Selling books at your school fundraiser sends a wonderful message – it shows you value reading and education and rates very high on the “feel good” scale.
Though not always the most profitable in terms of dollars and cents, it is possible to make money with a book sales fundraiser and the excitement that it generates about reading is a very positive benefit.
It can be a good way to promote awareness too – theme-specific fundraisers are very popular, with the Christian book sales fundraiser and African-American book sales fundraiser leading the pack.
Another popular option is personalized books. Your child’s name is incorporated into the text of a professionally written and illustrated story.
This kind of fundraiserr generally works in one of two ways. Books are sold either over a web site or via a brochure. The internet method is the simplest and has the advantage of letting you contact people outside of your community.
Once you’ve selected your provider, contact ALL of your friends, family, and acquaintances nationwide and ask them to order books through the provider’s web site.
Related: Why not combine this with a Katydids Chocolate Fundraiser
They will either need to order from a special web page or enter a special code to make sure that your group gets credit for the sale. At the end of the fundraiser, a check for the pre-negotiated profits (usually 10% – 25%) will be mailed to you.
The beauty of this fundraiser is that it requires no up front investment and very little work – the money is collected by the website and the books are shipped directly to the customer.
The brochure version of this fundraiser works just like any other “pre-sales” or “order taker” fundraiser. Students are given a brochure with several book titles to choose from and they collect money up front.
Later, at the end of the fundraiser, they deliver the books to your customers. This does require a little more work, but tends to generate a lot more excitement, and might get a few more people reading.
Book Suppliers
Personalized Children’s Books and Gifts – We offer an excellent educational and personalized product, which offers an alternative to sales of candy, soap, etc.
Book Fair Fundraiser
We’re a local book club that maintains a community library and promotes reading by holding readings and other literary events. We took a table at a local community fair to raise awareness of our organization and also to sell used books that had either been donated by members or had been weeded out of the collection.
We had music and posters to catch people’s attention as they walked by, but our main draw was our giveaway – origami rockets (we were working with a science fiction theme.) These were super-cheap to make since we used plain old 8 1/2 x 11 office paper from the recycling bin and had our artistic members decorate them.
Selling paperbacks for 25 cents each we raised $78 over the course of about 5 hours.
Book Club Fundraising Helps Orphans
In our society, we were planning to organize an event to help orphans living in a nearby orphanage supported by our society. We were thinking about something that could be presented to all the families of the society and our prime motive was to involve the kids from the orphanage so that they could also become apart of the event. We were confused and then my husband suggested that we must start a readers club in the society, which would be managed by the kids only.
That turned out to be a good idea.
All the kids got something or other from their houses, we started building our database that included newspapers, recipe books, magazines, comics, journals, and by the end of time, we had gathered 1500 different items in all. We decided to charge $8 per month from each family as a monthly subscription charge that has to be renewed after 3 months. Everyone in the society happily agreed to contribute towards this idea and we collected $1600 within two days.
The basic idea was to help the kids and adults of the society to grow a habit of reading and our library was a perfect idea to keep the things going in a positive direction. Half of the money collected was spent to buy new books and magazines and those books were distributed among the kids of the orphanage.
Rest of the half was spent on acquiring the assets like chairs, lamps, lights and racks to keep the reading stuff. The whole idea kicked off greatly and our society was mentioned in a local newspaper for this great idea. After every three months, people pay there subscription charges to the secretary of the society who, with the help of the kids, buys new magazines and books for the reading purposes.
It was a learning and growing experience or the kids of the society.
