Would you pay $1000 for a TV if you could get it for $400 with a little extra effort/forethought? If your answer is “Duh!” I have some ideas to help you bring me to your school for a fraction of the prices posted on my site. Savvy shoppers, listen up!
- Schedule your event early in the school year. I offer $200 off full-days in September and $100 off in October. Too early for you? Contact me and see if there’s a month that’s slow and I can do something special for you.
- Coordinate book/CD sales: It’s $200-250 cheaper if you’re willing to print up some order forms and send them home with your students. What if you don’t sell anything? No problem, I just appreciate the publicity. More details are here.
- Apply for a TCA grant: If you’re a Texas school or nonprofit, the Texas Commission on the Arts has grants that typically cover 40-50% of my total fee (yes, including and travel surcharges). How hard is it? It’s typically about 90 minutes of work. How long does it take to make $500 in a book fair? More details here.
- Share a date with another school: A full-day is usually four shows. You can share a date with another school and get two each. I just recommend you have groups smaller than 250-300 with grades 3-5 and under 175 when kindergarten will be in attendance. The half-day price is slightly more than 50% of the full-day price because of the extra set up and travel time involved.
- Coordinate a series of dates: Have a sister school or part of a bigger district? Put the word out to ’em and I can typically save you about $100/day, maybe more.
- Book for NEXT school year: In the months of April and May, I start promoting for the next year and I offer $100 off a full-day for any month in the next school year. And, yes, you can combine that with those aforementioned discounts in September and October!
- Get creative! To help fund author visits, Angleton ISD creates and sells a t-shirt that they sell to the students. This handsome family is wearing the Lucas Miller edition which he even designed for them. The audiences were a sea of light blue and, with TCA grants, the schools had a very small out-of-pocket cost!
If you combine two or more of these ideas, you can easily save 60-70%. And if you’ve got your own ideas, who knows, you might MAKE money off the event!
