Cape students tackle yearbook business

A new layout with lots of color has Cape’s yearbook staff scrambling to design pages, sell ads and meet deadlines for the 2011 yearbook, which is expected to be in students’ hands before the school year ends.

Students say they hope the yearbook will have color on every page, but that depends on how many books and advertisements they sell. Senior pages will be in color; other pages will have as much color as advertising allows.

Co-editor Bethany Graves said, “It’s not just a class. It’s a business.”

This year’s yearbook budget is about $40,000, for 600 copies of full-color books, adviser Amie King said. Business manager Matt Wilson said last year, the yearbook staff paid off all its bills by the end of the year.

Yearbook staff members call local businesses to see if they want to buy advertising, and Wilson and fellow business manager Andrew Merlo visit them to sell the ads. “We can’t do it without ads,” Wilson said.

“This gives us good real-world experience … It’s invaluable how much it teaches you to go out into the business world,” he said.

Always ready to make a sale, Merlo said ads are tax-deductible and repeat advertisers get 10 percent off the cost of an ad.

Students must pay the printing company on time in addition to completing sections of the yearbook by deadlines spread throughout the school year.

Selling the books to students is also part of the business. Students can make $1 deposits on yearbooks and pay them off though the year, but prices go up after each marking period. “We really try to work with students to make the yearbook easy to purchase. It’s not a bad deal, especially with the $1 deposit,” Graves said.

Amelia Mazzetti said, “People think this is an easy class, that you go in and don’t do much work. It’s not just a class. It’s a 24-7 thing,” she said.

Merlo agreed. “We’re up until 12 on deadline getting our pages done,” he said. The last deadline was on a Sunday.

Mazzetti said, “We work as a team. Nobody doesn’t do any work. We all help each other.”

She said working on their yearbook helped her and her fellow classmates become comfortable speaking up and sharing their ideas.

Wilson said co-editor Courtney Puckett is a good example. “Last year, she had good ideas and kept them to herself. This year, she’s really opened up,” he said.

Phyllicia Barlett said, “Some of the other people in yearbook are friends, but others are people you don’t normally hang out with, people outside your normal friends circle.”

New yearbook style

Work on this year’s book began last summer when some students went to a camp at Gettysburg College where they learned about yearbook design and got ideas from yearbooks from other schools, said Puckett.

The work picked up from there.

“This is the first yearbook we’ve done that covers the school year chronologically. Traditionally, there have been pages for each of the clubs and sports teams,” said King.

Graves said with the new style the yearbook will read more like a magazine. “In the traditional book, people just flip to certain sections. In this one, you have to look through the whole book,” she said.

“It’s more fun. There’s something on each page for everybody.”

Mazzetti said one goal is to have each student in the yearbook three times; the yearbook staff is trying hard to cover even camera-shy students, Graves said.

The yearbook room might be the only classroom in the high school with a coffee maker and water fountain, said Mazzetti. And they say they do need the coffee.

Students use a design program on a Jostens website to lay out yearbook page designs. Where they are using selective color, they upload color photos onto black-and-white pages, and a tool allows them to select what portions of the original color to use.

Barlett said, “I like the artistic aspect of it, especially this year with it in color.”

Yearbooks will be delivered in the spring, instead of over the summer. That means the deadlines are coming up sooner than they would otherwise, Graves said.

It’s good because seniors will have yearbooks before they graduate, instead of having to come back to pick them up over the summer. The downside is that the book won’t include spring sports or prom, Matt Wilson said.

“We have such a diverse population of students in this school, it’s hard to please everyone. We’re trying to please every part of the population in some way,” he said.

Merlo said, “Twenty years from now, this will really mean a lot.”

Cape yearbook is taking advertisements until March 7. For more information, contact yearbook adviser Amie King at aking@cape.k12.de.us or please call 302-645-7711, ext. 2115.