Tips for Skype Author Visit: Be Prepared

More and more, librarians and teachers are using video conferencing software to connect with authors. Before I did my first Skype Author Visit today, with a school in Arlington, VA, I went through several fine-tunings of my setup. These are all small tweaks, but I felt like they were important to let me relax and enjoy the presentation.

Turn Your Office into a Video Studio

Lighting. My office is a dark attic, perfect for writing, but not good at all for a video studio. Looking around for tutorials on lighting for video shoots, I saw that it was important to have three types of lights.

Main light at about 2 o’clock to light one side of the face. It needs to be strong enough to light up your face without glare. Because I have an attic office, I just use a shop light and bounce it off the nearby ceiling.

The main light is about 2 o'clock from my face, bouncing off the ceiling.

The secondary light just bounced light onto the opposite cheek.

Camera. With the lights in place check the camera settings.

• Tilt. Is it capturing your full face? I also position the screen showing small shot of myself as near the camera as possible, so I am mostly looking at the camera.
• Reverse Image. I also found it better to reverse or flip the image that I’m seeing of myself. That way, if I reach up to touch my hair, it looks right to me.
• Zoom. Zoom in or out until you get a shoulder shot. I like it zoomed out enough so you can easily see my gestures, because I talk a lot with my hands. It also gives a small window into my office and sometimes, I got questions about my unabridged dictionary which is on a book shelf behind me.
• Color balance.
  • Set the white balance first.
    Click on Auto-focus on the white balance. Hold your foam core or other white object about where you’ll be seated. Let the auto-settings work. Then, click OFF the auto-focus, forcing it to stay at that setting. My office has windows, so I do this check each time I do a video, to allow for differences in light coming from the windows.
  • Then set brightness, contrast and color balance to your liking. I like to balance the color closer to the b/w side, so it’s not glaring.

Turn Yourself into a Movie Star

Make-up. With 3-4x the light, you’ll need makeup. I’m a minimal make-up person, but I’ve found that it helps to pay attention to my eyes and to add a bright red shade of lipstick. This helps make me stand out.
Also, if you tend to have dark circles under your eyes, adjust the lighting to avoid this, and use a yellow-toned concealer, or look for something like Ooh La Lift , which lightens this area. Use the screen capture function of the camera to take shots of yourself for comparison

Clothes. Test a couple colors and styles of clothing. Use the webcam to take a series of pictures for comparison.

Triple Check All Equipment

Once you have the lighting, makeup and clothes right, test your microphone using Skype’s call service. Finally, try a test call with a school a day or so before the real thing to make sure that all equipment is functioning on both sides. I like it if any face-tracking software is turned OFF during the visit. Face-tracking tries to find a face and focus on it; but with a classroom or even just a couple people, it tends to move from face to face and I find this distracting.

Lights, Camera, Action!

10 Minutes Before.

• Last equipment test. About ten minutes before, test your equipment one last time.
• Props. Gather all your books as props, and any other props you plan to use (I forgot to do this on the first Q&A, but made a beeline for the books before the second).


Make sure you have your props nearby. Water, too.

• Review purpose and audience. Make sure you know the age of the audience and what type presentation you are being asked to do and make sure you’re ready for that. For example, you might have sent ahead a handout for the kids, or perhaps a Powerpoint which they will show at the same time they show your video feed.
• Water. Also, if you need it, set a cup of water beside your computer/camera set up.
• Minimize disturbances. Turn your phone off or to vibrate and warn anyone else around that you’re doing a video, so they’ll stay out of your “video production room,” or at least enter quietly.
• Expect technical problems. Be read for technical difficulties by becoming familiar with the camera, microphone and Skype settings. For example, in my test visit, I talked only to the teacher. But in the real visit, she turned up the speakers so everyone in her library could hear, resulting in feedback. We had to play around with the sound on both sides to find a comfortable level which was easy to hear, but avoided feedback.

Action.
Once the Skype visits starts:

• RELAX. Just have fun. You’ve done all the setup work, so you don’t stress in the middle of the session, so now be confident, relaxed. If kids are coming into the room, wave at them and say, “Hi.” Do whatever kinds of interaction you would normally do before and during an author visit.
• Consider the Technology. Talk slowly, allowing for the slight lag time of Skype.
• Focus on audience. Focus on the students and meeting their needs: If a student has a question, ask that they come up close to the camera to ask their question. Answer questions simply and clearly. Ask them for follow-up questions. It’s all about the kids.
• Look at the camera. Remember to look AT THE CAMERA, not down at the computer screen where your image and their image are displayed. Looking at the camera will make it appear that you are making eye contact and that’s important for any speaker. To make this more natural, it helps to maximize their video feed, making it fill the screen. If possible, move the smaller image of yourself near the camera, so you can see it from the corner of your eye. But whatever you do, make yourself look AT THE CAMERA. It was one of the hardest things to do today.
• Multiple presentations on one day. If you are doing several presentations, common for short Q&A sessions, hang up and have them call back in between. This allows you time to take a bathroom break, reapply lipstick, check email, Twitter just once (Okay, twice – it’s short), and just relax a few minutes. But be sure you’re back in the room, ready for the next session.
• Very Important: Touch NOTHING on the camera or Skype settings in between sessions. This is NOT the time to tweak things, unless you absolutely have to. If you DO tweak, call back five minutes early to reconfirm that everything is working right. I looked at possible Avatars and either I did something or the librarian did something to settings and somehow, I missed the second call.
• Tip: You’ll get an Orange Pop-up Box from Skype to tell you when the other party is Online. You can expect the call shortly after that. If you don’t get the call on time, call them: there may be some technical difficulty going on.

I’m a fast learner. The first Q&A, I felt too stiff; the second Q&A lasted only a few minutes because of technical difficulties. But by the third, I was starting to feel comfortable and like this method of connecting with readers. I hope to do it again, soon.

To the students at SMS: Thanks! You had some great questions!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Connect with Authors Through Skype

One site that quickly gained popularity this year is the Skype an Author, a Wetpaint site, billed at the key to Virtual Author Visits in Your Library or Classroom. Set up by Sarah Chauncey of the Grandview Elementary School Library in Rockland County, NY schools and author Mona Kirby, it is getting attention from many sources, including the School Library Journal.

The site allows authors to set up pages describing their books and how they might do a Skype visit. Skype is the online audio/video free phone service; a Skype visits allows an author to see students and students to see the author.

Authors are asked to do one of two types of Skype visits:

• No Charge – Meet the Author Visit – 10 to 15 minutes
• In-Depth Visit – 30-60 Minutes – Charge to be determined by author

Why Should you Want to Skype?

(See what Catherine Balkin said in yesterday’s post. )

Set Up Your Page

I recently updated the Darcy Pattison page on the Skype an Author site.

Here are some tips:

Set up your Webcam

One final thing you’ll want to do before going live with the Skype an Author site is to test out your Skype/Webcam set up. I discovered, for example, that the lighting in my office is great for doing work on the computer, but awful for doubling as a video studio. Here is one videos to get you started on simple lighting. Look for other tutorials.

How to Apply Simple 3-Point Lighting to Amateur Film Making

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Online Author Chats – A New Learning Experience

Guest Post by Catherine Balkin

Author Appearances Down. I’ve been arranging author appearances in schools and libraries for about 20 years and, a few months ago, I was sitting at my desk, lamenting their recent slump. With the economic downturn, school and library budgets have been cut right and left, and fewer and fewer authors are being asked to visit schools, libraries, and university events. My little business was – and still is – suffering because of it. So are many of the authors and artists I represent.

Online Chats an Alternative to School Visit? Then a school teacher called and asked me about arranging an online chat with an author using Skype or iChat. At the time, it was a new idea and I decided to explore it. I started asking authors if they would be interested in doing them, and many of them loved the idea. I talked to other schools – many schools, in fact – to find out what they could afford for honorariums. Everyone I talked to liked the idea of online chats. The schools liked the idea of not having to pay travel and hotel expenses, and the authors liked the idea of fewer travel hassles. And because there was no need to travel, the authors were willing to charge less. The more research I did, the better online chats began to sound.

Problems with Setting up an Online Chat. Okay, a couple of snags presented themselves. Some school districts won’t allow access to free programs like Skype or iChat, fearing viruses. But enterprising teachers can use their own laptops or go to a public library or other public places that offer access to computers and the internet. And sometimes the images on the screen aren’t as sharp as we would like or there are time lags during a session – but a good computer makes a big difference with snags like these. They were definitely not obstacles that couldn’t be overcome.

Making Author Online Chats Work

So to help spread the good news that there was an affordable way to bring authors and artists and students together, I decided to raffle off online author chats. This raffle has been teaching me even more about the process and most of the raffled off chats haven’t even been held yet.

• One winner still working on the scheduling end of things teaches an online graduate course to library students all over the country, and she told me she plans to use either Skype’s conference call feature or Adobe Connect.
• Another snag that had been worrying me was the fact that the number of students the author could reach during a chat was limited to the number that could crowd around the computer monitor, but a conference online chat solves that nicely.

  The solution came from another winner – an elementary school teacher, who told me she plans to project what’s on the computer monitor onto a large screen using an ActivBoard so the whole grade level can participate.

This raffle has been – and is still in the process of being – a great learning experience. They certainly offer an alternative solution to budget minded schools. In these uncertain economic times, they are a brand new educational tool and a whole new way for teachers to present literature to students. And they allow us a way to continue to bring readers and writers together.

I have no doubt that I will do more raffles for selected authors and artists from time to time, especially when I add new authors and artists to the Balkin Buddies online list, so anyone who wants to drop his or her name into the future raffles hat, please feel free to contact me through the Balkin Buddies website . I also hope you browse through the site from time to time because I’ll be adding more information as I learn it.

Like author visits to schools, online chats are already proving to be a great way to connect kids in a very personal way to the books they read.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win