According to Echowan adviser Julianne Herbert, sales — which closed on Feb. 5 — were especially good this year, leaving staffers less stressed than in the past.

“We got out of the gate quickly and got a lot of sales really early on. The staff have been really willing to work on their sales techniques to encourage people to buy books,” Herbert said. “This felt the least stressful, for whatever reason. I don’t know what (the reason) is: if it was the staff was more engaged (or) if the school has a greater sense of school spirit this year, because the yearbook is really attached to school identity.”

The publication’s editor-in-chief, senior Olivia Mosby, said the sales editor’s new techniques played a large part in the elevated number of sales.

“Our sales editor, Ella Thomas, is in charge of assigning all of the sales, and she oversees all of the progress we make. She comes up with the assignments, but overall everybody on Echowan is responsible for sales,” Mosby said. “For most of the year, we were ahead of what we did last year, and a lot of that was because of the new strategies that (Ella) came up with.”

According to sophomore photographer Elie Grassley, Thomas helps to break up the sales throughout the year via staggered deadlines.

“(Thomas) is in charge of making deadlines and getting us to sell yearbooks,” Grassley said. “Earlier this year we had a deadline where she gave us a list, and we had to contact everyone on it and let them know about the yearbook.”

Mosby said with each deadline, staffers must make a certain number of sales — the actual number of which depends on how many total sales there have been so far and how large the staff is.

“We usually (sell through) smaller goals just based on how many sales we have,” Mosby said. “We look at how many we have and how many we want to have, and then we pretty much just divide that number by the number of people on staff, and that’s how we decide the assignments.”

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As a first year staffer, Grassley said the sales were difficult to make at first, but she was able to develop successful strategies.

“It was kind of hard at first, trying to get people to buy them, but after awhile you get the hang of it,” Grassley said. “If it’s in person, you try to persuade them and give them all the reasons (to buy). If you are direct messaging them or texting them, you give them all the information like where to buy it and the deadlines.”

Now that sales are over, Herbert says she is looking forward to distribution day in the spring.

“I’m really excited for distribution day, and I hope that the students and staff love the book because my staff has been putting a lot of work into it,” Herbert said.

The Echowan distribution day is during school May 29.