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Authors and illustrators have pointed to a fall in the number of school events they are being asked to attend, largely as a result of school budget cuts. An author or illustrator event will cost schools around £350.
Author Alan Gibbons said: “There is definitely a tail-off in school events, I am still being booked up but the speed of bookings has slowed. If you are an established author with a reputation, it’s held up, but for authors who are not so visible, it is much harder.”
Author Michaela Morgan said some schools also discouraged book sales during author events. “Some schools justify a ban on selling books saying that their children would not be able to afford them. Another reason is that the schools, anxious to make money, prefer to have sales from a book fair.”
More online author events are being made available. However, Morgan was critical of this. While these are cheaper or free for schools, they provide no personal contact.
Rather than creating a new qualification for author events, an idea which is currently under consultation, Morgan said: “If professional bodies want to support creative work in schools, it would be more direct, simple and effective if they contributed to the costs of having artists and writers in schools—as they do in Scotland and Wales and as they used to do in England.”