Yearbook Peeps....HEEEELP!!!
 

Ok, so as part of my new job, I've been given the ummm....'honor?' (lol) of doing the yearbook. Thing is, I have NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO idea what the heck I'm doing.

Right now I'm allowing the students to take the lead and do it, but I know eventually I need to get some kind of grasp about it. Last year the yearbook staff decided to print their own yearbooks. This year they want to get it published (or find SOMEWAY to have a hardcover yearbook).

I'm assuming that getting them published costs a lot, and I don't know what our budget is.

Can anyone help me with ANY kind of information? If you were in yearbook in MS/HS what things did you do? What resources did you use, etc? I know I can always ask the previous teacher, but he's moved up and i know he'll be busy, so I don't want to bug him too much.

We published ours through Taylor Publishing in Dallas.

If you have specific questions, shoot me a PM :)

I wasn't on staff, but we sold our yearbooks, they weren't free in HS. That's how they afforded professional publishing.

I was on the yearbook staff in 7th & 8th Grade... That was like 10 years ago so obviously, I don't remember. But yeah, they were never free. Our high school yearbooks were $40-50. Even our elementary school yearbooks cost money, but they cost a lot less!

Ditto.

I was editor, but that was in the era before computers so I won't be much help to you now. I do remember that Taylor did provide a rep to us that actually visited our school, did some training, etc. We even went to workshops.

And like drole said, we sold ours.

Oh I know they aren't free, clearly. I never meant anything about free, I just meant I don't know what kind of budget we are working with right now. Of course we are going to sell ours, and all....

I was just wondering if you all had any tips for me, in general. What things did you all do in that class? What can I do to help these kids. They are 7th and 8th graders and they have more experience doing this than I do! lol.

When I was staff, we focused on reporting and writing copy. More experienced staff were in charge of photos. As editor, I was in charge of editing other students' copy and layout, mostly.

I'd do an exercise asking students to pick their favorite layouts from magazines and then you can comment on why they're good (white space, etc). Also, get them prepared for reporting by doing mock interviews.

I'm sure I'll think of some more stuff, but this is all I have at the moment lol

And our middle school yearbooks were cheap (~$15-20, but they were paperback). HS yearbooks were much more expensive.

One thing that helps is to sell ads to parents and businesses. Graduating "seniors" would have pictures submitted for their ads and you'd price the ads per quarter page up to full page.

The actual design for the yearbook is pretty easy. Most of the pages are class pictures which are mostly a grid with a text section to one side for student names. Pictures are labeled. It's really easy. I was on yearbook staff in middle school and co-editor of my med school yearbook. Unless they have everything on computer now, everything is done on grid paper so you just have to count blocks and draw out your layouts. It definitely is not too hard for a 7th grader. I did 40 pages all by myself in med school in a week. The creative stuff is the extra pages where you can do collages, ads, etc. That might be the 8th graders job.

I forgot about the ads. We didn't do those in middle school (we just had students submit photos for collages), but they made a bunch of money in the HS yearbooks.

And now that I think about it, our MS yearbooks didn't have a bunch of varying layouts. The HS one, though (because of all the different organizations, etc), required multiple layouts to remain interesting.

ETA: Another thing. When we had sent in all the files for the HS yearbook, there was a month that we had nothing to do. Our advisor had us put together a 'poetry' book, allowing students to submit original pieces. It was another opportunity for us to test our design skills and make some extra money (we printed ~200 and sold them for $5-10 a pop). That's another idea for you.

ETAA: What are you going to be using to design the pages? Like AOII Angel said, we practiced on grid paper, but ended up actually designing the book in Quark. I think Quark and InDesign are two programs that'd work well (depending on your budget).

Ours was published by Jostens. But that was, thirty years ago. Yes, way back in the day.

Have you googled any of the educational or journalism sites for lesson plans or tips? You might try the National Council of Teachers of English site as a starting point.

I also bet that the publishing companies would have some helpful guidance.

As a former high school English teacher, my advice this early in the year would be to focus for a week or so on some serious mechanics and writing skills in anticipation of writing copy.

I absolutely loved being on the yearbook staff! Among other things, I spent a lot of time getting my friends out of class on "yearbook assignments."

I was the photography editor for 2 years in high school. Jr high yearbooks were always "paperback" and high school ones were hardcover. JrH ones cost about $20, high school $30-$45. the cost of the book depended on how much we made in ads. the more ads, the less the cost of the book once it went to print. Its been oh..... about 12 years since I did all of this, but this is what I remember.
Full page ads were around $150 (lawyers, doctors offices, businesses with money)
Half page ads were $100
1/4 page ads were $75
1/8 page ads (perfect for just a business card) were $50

We also had sponsor lists that were just a list of names on one page.
You could have your name on the "Alumni" Sponsor list for $35 (this was all my parents ever gave).
And there were "Patron" sponsors for $25.

I went to a private school, so "fundraising" was a year-round thing. We had a contest in the fall among homerooms to see which students could sell the most in yearbook ads/sponsors. The homeroom that won got either a pizza party at the end of the day, or a breakfast party with donuts, juice, milk, bagels, casseroles, etc. If the fundraising event didnt make enough in ads, it was up to the staff to walk around town and ask businesses to buy an ad or at least be a "sponsor."

Ha ha! I was photo editor of my HS newspaper and LOVED to skip class to work on our next edition! Our darkroom was a great place to hide out.

I helped with the Yearbook when I was in High School 15 years ago. We used Macs and PageMaker, if I recall correctly. I think it's still around.

I work in the Marketing Dept. and we use InDesign. I have no formal training with InDesign but I manage to do ok. It can be somewhat of a challenge, though. I'm not sure if middle schoolers will catch on quickly...but judging how kids these days are so tech savvy, they might.

I've used Quark and InDesign (another Marketing person here :D), and Quark was a bit easier to learn. If these students want to continue with journalism/newspaper/yearbook in high school, it'll be important for them to at least be familiar with one of those programs.

Oh, and Jostens published ours as well. epchick, I would contact the publisher to get a better idea of what cost will be. obviously it'll be cheaper for a paperback yearbook with no color pages versus a hardcover book with lots of color pages.

oh, we also had a yearbook sale the same time we were selling the ads in the fall. If you pre-paid for your yearbook, it was automatically $20. if you waited until after the end of the school year when it was published, it cost more.