Dianne,
Your ideas sound great!Which company did you use? Did the company have software that you used to design it digitally? I have signed up for yearbook next year so I'm new at this. Doing it digitally sounds so much easier than taping pictures to a format. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Wow... so much info! It's interesting to hear what everyone thinks about this subject.... I have been doing our school's elementary yearbook for the past three years and for us it has been very successful! We have about 750 students at our K-6th school, and we have presold 630 this year. I'm confident that the extras we order will sell out fast.
Info about ours: They cost $12 in the fall, and $14 in the spring. Depending on our volume, they cost us $9-$10. But that's not all... we also sell ad space which we make about $1500 more on. Our book is 96 pages, with 8 pages of color. The reason the printing costs more for us than maybe some others, is that we take it to a very high quality printer... not a digital printer. We also have the book "perfect bound", not stapled.
I design our book digitally which really makes the quality so much better. I agree... most elementary yearbooks are AWEFUL!
Most of the schools in our area have yearbooks. They are not so huge and expensive as the high school yearbooks, so I really don't think that having yearbooks throughout a child's school years takes anything away from their senior book. Just my opinion. At our school the yearbooks are anxiously anticipated at the end of the year. We have an art contest for the cover, and I include all of the entries as artwork inside the book, so no one is left out.
If anyone would like any help, please ask anything... I've really learned so much and would love to share.
The company that takes our school pictures in the fall prepares yearbooks for all students who purchase pictures, and they are available as JUST a yearbook, no picture package, for $7. The school doesn't have to do anything, and we still get a profit from the pictures. This year we made $1200 on fall, and spring pic profit checks havent been mailed yet. It works out well for us, maybe your photographer does something similar??
We are a pre-K through 5th grade, and we do a yearbook. Personally, I think it is ridiculous and doesn't give the kids anything to look forward to, but most of the other schools around here do one, so we have to stay on the bandwagon, I guess.
I and another parent put ours together this year in just under 2 weeks. Long story short, we almost missed the deadline due to a power struggle between the past treasurer, who can't seem to give up control even though her kid is in middle school, and the current president. It wasn't difficult at all...just time consuming. It was one of the better books, if I do say so myself. [img]smile.gif[/img] Next year we are going to start earlier and make it a really AWESOME book.
We asked parents to pre-order before Thanksgiving at a $10 price, and told them that the cost would be $12 after. We gave them one final chance to order before we placed the order and only ordered 11 extra to get the price break. In the past, there has been approximately 100 extra books ordered and we were having to discount them about 75% at the end of school to get rid of them. I think that some of those parents who bought them so cheaply in the past were waiting to get theirs, but they are all gone now, so they are out of luck. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
I was on my daughter's school year book committee this year. We were a committee of 6 and this year our book was one of the best in years if I do say so myself. I've also heard that from lots of other parents. We met in the evenings and weekends to get it completed and were able to get some extras since we met certain deadlines.
The books cost $15.00 and the fifth grade class pictures are in color. The book has 60 pages and was not that hard to put together. The hardest part was making sure that the names matched up with the pictures. It was a lot of fun to do and will do it again next year. We had pre-orders and sold almost 200 and we ordered 250 and are almost sold out of the extras. We made about $1.00 off of each book, so we felt that it was worth the effort.
