As promised, I am reporting back on the in-store book fair we did with our local school. In my earlier post I spoke about working with one of our local schools on building community, shopping local and aiding the school with an easy fundraiser. We hosted a 10-day book fair at the store and have just now tallied all the numbers. I’m happy to report the book fair did well, but could have been better. Of course, I had very high expectations and was secretly hoping for a 10-day sales parade, and instead got a steady stream of customers.
The key to success for all in-store book fairs is the promotional effort that goes into them. In this instance, the school did everything right. All the families got flyers when school started and then again the week before the book fair, explaining how it worked. There was a wonderful article in the local paper about it, the kids all knew; even the visiting kindergarten class that week knew about the book fair. The PTO did a great job. We had it up on our website, Elizabeth made signage for the registers and the front door, so everyone coming in knew about it. We even dedicated our outdoor sandwich board to promoting the book fair.
The kickoff cocktail party with wine and cheese was packed. Lots of parents with their kids heaped their stacks of books on the counter. Folks were planning ahead that night and I thought that kind of enthusiasm would translate to every day of the fair. Not so much. It seems that with any organization, there is a dedicated core of supporters who really do a lot of the heavy lifting, and that was clearly evident with this book fair. We saw a lot of the same families during the 10 days who were working very hard to buy as many books as they could during the fair. They were great. They were cheery, appreciative and lovely. There just weren’t enough of them. We did have Halloween the last weekend of the book fair, and I wonder if that caused some families to lose focus in preparation for the holiday.
One of the best parts of the book fair was getting new customers into the store. There has been a big influx of new folks to town, so the book fair was a great way to introduce them to the store. And the goodwill the book fair generated was well worth it. Plus, we got a preview of what some of the hot series and books for the holidays are likely to be. In the end, though, I’m a tiny bit disappointed because I wanted to give the school a bigger check, but in the end it’s about patience, and when we do this again in the spring or next year, it will only getting bigger as it becomes a tradition.