There was just a huge write up in the Denver POst about how the local book stores in the metro Denver area are fed up with the pretty picture Scholatic paints. We have several local bookstores that will invite the school to their shop and the school recieves a percentage of what is done for the night. What I liked about this is not just people from the school were supporting the group/school but communtity members (many were tickled and a few asked about tax write offs!) But with retail, it's also a hit and miss at profit and most staores will do a one night thing. Still, we were offered a space for the teachers to read to their students (and in some cases MORE!) and the last time we did this we were lucky enough that a local writer had a book signing the same night to promote his new chidren's book.
Our librarian is also having a book fair in three weeks and the PTO has agreed to help with volunteers and snacks (she is too nice not to want to help!). Anyway, we went through Barnes and Noble for a couple years and there is The Tattered Bookcover in Denver will do this for schools.
Just an FYI for those of you in western or Upstate NY. We have been using Adventureland Books for the last year and a half and have been very pleased. They provide everything that Scholastic did except we can eliminate the toys if we want to. (And we do...) They have some unique features as well. They have an entire rack of local authors. And another rack of NYS books. They will customize our fair according to our wishes. We have asked teachers to come up with books they would like to see or curriculum subjects that we can supply books on. That way the kids might purchase a book they can use in their own classroom as well. They give us a buy one get one free sale in the fall and a book for every student (during our Parents as Reading Partners month) in the spring. We don't take any profit from ours sales, but you can choose that option as well. Adventureland is based out of Rochester and should be listed in the phone book. I am sure I can get contact info for anyone interested.
This is just a plug in Scholastic's favor as it seems like they're getting a huge amount of bad press...we have been very happy with Scholastic! Imagine living in a place where you can't get a book in English just down the road. That's us! With Scholastic our children can order books cheap, even with the shipping costs we have to add on, they are still cheap. With our points we purchased "free" books and are getting ready to have a book fair. Once shipping is paid, it's all profit. And not only us, but another international school who is so remote they don't get decent shipping and therefore can't use any mail service. We're able to make our kids happy and another school's kids happy. For next to nothing. When we've had boxes stolen at customs, Scholastic has replaced them free. When we were evacuated to Houston they helped us set up a last minute book fair to give our kids something to do and allow us to give something back to the school we shared facilities with. One thing about our "free books" really surprised me this week. I went through all the boxes yesterday with the librarian so she could pick some books out before our sale and so I could get an idea of what was sent. I was expecting grab bag type stuff...books that no one else wanted...but I was so wrong. These books were wonderful! Current favorites, classics, hard backs and soft, puzzle books...everything I would have ordered for a fair had I done so.
So anyway, just my opinion and my own experience, but Scholastic has been wonderful for our school and working with them has been a delight! :cool:
Our Librarian handles the book fair and is sold on these guys. We are just finishing ours this week. I provided some volunteers to set up and break down is about it.
I tried to get her interested in doing a book store sponsored book fair but she didnt want to do it so we didnt.
The way this works is you work with a local book store (one of the major chains) they provide the books, you provide the space, time and sales staff. The way I had this set up and a lot of this is the realtionship I have with the manager of the chain I was talking to about all this - discounts would apply (10 to 25% based upon the book and the specials currently running) We would get 20% of the overall sales. They would drop off and pick up, we do the set up, etc. They would provide some small incentives - book marks, small items like this to give away - we could provide a list of books they would supply - special orders and back orders on those that we ran out of stock on would be delivered within 48 hours (2 business days actually) if we did not want to provide a list they would select books based upon our school grade level. Also, they would advertise for up to amonth ahead of time in their area stores our fair.
Too bad our librarian thought this was not a good idea but here it is an out of the box idea - yes it will require work and cooperation but when I started looking into this I was amazed at what the chain book stores are willing to do for a school. The freebees and the over 10% discount was special for me, like I said the manager is a close friend but all the rest was just standard for them.
I'm the book fair chairperson at our school. Last year was my first year and we did two book fairs. The first one was a regular fair, but since we have a big school we got a lot of cases. We did it before Christmas and were upset about
the lack of Christmas/Hanukkah books so I called and complained and the sent me out several boxes. By the time our second fair in the spring rolled around I had figured out that you need to tell them exactly what you want and don't want. I didn't want any of the junky stuff and told them that, and what little they did send I just didn't set out. You can also ask for more specific selections - let's say more
k-3 or more older grade books and they do try and accomodate.
My biggest gripe about Scholastic is that you do ALL the work and they make a huge profit. It is a lot of volunteer hours to do a book fair for a school the size of ours and we don't need to take our profit in books - we just need the money so we make only 25%. Other fundraisers make more money for a lot less work. However, the kids really look forward to shopping at the book fair and it's a tradition in our school. I looked for alternatives but couldn't really
come up with any. I find their customer service just awful. No one even showed up last year to help set up - and we do one of the biggest book fairs in our large county.
This year we are only doing one book fair in the spring and I will be very choosy about what goes out for sale.
In our area (Ohio), Scholastic is pretty much the only game in town. I have discovered, though, that you can actually exercise some considerable control over what items appear in your book fair. I'm not sure if all the Scholastic Reps actually offer this to their schools (mine did), but I was able to control the mix of books and non-book items shipped to the school. Also, I over-ordered a little bit so that if an item was not appropriate or too expensive (or too cheap!), I could just leave it in the box.
Also, the scholastic books in-school warehouse sale offers an opportunity to sell a bunch of current books at 50% commission, or you can sell them at 50% off, which is a great thing to do for the school.
I do wish that another company would compete with Scholastic, but Scholastic seems to buy 'em up, or run them out of business.
