Secondhand Book Sales

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Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. But I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budgets, and I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. Hi there and welcome to another episode of the PTA Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about secondhand books and how you might be able to convert them into some money for your PTA fundraising. So, since stepping back a little from my PTA, I've been spending more time in the school library, which I talk about in episode 25 of my podcast because my PTA raised money specifically to make a library in our primary school. And since we opened the library, we have been inundated with donations from parents, donations of books from parents who have very generously brought in books from home to donate to the library. However, it has reached a stage now where we simply have too many books in the library, and so I have been sorting through them. We literally cannot fit any more picture books on the shelves, and the children were also finding it very hard to tidy their books away as there just wasn't any space for them. So we've had a big sort out, and now we have a whole massive pile of books that we don't need in our library anymore. And of course, the question now is what should we do with these books? So I'm going to cover some ideas in this episode which might give you some options of how to use secondhand books in your fundraising. It's something I've done quite a lot in the past, and I just thought it's an easy win for a PTA actually doing secondhand books. So it might be a new idea for you, or it might be something you tried before, but I thought we'd just cover some of the options really. And firstly, I'm going to tell you why I think running a secondhand book sale is a great idea. I do think that secondhand book sales are a great addition to any event. Children love them as much as grown-ups. There are fantastic bargains to be had, and you just never know what you might find. I know that I have been really delighted at secondhand book sales to find books that I enjoyed reading as a child, which I had completely forgotten about, and also box sets of books at bargain prices. So for me, I find secondhand book sales to be a potential treasure trove of undiscovered gems, and I will always go and have a browse if I see a secondhand book sale anywhere. It's always exciting to get a new book, I think. And because people will linger at a secondhand book stall, it's a great addition to an event to help encourage people to hang around for longer, which can sometimes be really helpful if you're waiting to draw a raffle or you have organised a big event and you want people to hang around so they can take part in all the activities. Another good thing about them is that they are a wholesome educational stall and they gently promote reading for pleasure amongst your school community for parents and for children. And children are free to make their own choices of a book or story when they come over to the stall, which I think is a big deal to them. I think often in school they take reading books home, but it might not be the child's first choice of book, and so if they can choose for themselves, I think that's really exciting for them. And of course, a second hand book stall or a second hand book event is very eco-friendly. You are recycling, reusing, and sharing pre-loved items. So if you have any events where you want to focus on sustainability, then a pre-loved book stall kind of automatically just ticks all of those boxes so you can add it in. And these types of sales are also extremely easy for the stall holder, so that's the person standing behind the table. So you can often ask older children in years four, five, and six, for example, to help or to manage the stalls on their own, as long as you have clear pricing, they don't have to really do anything, they just um take the money. It's it's so simple for them. So those are the reasons why I think a secondhand book sale, whether it's a standalone event or as part of another event, why I think they are really great, and I hope I've convinced you to give one a go. So, for secondhand books, the most obvious approach is to run a simple secondhand book sale, either as a standalone event or as a stall at another event that you've already got going on. All the things I'm going to say in this episode about secondhand book sales apply to both standalone sales or an event where the bookseller is just one of a few stalls at the event. And to kick off your book sale, you will probably need to ask your school community for donations of secondhand books two or three weeks before the sale. In my experience at my school, once you ask for donations of books, you could be inundated with them because there are lots of secondhand books around in the world, and often families want to have a clear out at home. So I would recommend preparing that you might be inundated with books. So you already need a plan when you ask for donations, you already need to have a plan for where to store the books prior to the sale. And do be careful, do remember books are very heavy. I know that's I know you probably know this, but unless you have ever tried to pick up a massive box of books, perhaps you don't realise. So do pay attention to how people are lifting them or moving them around and get lots of helpers. Um, even consider um you know, borrowing lots of bags for life, like strong bags, um, so that you can put the books in, which is sometimes easier than boxes actually for moving things around. So, yeah, do think in advance of where to store them before your sale and also how to move them around between the school, between your car boot, between the table at the sale. If you do have a lot of books coming in, then it can make sense to start sorting your books into categories in the weeks leading up to the sale. I will talk more about what categories or organisation types you could try in a moment. Um, I did have an experience at one event that I did where we were setting out a bookstall as part of a winter fair one year, and we'd had so many book donations that we that this very small table was just surrounded by boxes and boxes of books, and we just hadn't allowed any time to sort through them, so we just kind of had to just lump them all onto the store, which is all we had time for because the fair was opening in half an hour and there just wasn't any anything else to do, and it wasn't great at all. Um, and it crossed my mind as I was unpacking these boxes that it would have been a good idea to have done some pre-sorting in the weeks leading up to the sale. So I can now pass that pearl of wisdom on to you that if you find you are getting a lot of books, then any pre-sorting that you can do will really help you on the day. So I would highly recommend that and highly recommend adding that into your organizational plan for the event or the sale, whatever you're doing. Another pearl of wisdom, which I have learnt from experience, is to have as many tables and boxes as you can on which to display your books. I think a book stall is a very visual stall, and your customers need to see the front covers and the titles on offer, so you need quite a lot of space to spread your books out. It is a good idea to allow the books to overlap a bit so you can fit as many as you can on your table, but you need to try and leave the title or at least part of each front cover visible to entice the customers over. I would say it's also okay to have some big shallow boxes on the floor with books in so that people have a chance to rummage, and this also can help with having some extra space to put the extra books in if you don't have enough table space. Now, this actually links quite nicely to how to arrange your stall, and there is a similar point to share here to the point I made in episode 32 where I talked about how to lay out a cake stall for a cake sale. I would recommend incorporating different heights into your stall. So rather than having all the books laid flat on one surface, and you can't really see that from a distance if everything's laid flat, it might look better and more enticing across the playground if you had a variety of layers to your store. So, for example, you if you have donations of large hardback books or box sets, you can stand those up at the back of the store. Um, and you can also use the box under the tablecloth method that I mentioned with the cake sales to create extra height on the table. So this is where you you cover your table with a tablecloth, and then you just slip some cardboard boxes underneath the tablecloth just to create like some hills on your table, but they are in disguise because they're under the tablecloth, but just allows you some extra surface area to put your books on at a different height, um, and then maybe you have the books at the front of the stool just on the base layer of the table, uh, on the surface of the table, whether it's a tablecloth or not. Then on the floor, you can put your boxes of books. Now, I would avoid putting boxes on the floor directly in front of the table displays, as either people don't look in the boxes because they're hidden by the other people's legs who are kind of crowding around the table, or people won't be able to look at the table display if somebody's crouching down to look in the box. So if you can, it's better to have the floor boxes off to one side and obviously make sure they are not a trip hazard on your risk assessment. So have a think about where to put them and go around the front of your stall and imagine you're a customer coming over and just have a look and see see how it looks. If you need to make your boxes on the floor brighter so that they really stand out, so nobody, definitely nobody will trip over them or fall into them, then do that or add some decorations onto them or something or other so you can highlight that they're down there. And don't forget to allow space on your stall somewhere to display your prices and make sure this is nice and big so everybody can see what everything costs. When choosing prices for your secondhand book stall, I recommend keeping it as simple as you can. In the past, we have usually asked for something like 50p for a picture book and one pound for a paperback, and maybe £3 for a book set. I have also been to some book sales where it was £1 for to take any two books, so there are quite a few different ways you can price your books. I think when deciding on prices, it's helpful to remember that all the books were free donations, so all the money you take is profit, and crucially you want to get rid of as many of the books as possible. So you have to price your books, yes, to make money, but also so you have fewer books to deal with after the event. So it's very much in your interest to price them to sell and to disappear from the table. Um, I also think it's important uh not to overcomplicate things by saying all the books in this box are 50p. Because when people present you with the books that they want to buy, and it could be like a handful of books, you have no idea which books came from, which section on the table. So if you were thinking of doing like this section is this much, this section is this much, then I would just add a word of caution in there that you're not going to be able to identify where the books came from. So um, whether you can add a sticker onto some books that are slightly cheaper or something, so you can identify them, you'll have to have a think about that. But as I said, I would I would recommend just keeping it really, really simple. It also aids the person standing behind the table. And if you are lucky enough to get some children to be your volunteers, they definitely need it to be simple because it's already complicated enough for them to add up 50p and one pound if they you know haven't done that kind of activity before. Now we're going to think about how to organise the books on your stall to try and make the most of the event and to sell as many as possible. So here are some different approaches that I have tried or I have seen, and I have tried to come up with some new ideas for you as well. So if you try any of these, please let me know. I would be really interested to hear if they made any difference or if you sold more books because of the different organization that you tried. So I'll just run through some ideas for you, really. The first idea is the simplest idea, and that is to just have a book jumble. So if, like me at my winter fair, you don't have time or you don't have much display space, then just go for a massive mixture of books. You can call it a book jumble, so nobody's expecting it to look very pretty. Now, I don't actually recommend this as the onus is then on your customers to do some work with digging and rummaging and filtering through the books to find any books they like. Um, so it actually might make it harder for the customer to find things they want to buy, but it might be fun for some people, it might be fun for the children to sort through their picture books, that kind of thing. And if you really don't have time to organise the table, it might be your only option. If you've already got your donations, just go for it, see how you get on, and that is by far and away the most simple option. So a book jumble. Alternatively, you can arrange books by um age or key stage and separate out obviously any books for adults or non-fiction. Um, this often works quite well to guide people to the right area of your stall to find books that are appropriate for their age group. However, I am also a little bit hesitant at labelling books like this because, apart from the adult books, obviously we don't want the children reading the adult books, um or certain adult books. I mean, some adult books might be fine. Um, but children do develop reading skills at different speeds and different ages, so some may be in between key stage with their reading ability and overlap different sections, um, but of course, you don't necessarily need to label the sections, you can just have it organised like that, and I think that children do naturally find the books that are right for them, if you like. Um, so um you could even split your stall into um different stalls, maybe across if you're if you're, for example, having a secondhand bookseller to summer face, you could have three different bookstalls. You could have one for adult books, one for key stage one books, and one for key stage two books. For example, spread across your fair, which is another idea, and obviously, if you have enough volunteers for that, because each store will need a volunteer, so that's a bit uh a bit dependent on your volunteer workforce, but um that could be an option for um spreading out your stalls, but also um having the books in different groups. Um, and apart from arranging by age, which is kind of the most obvious way to do it, I've got some more creative ideas for another way to arrange your books. So, one idea is that you could arrange them by topics instead. So you can have books about animals or books with animal characters, books about space, books about friendship, school, silly books, funny books, all sorts of topics. And um, I think arranging your books in a different way to ages can be fun for people when they come over to the stall and might make them find a book that they wouldn't have ordinarily picked. So, yeah, you could go for topics or you could go for genres, which would be things like mystery books, comedy, adventure stories, fantasy. Those things might be more appropriate for organising your paper book, paperback books, um, so for probably slightly older children. Might be tricky with picture books to do it that way, but um, it can also, if you do label um books by genres like that, it can actually help children to understand which books they are drawn to naturally. So some children might always want to read a mystery book where it's like a murder mystery and they don't really know what's going to happen in the end, or a comedy book, or a graphic novel, that kind of thing. So it is it is nice to uh arrange them in a different way. Another thing that you could try is just arranging the books by colour on the table, and you could create a rainbow effect on your table. I think that would look so amazing if you see that store from across the other side of the playground, it'll be really, really eye-catching. I fully appreciate that that idea would take a lot of time to arrange, but it might be fun just to give it a go. If you've done a few secondhand book sales in the past and always arranged it the same way, then why not try shaking it up a bit and just trying something different and see what impact that would have? Another thing you could try is to actually sell books in bundles. So this is especially good if you have had so many books donated. So, for example, you could tie up together three books and sell those for a pound. So, for example, they could be all animal books all tied together um with a ribbon or something, or you could even say to people you can pick three books for a pound and then they can choose whatever they like. So selling as a bundle is also pretty good. And I love this idea. Now I haven't I haven't actually uh ever bought a book like this before, but I've seen other people do this, and this is where you have mystery books, so the books are wrapped up, so you cannot see what they are. And again, this might work better for the paperback books rather than the picture books, um, and it would work well for the older children and for the grown-ups. So if you went for something like mystery books, you can actually stick a sticker on the front of the wrapping. So let's let's say um, for example, that you wrapped them all with brown craft paper, and then you could just stick a label on the front where you could write um mystery book or comedy book, and then sometimes you can put like three descriptive adjectives of saying what that book is about or something like that, and keep it as a mystery for people to just take a chance on a book, really, and see what it might be. And I always think that's really fun because you might end up with a book that you would never in a million years have picked off the table, and you might read it and think, Oh, that was really good, and so I think sometimes um somebody kind of choosing for you in a way uh is is can really expand your reading and just but also make the experience more fun at the stall if you're looking through lots of wrapped up books and you've only got a few words to kind of guide you as to which one you might want to pick. I think that would be fun. And then if you if you um marketed your event or your stall with With mystery books. Imagine the really cool posters and the the kind of hype you could create with that. So I think that would be really exciting. And um, I think it would I mean I I would be really drawn to a stall like that, so I would hope that it's just a really different way to try and get rid of your books, really. Uh and then another idea is to actually put some reviews for your books on your stall. So we had a surplus of some class paperback books bought many years ago that we found in a cupboard at school. We had like 10 copies, no, sorry, 30 copies, because it was a whole class's worth of copies of some classic stories. So we had Peter Pan, we had Heidi and some other ones, and um, and they were still like new, they'd just been bought by a teacher many years ago, and the current teachers at our school don't actually use those books in the classroom now, so we were trying to get rid of those, and um, so to entice um the children in particular to come and buy one at our book sale, we um I got some children to read the books, and then they wrote a little review about them, and we had that on a little stand so that the children could read the review and see it was recommended um to them by their friends, and um uh see if they wanted to also read it. So um that is a good idea. If you have children that have read a particular book before, they can write a review or just give it a star rating or something, you know, so that other children know, oh, that was a good one, like my friends enjoyed it. So there are some slightly different ideas to try and market and uh sell your books in a different way, which might help to offload the books that you've had come in. And once your sale is over, what do you do with the books left over from the sale? After my experience of book sales, I would strongly encourage you to also have made a plan for this in advance of the sale so that everybody knows what's happening when the event closes. You may need volunteers to each take a bag of leftover books home and then to a local charity shop, for example. I would recommend again trying to ensure this happens at the end of the event if you can. Um I did have a situation once where we had to just take everything, we had an event off the school site, and we had to then just put all the books back on back in school afterwards. And then the volunteers who I thought were helping me take all the books away couldn't do it straight away. Um, and the school started to get a bit annoyed because we did have a lot of books left over and they were kind of just left in the corridor, which was just was not good at all. Um, so I would recommend not even taking them back to school, but instead making sure they go in somebody's car or home with somebody else, so you can then um get them to the charity shop. Another thing that we did once um from another secondhand book sale is we decided to keep any unsold books for our next sale. So we had uh two or three massive boxes of books that one of my volunteers kindly said he would keep in his garage for the next sale. Um, and because when you look at secondhand books and you're charging 50 pure a pound for them, it just looks like money just waiting there that hasn't been converted into money yet, and so it's really hard to get rid of them when you think, oh, but I could sell them. So uh what we did was he kept these three boxes in his garage, and at our next book sale, he brought all three boxes to the sale and we put them out along with a load of other books we'd had donated. And of course, the ones that we had kept in the garage did not sell, and that was then that I realised they didn't sell for a reason, they weren't books that people wanted. So um we never kept unsold books after that, it just wasn't worth it, and um I'm telling you that so that if you're ever tempted, then you might um think twice about it because they take up a lot of space, they have to be kept clean and dry. And um if they don't sell once, yes, I know it's true that maybe you think, oh, but maybe people didn't see those. We had so many books, maybe they didn't see them. Maybe sort through them, maybe get rid of the ones that you think really are not gonna sell, maybe keep the better copies or the newer copies. You could try again, but definitely cut them down so that you're not hanging on to loads of books that are just not going to sell. So, in the end, we just had to donate them to a charity shop. Um and you just don't want to be left with a load of books hanging around, really. Um, but before you donate them to a charity shop, if you definitely don't want to take them to another book sale, there are a couple of things that you could do or you could try instead. The first thing to try is that you can scan the barcodes of the books into some websites that actually pay for secondhand books to see if you can sell them. I tried this recently with a well-known secondhand book website called World of Books. Some of the books I scanned in were worth nothing. Some of the books I scanned in were worth 10p, but some of them were worth 50p, and some of them were over a pound. So I felt it was definitely worth trying this method. You scan them in, tells you how much money they will pay for them. Um, there are conditions on the website, they have the books have to be in a certain condition, so you do need to read through that to make sure that you're not well basically sending, you know, they won't just accept a book that's got water damage, for example, they're just not going to. So make it worth your while, make the effort worth your while, and just scan in the um the ones that are in a good condition. Then you package them up and you send them off via a free parcel service, or a courier can come and collect the books. Um, and once they get to their warehouse, they do check the books. So I'm actually now waiting for confirmation email from a parcel of books I've sent off recently just to see how much of the £30 they say they're gonna pay me, they actually pay me. So I will let you know about that because I'm gonna be this is the first time I've done it, so I'm gonna be really interested to see um if they accept all the books that I've sent in. I was quite careful, I did try and send in books that weren't too damaged um or too well read, if you like. So we shall see what happens. Uh, there are other companies in the UK who also accept books this way, so probably if you just have a look on the internet, you can see who they are. And if you had any particularly nice hardback books or box sets or something donated, then you could make them into future raffle prizes. Maybe pair some storybooks with some chocolates or some snacks and market it as a cozy evening in, for example. You could do that with grown-up books and you could do it with um children's books, so you might be able to repurpose them as an extra prize in a raffle. You could run a book tombola if you have enough books left over, or you could use them as sustainable prizes for other games at a summer fate or a Christmas fair. That so instead of buying sweet prizes or any other new prize, maybe they could choose a book to take, and um, there might be other ideas for games that you could swap books into to make to make your game a bit different. Um, I'm sure we're all creative people on the PTA, so you might be able to come up with some ideas. And finally, there are crafts you can make with paperback books in particular. If you have a look online, there are lots of ideas for things you can use paperback books for. So perhaps you could keep some paperbacks that didn't sell, and especially if they look a bit scruffy on the outside, and you could keep them to run a craft stall at another event, or you could create the crafts yourself and sell those at another event. So there are other things you can do with secondhand books. Obviously, all of those things I just mentioned take time and they take volunteers to organise. So you I guess you're gonna have to weigh up. Is it better that I just get rid of these books, or could I repurpose them? Could I use them as something in the future? And if you do want to do that again, think about your storage. I think it's a sale or a type of sale where you can get really creative with the marketing and organizing of the store to make it more exciting than just selling secondhand books. And if you have more than one book sale in a year, you can use some of the ideas to always make sure your book sale feels fresh and enticing to your customers. So if you try any of those different ideas, please do let me know. I said I would be interested to hear what you did and how it was received by your customers. Do drop me an email, it's hello at ptapodcast.com. I'd also love to know if there are any topics you'd like me to cover on this podcast. Is there anything you would like to hear about? You can email me about that as well or use the contact form on my website. So that's all for today. Good luck with whatever your PTA is working on, and bye for now.