Foreign Perspectives

We’ve been helping out at the book fair in the school this week which provides a different perspective to some of the money making activities that schools need to get involved in these days.

The first thing that’s noticeable is that the school don’t get cash commission from the sales that they make but instead get that commission in the form of books. Thus what looks like a fairly high rate of commission is actually a good deal less in practice and probably little more than 10% for the company.

The books on offer are from one educational publisher which makes the selection more limited than it really needs to be. Well, seemingly more limited than it needs to be as one of the problems is that the books all need to be suitable for children so they could easily run into difficulties were a general publisher to be used. In fact, a growing problem seems to be that people generally are moving online for their purchases which is particularly understandable this year as the discount vouchers previously issued to the children aren’t there any more whilst the books are all at full price and these days nobody pays full price for books. So, why don’t the schools just put a link on their websites and join the internet sales rush? Basically because the link would have to be to only childrens’ books and there isn’t anything fitting the bill at the moment.

Being tied in to a single supplier is rarely a good idea and this is no exception. For all of the items that I’ve checked, the Scholastic price is around 20% to 30% higher than the Amazon price which probably goes some way to explaining the very low sales at the book fair.