In this article, the author relates how his visits to classrooms across America to speak to children about writing and illustrating books have left him impressed by the creative ways in which educators manage scant resources to motivate students and to develop exciting lessons. He shares six things that he has learned from these visits about how to maximize the benefits students drive from a visiting author: (1) Prepare the students for the author's visit; (2) As a class, brainstorm questions to ask the author; (3) Plan to use some aspect of the author's work in classroom activities; (4) Identify any of the author's ideas that overlap concepts that will be taught; (5) Immediately after the visit, clearly communicate to the students what they should remember; and (6) In future lessons, reinforce language arts concepts by linking them to things the author said. The effective use of a visiting author can promote learning by creating new connections to previously-learned material and by reinforcing learning long after the visit. While the content of various author presentations may differ, every visiting author, by virtue of his or her status, is a novel experience for students.