Several weeks ago I was working on a proposal and when I got to the marketing part I let my imagination run wild, as is my wont. One minute I’m in my chair in my jammies, at three in the afternoon, plinking away at the keyboard and the next I’m on tour, the popular author of an award winning YA book.

And where did the tour take me? No, I wasn’t sitting at a table in an empty bookstore twiddling my thumbs and feeling like a wallflower. I was speaking at a church summer camp.

The kids in my denomination love summer camp. The more I thought about this idea, the more I liked it. It is feasible that I could spend five or six weeks at summer camps. I don’t mean that I’d spend the whole week. But go in for one night. Give a talk. Shake hands with the kids.

And kids don’t just go to camp during the summer. My two just got back from the fall middle school weekend retreat—and get this—they came home sporting new t-shirts. Where’d they get the money for the T-shirts, I wanted to know. The shirts weren’t for sale, the kids told me. They were free. In other words the price of the shirts was built into the price of the camp. The youth leaders wanted the children to bring something home to help them remember the camp, the topic they discussed, and the verses they focused on.

And it works. I mean, if you are able to come up with 85 dollars you are probably able to come up with 95. It’s not that big of a deal for most of us. So they didn’t ask if we wanted the shirts. They just included them.

So you know where I’m going with this. My little pea brain started buzzing. What if I were a published author? And what if I agreed to go and talk to church camps for an evening on something. I might talk about the theme from whatever book I was trying to sell–forgiveness is beneficial and bearing a grudge makes you weak and poor, or God is never a victim of circumstance. Or I might talk about something else–how living with my husband’s disability has helped me learn to be a better writer/Christian/mother/person (or some such–I’m just making this up as I go). I could ask the camp coordinators to add ten bucks onto the price of the camp so that all the lucky kiddies could go home with an autographed copy of my book.

I think it’s brilliant. (I often think I’m brilliant in the privacy of my own home, when I’m sitting in my jammies at three in the afternoon.) I bet I could sell a few thousand books a summer that way.

Writers from larger denominations could probably sell way more than that. And the camps are spread out all across the country. Word of mouth will spread across vast areas. And because you took the time to talk to the kids, the next time one of them sees a book of yours in the store, she says, “Hey I know her. She’s a friend of mine.” (I do that now with authors I’ve never even met other than cyberly-speaking. I still remember the first time I went running around a store in Wasilla waving a True Confessions in the air saying, “My friend wrote this story. Her name isn’t really Honaria Pleasantbottom.”)

And you really can be a kind of friend. You can go back year after year. Selling new books each time. The kids see them as gifts of course–like mine said, “We didn’t have to buy the shirts, they were free.” heh heh, ya gotta love ‘em, the little innocents.

The best part about this plan, though, is that you would have some great face time with kids. Besides having fun, because kids are really a bunch of fun, this face time will make you a better writer. It’s a win win proposition for the writer, I think.

I tucked that wild dream away after I’d enjoyed it for an hour or two, thinking I’d take it out again after I actually sold a book (and then thinking of facing a group of summer camp kids won’t seem like so much fun, probably. It will feel more like work, no doubt). But today it was brought back to mind when I saw this article. I’m happy to find proof that this camp deal is a viable idea. Because I really like it. It seems to me like a great way to connect with kids.

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