{"id":5977,"date":"2016-11-03T12:59:15","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T16:59:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=5977"},"modified":"2016-11-03T15:45:45","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T19:45:45","slug":"comics-at-the-scholastic-book-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=5977","title":{"rendered":"Comics at The Scholastic Book Fair"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you read this blog and\/or follow me on twitter<\/a>, you know one of my usual rants\u00a0is about the large swath of comics that gets ignored when “comics” is–as is often the case–taken to mean “the direct market.” I’ve written before about the huge and often-ignored market for kids’\/all-ages comics, but today I want to discuss one aspect of that market in particular: the Scholastic Book Fair.<\/p>\n

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What’s the Scholastic Book Fair?<\/span><\/h3>\n

If you have a school-age child you probably know about the Scholastic Book fair–and even if you don’t<\/em>, you may remember the Book Fair from your own school days. If you don’t though, here’s the deal:<\/p>\n

Scholastic is a major children’s book publisher and they partner with schools to host short-term “popup” kids’ book stores\u00a0on school grounds. This is a win-win situation for everyone. Schools get to keep a percentage of the sales, Scholastic gets a guaranteed “captive audience” of customers, and parents\/kids get a convenient opportunity to buy well-curated kids’ books at prices that are usually quite low.<\/p>\n

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that an event organized by Scholastic, whose imprint Graphix played a large part in pioneering the kids comics market with titles like Bone<\/em> and Amulet<\/em>, would prominently feature kids’ comics. But what I’m betting would<\/em> surprise most comics folk is the scale of exposure and sales that these books get via the Book Fair. It really\u00a0shouldn’t<\/em> be a surprise, but since the Scholastic Book Fair operates entirely outside the realm of the direct market, it’s rarely discussed in most comics circles–because “comics” is so often taken to mean, “serialized monthly comic books that you buy in a comic book store,” rather than, ya know, “the medium of comics.”<\/p>\n

Scope and Scale of the Scholastic Book Fair<\/span><\/h3>\n

So, just how big a deal sales-wise is the Scholastic Book Fair? It’s “yuge.” From Scholastic’s website<\/a>:<\/p>\n

with operations in all 50 states as well as in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Thailand, and the U.K. The undisputed leader in the field, each year Book Fairs sells more than 100 million books to 35 million children and their families visiting more than 130,000 fairs in preschool, elementary, and middle schools around the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As someone who makes comics, the first question\u00a0that pops into my mind after taking in these (pretty stunning) numbers is, “just how many kids will be exposed to my book if it were in the Scholastic Book Fair?” I crunched a few rough numbers.<\/p>\n

To make things easy, let’s just stick to the United States. There are approximately 115,000 Scholastic Book Fairs held<\/a> at U.S. schools<\/a> each year. The average middle school in the U.S. has 595 students. The average primary (elementary) school in the U.S. has 446 students. \u00a0I suspect that the Book Fair skews more toward middle schools, but let’s just take an average of the two numbers to use as an estimated number of students per school: 521. Obviously every single student<\/em> doesn’t go to their school’s Book Fair, so let’s just assume, say, only one quarter of the student body actually goes to the Book Fair. If one quarter of the student body (130 students) goes to each of the 115,000 fairs held per year just in the U.S.<\/em>, that’s\u00a019,500,000 kids who’ve potentially been exposed to your book.<\/p>\n

I suspect a\u00a0comic could have been sitting on the shelf of every comics shop in the U.S. since the day Action Comics<\/em> #1 came out and not have that many eyeballs on it.<\/p>\n

And, just based on anecdotal evidence, I’d guess this number is way<\/em> on the small size. For example, here’s one librarian on her school’s Book Fair:<\/p>\n

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@ben_towle<\/a> In my small school, 100% of students come to book fair, 95% buy at least one book. I hold 2 book fairs each year.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Katharine Kan (@TeenlibnKan) November 3, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n