72 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ AUGUST 5, 2019
Soapbox
“Everybody wins: customers get a discount, and sellers get full price.”
Vouching for Vouchers
An assistant professor of publishing says vouchers are
the best way for literary festivals to sell booksBy Kathi Inman Berens
items, jigsaw puzzles, and knowledge cards.
“People often spend more money when it
feels like they’re getting a discount,” Bunn
notes.
Because the vouchers can only be spent in
person and on the day of the festival, people
want to use the $5 for something. “We have
seen an uptick in sales,” says Rachel Bell,
publisher of Overcup Books. “As an inde-
pendent publisher with a small catalogue,
we love it when people deem our titles
voucher worthy.”
Andrew Proctor, executive director of
Literary Arts, says vouchers have radically
stimulated book sales at the festival. In 2018,
78% of PBF ticketholders bought at least one
book; 29% bought three or more books. Well over half (54.7%)
of the 6,425 vouchers were used—that’s 3,515 purchases made
using vouchers. In 2017, just over 47% of vouchers were used.
Increased voucher use might correlate with the growing
number of millennials at PBF—they were the largest demo-
graphic group among 2018 ticketholders. PBF’s slate of diverse,
hip, queer, and famous authors hit the marketing sweet spot for
the 25–34-year-old attendees. Millennials are likely to value or
need vouchers more than their middle-aged counterparts.
How can a festival afford vouchers? “We essentially treat the
festival passes as costing $10,” explains Literary Arts’ Bullock.
“Since we’ve included the vouchers from the beginning, there
was no adjustment needed to accommodate them.”
Vouchers mean that booksellers don’t need to slash prices.
“Vouchers are the only discounts we offer on the products we
sell at PBF,” says Powell’s Sutton. Everybody wins: customers
get a discount and sellers get full price.
The concept of using vouchers seems to be spreading.
Wordplay, which bills itself as “Minnesota’s largest celebration
of readers, writers, and books,” offered $5 vouchers to each of
its 10,000 ticketholders at its inaugural book festival in May- Booksellers at the festival felt vouchers helped with hard-
cover sticker shock, says Wordplay founder Steph Opitz. ■
Few people are happy with how books are
sold at literary festivals. New York City
publishers think festivals don’t move books
at volume. PW reported that attendees at this
year’s BookCon were unsatisfied with aspects
of the event. “There’s hardly any ARC drops
or free books,” one BookCon attendee said.
“It felt a lot like we paid for a ticket just to
be allowed in to buy things,” said another.
But that’s not the case in Portland, Ore.,
where book vouchers power a high volume of
book sales at the 10,000-person, one-day
Portland Book Festival held each November.
A $5 voucher is rolled into the cost of a
festival ticket. Admission is cheap at $15 for
preorders and $20 at the door. With vouchers
for all paid ticketholders, festivalgoers get up to one-third of
their entry fees back to spend with vendors at the festival,
including booksellers at the nine event locations and small- and
midsize presses that exhibit their wares on the expo floor.T
he voucher idea appealed to Amanda Bullock shortly
after she was hired in 2015 to be director of the PBF and
moved to Portland from New York. In New York, she
noticed, “you’d pay for a $10 event ticket, and they’d throw in
a free drink.” Why not do the same thing for books?
Vouchers keep everybody happy because they are not a dis-
count. Literary Arts, the largest literary nonprofit in Oregon,
which acquired PBF in 2015, absorbs the cost, and booksellers
and publishers get paid their full prices. “With the preorder
opportunity last year for Abbi Jacobson and Tom Hanks, PBF
sales are about double a robust author event that we host at an
off-site location,” observes Kim Sutton, chief customer officer
at Portland’s Powell’s Books. “Vouchers are very helpful in
driving sales at PBF, to incent a purchase that may not have
happened or to allow festivalgoers to treat themselves to an
additional item.”
Vouchers lower the risk of buying a new thing. Craig Bunn,
associate sales manager for Pomegranate Communications, said
the press collected three to four dozen vouchers at last year’s PBF
when it rented a large endcap booth on the expo floor.
Pomegranate sold out of boxed notes, Edward Gorey specialtyKathi Inman Berens is an assistant professor of book publishing at Portland
State University.