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About Contact Sign in Join. Home How can a library make mo Ackworth Library wrote How can a library make money? Some will leave the book display rather than pay a fee. Why not hire it out? As importantly if you are giving it away for free at present - why? Have you got an agreed and argued reason for doing so? Reproduction fees. This covers everything from someone using a portrait for a frontispiece in his obscure memoirs to reproduction of an item on TV in a programme with a million pound budget, so fees have to be scaled by potential audience rather than the intrinsic merit of the item.
This also shows that archive and realia material can be exploitable and not just a nuisance. Rental of books. I know little about this, but it has been done at the University of Surrey via local bookshop as a way of making extra copies of textbooks available to students. The cases where it will be workable may be small, but it is possibly worth exploring in disciplines with a small set and stable booklist.
Rental of equipment. You can do almost anything here. The possibilities are almost endless. Rental of space and sale of materials. Space has a price, so why not charge for the prime space such as lockers and carrells. Similarly you can charge for materials. People have always come to issue desks looking for the loan of a pen; sell them one. These days they come needing things like floppy disks; why not sell that too. Cheap binding at least is open to everyone.
Students will flock to a service which does things as simple as spiral binding for reports and project work. You can also act as a middle man in having things bound properly at your own commercial binder. This tends to be a small but lucrative area since there is little overt competition and the general public have neither the machines for cheap binding nor the contacts for proper binding.
This will perhaps tend to be a non-paying service. You can protect books by giving away or selling carrier bags which advertise you or perhaps your services [example]; You might even get a bookseller to pay for their production if they can advertise on the other side. People like banks will put their logos on student cards and pay for them, thus saving you money; bookmarks will be supplied free if they carry advertising.
This can save by preventing toast, bacon or even less desirable items being used as bookmarks, thus extending the life of the book. I drew the line at this when I was offered several thousand copies of a bookmark advertising The European; objecting to Robert Maxwell seemed better than taking his cash. Some advertising may just not be desirable. Could a hospital library take money from Rothmans? Schools have recently been encouraged to put advertising hoardings on their walls. Do you have wall space that could carry advertising?
It was suggested for schools recently? Why not? Some advertising can be considered information transmission as a public service. And we are information professionals. Vending machines. This covers telephones you can also then sell telephone cards, as well as food and drink.
If you are willing to go that far, would you put in fruit machines or computer games. If not, what about a photobooth? Jill talked about the added value of commercial activities such as cafes as an ambassador for your library - whilst income is an advantage, it can also drive visits. She talked about a community library example from Haydon Bridge in Northumberland, which had built up all sorts of income generating activities, including a sponsored bike race, hiring out resources such as jigsaws, and facilitating plant sales.
She ran through all the different things libraries might monetise. These included your collection; your buildings and underused spaces, including out of hours opportunities; staff experience - and underpinning all this, your deep knowledge of your users.
Her advice was to think big, start small, plan for growth, to invest, and recruit and build skills needed over a 3 year period. Building up a meaningful income stream is not a quick fix! Charlotte Collyer from Libraries Unlimited talked about the journey they had gone through with developing their Fab Lab to generate enough income for it to be self-funding. They had revamped the business model a year or so after launch to clarify their offer and to maximise return on the investment made, both financially and socially.
Volunteers now give time to staff the Fab Lab in return for use of the equipment. There was also a graduated scale of hourly charges for different machines, rather than a flat fee for usage. Charlotte used a Lean business model, [ youtube. Anne Hallinan and Louise Millard came along to talk about the work they had done in Brighton and Hove to develop 2 commercial strands of work: their bookstore at Jubilee Library, and events, activities and conferences held in the library.
The Booklover Store is managed by the commercial and conferences team although it doubles as an information point. Positioning near the entrance was regarded as critical to success, and some people come specifically to shop there despite keen competition from the shops nearby.
The shop has been stocked with users firmly in mind; for example, as there is a large number of under-5s, the party gift market is consciously catered for; and items with local connections are stocked with tourist footfall in mind. The shop builds on the prevalence of local talent, eg. Ann and Louise talked about the challenges of buying; negotiating the world of local exclusivity deals, covering the right trade fairs, balancing bulk discounts against having excess stock; and also pricing to achieve income targets.
They are planning to develop their own range based on the library special collections, which they feel are a very marketable asset. They had used a retail consultant in their early days and felt that this initial advice had been money well spent. They did discuss areas where the retail side profit was curtailed by operating alongside the library; for example, by generally sticking to the same opening hours although the shop did open on Christmas Eve when the rest of the service was closed to make the most of last minute demand for quirky and interesting gifts!
Their business model self-funds staff costs 1. Conference rooms had been developed further from the initial dedicated resource which had originally been set up with adult learning sessions in mind , and grown by adapting and using previously wasted space such as storage rooms and making previously specialist rooms multi-purpose spaces for hire.
The service had also made targeted investment in presentation kit based on customer feedback. The service was embarking on a detailed costing exercise to develop and establish realistic and sustainable charging approaches and were also planning wider marketing to external organisations, building on local Chamber of Commerce partnerships they were already seeing a shift from primarily internal bookings.
Ann and Louise also talked about using their foyer and window space to host exhibitions and promotions. The foyer was often booked out nearly a year in advance. They hired these spaces out on a flat charge basis as they had not yet found a satisfactory commission basis to use with the exhibitors. They also used ebay to sell old stock and equipment, with proceeds going back into library budgets; and had set up 2 Bookends stores to sell withdrawn stock.
Top tips from Brighton and Hove? Watch out for people with retail backgrounds during recruitment - and use their insights if you employed them! This session was led by Melanie Mills, who leads work on providing finance to fund social investment. Social investment is the use of repayable finance to achieve a social as well as a financial return.
As such, it sits somewhere between philanthropy at one end of the spectrum and more traditional bank financing at the other, with investors accepting a higher risk in return for social benefits, and because they could gain certain tax reliefs against their investment. To achieve this, you do need a proven income stream with a degree of profit margin.
This sort of financing is not open to local authority run services, but could be accessed by organisations like independent libraries, social enterprises, trusts and mutuals. It could be used to do things like buy a building, or to support ways to generate more income. Some library and leisure trust organisations were already using this sort of finance; for example, Greenwich Leisure had benefitted from investment to develop community sports facilities as had community library hubs in Lincolnshire.
Melanie suggested that anyone interested in exploring this further might start by looking at the Good Finance website, which exists to help charities and social enterprises navigate the complex world of social investment. Evidencing your social impact will be of fundamental interest to social investors. The Good Finance website has a useful tool to help organisations think about how to measure this , looking at a range of outcomes and target groups.
Melanie also mentioned a raft of new developments it was worth being aware of. Crowdfunder provided a potential way in to peer to peer lending, with Big Society Capital potentially matching funding. Big Society Capital had produced a Simple Guide to Financial Promotions for trustees, directors and senior managers of charities and social enterprises explaining the key questions they should ask when considering raising investment into their organisation.
It covers the financial promotion rules, their practical consequences and the possible exemptions that might apply, and finishes with examples of how different types of organisation might raise investment from a small group of investors to the general public. She also pointed attendees to the Access Foundation , which provided some help in looking at raising blended capital part loan and part grant. The final session was led by Sue McKenzie, who was previously head of service in Brent.
She led discussions about the pros and cons of using grants, Friends Groups, sponsorship, charging and crowdfunding as ways to raise extra money. The National Archives had run a national training programme for staff on fundraising, and had published toolkits on:. On crowd-funding, the advice was to involve your community as early as possible to help you decide what people would find acceptable to use this for.
Tags: masterclass. These self- and independently published books can include print and e-book titles. However many of these titles are not as popular as those released by major publishers, so will not be borrowed as frequently.
In the case of print books, low circulation means wasted shelf space, and in the case of e-books, it means squandered money in the acquisitions budget. Of course, many self-published authors may donate their books to libraries, at least in the case of physical books.
But then their earnings drop from the pennies they get from library sales to zero. Library books are not free. They are pre-paid, usually from some kind of tax base. Often there is an opposite effect to the need of the community: when the economy takes a downturn, the need for libraries grows just as budgets decrease. It is uncertain what effect Brexit will have on the British economy, but the tax base is sure to be affected in a country where libraries are already underfunded, [4] making getting books into libraries and paid for even more difficult for an author.
The UK is just one example of this precarious state of libraries. Many libraries are reinventing themselves and thriving, while others are struggling with declining visits and borrows. This is tough news for authors as well. Making a living as a writer is tough enough.
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