The Yearbook

The yearbook is an excellent tradition, and valuable part of the school year, as well as serving as a reminder of KSYK for decades afterwards. The problem? It can be a pain to organize.

History
The yearbook has been made annually for as long as I can remember, so 2008. It has always had a supervising teacher, who got together a team of Lower and Upper Secondary students, who made the yearbook semi-independently. The yearbook was generally paid for by the school, and the finished product sold.

All changed in 2013, when a couple students, including yours faithfully, realized that there was indeed no yearbook in process, half way through the school year. The very same day, a yearbook team was created. A lukio only production. To the surprise of many, on the last school week, the books rolled in. The Lukio Year in Review (LYIR) was born. A fine day in the history of KSYK.

So you want to make a yearbook?
Whoa, whoa, not so fast there. It's excellent that you want to go through with this, but first things first. Before you think about anything more, make sure you have the following things:


 * One or more editor-in-chiefs. This person is practically in charge of the process, and must be motivated and willing to do work. I assume this is you. Having two editors-in-chief can be good for making the process less stressful, as having two people sharing the load is way more comforting than being alone. It can also help with language checking, as you can have one editor for English, and one for Finnish.
 * An art director. This person is in charge of the layout, and putting the bad boy together. A sizeable job, but totally doable and excellent mark on their CV!
 * Financial security. This means having a supervising teacher in charge of money things, or a deal with the school to pay for the books, as is traditional. This would be the best with a supervising teacher. Anyway, having the money in charge of the editor can lead to unwanted situations (see 2013).
 * Motivation. You need a group of people willing to write. You need motivated people. The process isn't that bad, in the end, as long as you have a motivated team. Don't forget that articles need to be edited, and that there is a lot of little things beside writing articles, like getting class pictures and comments!

Why do you need all of this before you begin anything? Because, with the legendary LYIR, I was in charge of all of the above. And that wasn't too cool.

The Process and Scheduling
You have everything above? Excellent. I assume you are smart and it is early in the school year. Time is your best friend. You want time. Let's examine the process in reverse order.

You want the yearbook to arrive two or three weeks before school ends. Before exam week and end of year when everyone is everywhere.

This means getting to print at least two weeks (or the time given by the print house) + one week before the release date. Why? With the LYIR I received a message from the print house the night before the date the yearbook was supposed to arrive, saying that they only got to looking at it that day.

Before printing you want about two weeks for getting everything right. By this time you want the design and all the articles ready. The articles need editing. Depending on the process you want to use, this can take up to a couple weeks. (LYIR used "one edit" technique, but I really recommend cross-editing, see Editing) Let's allocate two weeks, just to be sure.

Writing articles takes time, but you need a balance between enough time to write, and too much making people lazy and forgetful. Let's give this a generous three months.

And finally, the first stage, planning. You need time to get together the articles that will be written. By the end of this you will know approximately the content of the yearbook, and who will write what. If you have no articles at the end of this, you have no yearbook. Give this maybe two weeks to a month. Now we can examine the timeline we get. Remember, the earlier you begin, the easier the rest. Note that a lot is exaggerated. It can be done faster, especially towards the end. Just remember to allocate enough time for everything.
 * November - December. Planning begins.
 * 4.1 Writing officially begins
 * 4.4 Editing begins.
 * 18.4 Book almost ready, articles and editing pretty much done
 * 28.4 Book goes to print
 * 20.5 Book published
 * 31.5 School ends

The Process
Let's examine different parts of the process more closely.

Planning
Gather as many possible people. Make a Facebook page. Meetings are nice, but not mandatory. LYIR had none. First step is gathering every single possible idea for content and article that you and anyone else can think of. A Facebook group doc worked for us.

At the same time have a list of articles to be written and by whom. This will be hopefully as close as possible to the final article list in the yearbook, at the end of the planning period. Consider the reliability of different authors. You will always have a few that will not be written. For reference the LYIR had just 14 articles / pieces of content. More is preferred, but it made a nice 30 pages of content. I would aim for 50.

Photographs and Comments
The yearbook traditionally has pictures and comments of every class. Remember that if you want the yearbook to include abis, their picture needs to be taken early, as they leave early February.

We had homeroom teachers send students a time during lunch break to have their class pictures taken, as well as an announcement. This resulted in relatively high participation.

The comments are traditionally organized followingly: A yearbook rep. or member of the class hands out a blank sheet of paper to every student. The student writes their name on the paper. The papers are left on desks, or go around the class. Leaving them on desks tends to work better. Other members of class then comment on their peers papers. After perhaps ten minutes, all students find their paper and choose two comments to be published. The class rep. then proceeds to type the class's comments up.

Other methods that can be tried include superlatives, where peers vote on students "most likely to" or similar. This can be a fun bonus, but falls short to comments by focusing more on only certain students, instead of giving every student something to remember.

The Print House
lol printing, y do i wana think about that lol?

Because the earlier you figure out the print house, the better. First of all you want to get as many offers as you can, to get the best possible deal. You also want to know how long the print house takes in production, so you can schedule as well as possible. You also need to know what the print house wants from you as early as you can. Get it done. LYIR and several years previous have used painotalo Casper, which has worked rather well.

While asking for an offer you need to know the following things, which should be decided during planning:
 * Colors? Very expensive, probably no.
 * Size? The book has traditionally been A4, but LYIR was rather successful with B3(?). (About the size of MAOL). The price of the size of the yearbook is almost the same.
 * Covers. Covers in color highly recommended. Regularly thick paper, glossed, see LYIR print specs. Also possible to get hard-cover, which is the coolest, but way expensive.
 * Number of pages. This is the most difficult to know early on, but use the plan, and overestimate. You will probably gain pages along the writing stage, and they really add to the price on a long run.

Writing
The creative process. Someone who has written things can fill in more on the writing part.

Check on the authors progresses. Inspire them. Give them ideas. Bug them when the deadline is coming up. If new article ideas come up at this stage, no problem.

This stage is up the authors mostly. If all goes well, you will have a good collection of about 15 - 20 articles and other content, and are ready to continue.

Editing
One big problem with the yearbook that I've heard in the past, is that it has been ridden with typos and bad language (like this guide!), which should be avoided with a printed publication. Editing is very important, but can be difficult to organise. First we'll look at how the LYIR was edited, and then, how the yearbook should be edited.

With the lukio year in review time was short, and motivation sparce within the team. We had a couple people who went through an article assigned to them, and made changes, sending me the final version. The authors were not part of the process. Then, before going to print, I went through every article, and checked or rechecked, even partially rewriting some. Despite the rather poor and uncommunitative editing methods, the language in the book was rather good, and probably better than other years, in my opinion.

But what was the problem with the LYIR editing process, then? First of all you need communication with the author. Afterall their name is on the article, it's their text. Second of all it's not very professional. Using good methods is good practise for life, and yields better results. Third, the more the merrier. Nobody in lukio is a professional editor, nor perfect. For best results, it's probably better to have more than one person going through each article. And more than a couple people editing all of the articles.

With the above in mind, I suggest the following method, employed to some extent in the 2012 yearbook. Have a group of proofreaders. Assign an article or more to each, and have them make all changes in word, tracking changes. When an article is checked, it is sent back to the author, who can go through the changes, and reject or accept them. From there it can go on another round to the same or other checker, creating the final version as a group effort. Most important is having as much as possible communication. The last stop is naturally the editor-in-chief.

Censorship
A quick mention on something rather important, that's good to keep in mind.

The yearbook, no matter how student run it is, will always be affiliated with KSYK. This means that the content can't be too edgy, although we managed to go rather far with the LYIR.

In the past there has been a little bit too much censorship by the supervising teacher. Also remember that as a student publication, not all articles will be perfect. There should be no reason to not run an article for "not being good enough", as has happened in the past.

With the LYIR, to stay on the good side with the school, we had the principal look through the whole yearbook before going to print. Also, just as importantly, if someone is mentioned in an article, ask their permission.

Advertising
The yearbook is ready, and everyone needs to know about it, and more importantly, how epic it is. The following methods have worked before:
 * Posters. Posters everywhere. Tens of humorous and/or informative posters around the school. Make them attention grabbing and edgy.
 * Facebook. KSYK lukio probably has a Facebook group, use it. Social Media is probably one of the best ways to get to everyone. Have someone funny write something funny.
 * Make announcements. Yes, those annoying things that interrupt lessons and are too loud. One good example is our overly cheesy US high-school type PA ad for Spirit Week 2012.
 * The info screens are made for info. You can always put something there and hope someone looks at it.
 * Last, but not least. Puskaradio. Just tell everyone that the yearbook is a thing and it's the best thing and they really need to buy it.

Sale
This part is difficult. Where do you get the funding? Do you do preorder only? Do you make an order and collect money? Both?

As mentioned earlier, traditionally the way of paying for the yearbook, has been a system where first "pre-orders" are collected. These are reservations of the final book, which is paid for when they arrive. As well as this, the yearbook has been for all of KSYK, not just Upper Secondary. The school has paid for the order, which is larger than the amount of orderers and money has been collected. Rumor says that money and books have disappeared.

Because of the initial lack of funding, with the LYIR, we opted for a pre-order only -model, but ended up with something a little bit like the traditional model. Here is the story and cautionary tale of selling the LYIR:

As mentioned we had a pre-order only -model, where yearbooks could be bought in advance, and then an order would be made from the final amount. The sale price was 8€. We sell about 50 yearbooks in a stand with a moneybox (with the option to pay straight to my account). Eventually I realize that the current amount of orders was too little for our sale price, as the price of the books reduces exponentially as the size of the order gets larger. The situation, which could have resulted in disaster, was saved by making a deal with the school to buy about 30 yearbooks for the library to sell for the rest of the year. I paid the school for all of the pre-orders, and the school paid the bill.