For the last couple of years, we’ve made it a standard practice to report out publicly on the financial details of each year’s Library Publishing Forum. (Here are the reports from 2024 and 2025.) These reports are meant to serve as a resource for fellow conference planners, as well as helping our community better understand the decisions we make around the event. This post will report out on the finances for the in-person Forum held June 17-18 in Seattle, WA, as well as Responding to Universities in Crisis: A Summit for University-Based Publishing (June 16).
Breaking even
The Library Publishing Forum has never been a revenue-generating activity for LPC. Our goals have always been to 1) put on a good conference that is affordable for attendees, and 2) not lose money on it. We have kept registration rates low by holding our in-person conferences in inexpensive campus venues; bringing in as many sponsor dollars as possible; and keeping everything on a shoestring budget.
Our cautious budgeting plus our consistently growing list of attendees meant that, before the pandemic, we frequently made a small profit on the Forum, which went into LPC’s operating reserve. Since 2020, however, the pattern has been that our virtual conference years make a profit, and our in-person events go over budget. Since we have now settled into a steady pattern of alternating in-person and virtual conferences, our new goal is to break even across a two-year span. That means that we are OK with losing some money on an in-person conference if we can make it up the next year on a virtual conference. As you can see from this post and last year’s report-out, we’re just about there!
Revenue
The Forum has two sources of revenue: sponsorships and registrations. Most Forum sponsorships are $500 or $1,000, so we’re not bringing in a huge amount of money, but it’s enough to make a significant dent in the event costs. As mentioned above, our registration rates are as low as we can possibly make them. After keeping registration rates flat for many years, we gave into the inevitability of rising costs and increased them this year. There are member discounts, student discounts, and lots of waivers, but the standard registration increased from $300 to $400.
The revenue breakdown for this year’s Forum was:
- Sponsorship: $12,000
- Registration: $27,440, plus $134 from registration for our Forum Friends program
- TOTAL: $39,576
Expenses
- Venue: $8,930
- Catering: $16,100
- Sched software: $2,520 (way too expensive – we’re still looking into alternatives)
- Keynote honoraria: $2,500
- Staffing (for two contract-based staff): $4,200
- Staff travel: $4,590
- Materials/printing/shipping/etc: $2,679
- TOTAL: $41,519
As you can see, we lost a little bit of money on the Forum (-$1,943), but honestly not as much as we were expecting! I credit strong registration numbers (and, of course, our dedicated sponsors) for us getting so close to breaking even.
Summit finances
Responding to Universities in Crisis: A Summit for University-Based Publishing was jointly hosted by LPC and the Association of University Presses, but it took place in our Forum venue and we handled all of the logistics. Between our two sponsors and the VERY strong registration numbers, the event brought in $5,243. For the venue, catering, staff, and a few small miscellaneous expenses, it cost $6,703, leaving us with a deficit of –$1,460. As the co-host, AUPresses agreed ahead of time to split any cost overruns, so each org was only responsible for covering $730. The Summit was an excellent event, and one that we were very happy to invest a little bit of our operating funds into!
The bottom line
Honestly, we were prepared to lose our shirt on this one. Seattle is a very expensive city, and we found out after the Forum was scheduled that it was getting even more expensive due to concurrent World Cup events in town. In-person event attendance has been unpredictable since 2020, and conferences on the west coast tend to draw smaller crowds, which made revenue hard to estimate. However, the opportunity to co-locate our conference with the AUPresses Annual Meeting was too good to pass up, so we took the risk of a big financial loss. We’re delighted to report that that didn’t happen, and that we are pretty much on target to break even across a two-year span of Forums. Many thanks to our hosts at University of Washington, our sponsors, and everyone who attended the Forum!