hosting, worrying about tablecloths and sound systems and that guy who arrives to repair tiles at the restaurant where the panel discussion is about to start; whether audiences can easily find the right venues for the authors; whether book sales tables are visible enough. 

These are not activities I'd normally want to come near. 

Such volunteerism brought, for me, an unsettling reversal. The Festival is the kind of gig I've always hankered to be invited to, as an author. It never occurred to me to consider switching sides. But because my home county recently named me "literary artist of the year" and gave me a marvelous financial grant, it struck me as fitting and even necessary that I should, in the old terminology, give back.  

Also, I'd be encouraging readers of all ages and backgrounds to love books.  

So I agreed to do it. 

Seven months of planning culminated in a single, six-hour day. The festival went well, give or take a dozen glitches.

But what truly shocked me is how fast I learned what an author should not do—if she means to be remembered warmly by literary event organizers who work maniacally, for no pay, to assure a smooth operation.  

One can find, online, all manner of lists in this vein. My own list of rules is shorter. These opinions are mine alone, and no official entity's. 

Respond promptly to invitations. Produce requested materials promptly. A no-brainer, right? And yet. 

Gather and record all needed information early. Do not wait until the last week before the event to pepper organizers with questions and demands. Organizers are half-crazy with last-minute tasks by then, and your name and voice will stick in their minds as someone who created, and sustained, problems. 

Do not ask for special accommodations and services unless these are absolutely physically vital. You may feel, if you manage to insist on travel money or other reimbursements, that you have triumphed in some Authorial Rights contest. Bear in mind that most literary colloquia operate on goodwill and insanely sparse private donations. You may be remembered as the author who cost the program extra dough and created more humbug. In their places, would you ask yourself back? 

Do not cancel your commitment to the event unless it is absolutely unavoidable. If organizers have already publicized your participation, which is likely, this will cause embarrassment and difficulty for them.  

If you are asked to bring copies of your book for consignment sales, cheerfully bring them. Do not insist angrily that the event do it. If you have any sense of current obligations incumbent on writers, you'll know you always need to keep on hand a goodly number of your own books for sale. Bookstores have fraught relations with small and university presses, for complicated reasons involving returns. I've hauled boxes of my own books to readings for consignment sales since I've been writing. And though I loathe it—one writer friend declares she "feels like a brush salesman"—it's a reality of publishing with a small press. It's not the event's fault or responsibility.  

Be ready to roll with a few weird punches; invent cheerful adaptations. One author I know (and now triply admire) bravely gave her excellent reading and discussion at an outdoor setting where a high wind sometimes made white noise into her microphone. Members of her audience came and went, and when I escorted her across the street for a signing we found the book sales table in chaos, with one poor overworked woman struggling to slide credit cards through one of those portable metal gizmos. Books were stacked chaotically. There appeared to be no extra chairs.  

My brilliant friend looked around, borrowed a chair from elsewhere, and popped herself into an available corner. From that moment I silently blessed her, resolving to be more like her should a similar situation accost me—which, if life is life, it will.

Another much-heralded author arrived to read in the festival's biggest room—following a previous famous author who, after reading and moving away to sign books, took most of her gigantic audience with her. Author Two graciously read and talked genially with her now-much-smaller audience. (Fortunately, both authors were friends.) 

The main shock to an author who switches sides—me—is the revelation that all refined, interior sensitivities and perceptions must be tossed away. The event must function: it’s as simple as that. Reading is the celebrated cause. Exposure of well-intended, curious people to writers and books is the goal. So the imagined bruises or slights or depressions an individual author may privately indulge, can't matter.  

The examples I cite go on, but their gist is clear: Be the kind of author you'd love working with if you were one of these events' organizers. Organizers have lives they're freely forfeiting to showcase books and writers. An author with any wits will hasten to help them help her. 

Will I do it again? 

One more year. Then it's back, exhaling with relief, to private sensitivities.

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