Publishing Educational Books and Materials
A three part article - all on this page
by Mary Ellen Lepionka
Part I
Many small and self-publishers are or were educators or professional practitioners and seek to parlay their experiences and expertise into writing and publishing educational materials. Many authors and small publishers have been successful at this, selling popular series, growing as companies, or being acquired as imprints of industry giants.
Overall, the education market is both huge and hugely diverse. The National Center of Education Statistics estimates a total of more than 38 million preK-8 students in 2008 and more than 16 million high school students. Of these around 6 million are in private schools. In 2007 there were around 15 million undergraduates, more than 2 million graduate students, and 335,000 students enrolled in professional schools. According to the U.S. Census there are presently 6.2 million teachers, about half in elementary and middle schools, and 1.5 million instructors in higher ed and professional ed.
Books for the education markets can earn a tremendous amount of money. According to the National Association of College Stores, in 2007 students spent more than $6 million on textbooks and $420 million on trade books they bought in college stores. Based on these numbers, imagine if your book were adopted as a supplement for 3 rd grade language arts in the state of Indiana. If Indiana purchased one copy of your book for every third grader, you would sell 77,546 books!
Each of the education markets further subdivides into specific market segments. Maybe you have created materials for the 442,000 preschool teachers, or for the 175,000 PreK-8 special education teachers or their students or their parents. Maybe you publish children’s literature that you would like to see in classrooms, school libraries, and state reading lists. Maybe you want to publish study aids for students taking physics or a casebook on civics or a textbook on clinical practice. Or maybe you just want to see your nonfiction trade book or gift book in college bookstores where students will buy them.
Each of these market segments has its own players, rules, and sales channels, and these are not the same players, rules, and sales channels as are normally found in trade book publishing. Feeding press releases, booking radio and television interviews, getting reviewed on Amazon, advertising in Publisher’s Weekly—these are not the best ways to spend your time or marketing budget if your intent is to penetrate the education market. What, then, are better ways?
Publishing Educational Books and Materials
Part 2: Cross-Marketing Kid Lit
Where do your products fit in the education market and are they market ready? To start, here are some suggestions for cross-marketing children’s literature (sometimes referred to in the trade as kid lit) and young adult literature (referred to as YA books—books for teens).
If you publish children’s or YA literature to the trade, reviews and awards are important starting points for cross-marketing to education markets. School librarians acquire books that are reviewed favorably in School Library Journal (www.schoollibraryjournal.com/) and Booklist www.ala.org/ala/booklist/booklist.htm). They also buy books that have received awards for writing or illustration (see a list at the Internet School Library Media Center’s awards page at http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/awards.htm).
Your book should already meet industry standards for book production and manufacturing. School libraries prefer hardback books and often have books rebound using library bindings (see www.lbibinders.org/home.htm). Middle school and high school libraries rely on rebound paperbacks for their fiction collections. Librarians also like to see PCIP or CIP data (see http://cip.loc.gov/) on the copyright page and/or a MARC record (see www.loc.gov/marc/), as this information saves them time and effort when cataloguing acquisitions.
Your book also should meet genre standards in content and pricing. These vary by subject. Big hardbound reference books for the nonfiction aisles in school libraries are higher-priced compared with the slim Scholastic-style paperbacks that are sold directly to students and their parents at book fairs or in book clubs (see http://librarypublishing.scholastic.com). Schools as a rule do not make returns or resell new books (except in fund-raising efforts) and so may receive deeper discounts than trade bookstores. Libraries usually do not want consumables—books such as thematic coloring books or skills workbooks that school districts or teachers might buy for classroom use and subsequent disposal.
Content standards also vary by region and locality. Private schools and homeschoolers may address particular needs in their choices of reading matter for students. Public schools have community oversight, censorship lists, textbook committees, and approved reading lists. After ensuring that your product is right for school libraries, therefore, getting on an approved reading list is the next step. Approved reading lists may be statewide, as in California (see www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/ll/), or by school districts (see www.davis.k12.ut.us/curric/languagearts/readlist.html). Approvals are based on reviews and awards and recommendations. However, be aware that your award-winning graphic YA novel or lauded children’s book on same-sex marriage, for example, may not be approved in all districts or states.
Reading incentive and assessment programs are another important point of entry to elementary and secondary school markets. Two popular programs are Accelerated Reader (AR) (see www.renlearn.com/ar/) and Scholastic’s Reading Counts (SRC) (see http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/readingcounts/ index.htm).
AR and SRC will calculate the reading level of your book using the Lexile system, will rate your book for students, and will write a test for it. The tests are designed to quantify student achievement in reading. Students accumulate points by reading AR- and SRC-rated books and taking the tests, for which there are various incentives. School librarians and school districts automatically buy these books. For detailed information on submitting titles, see “Selling to the Elhi Market: Part 1: Reading Incentive and Assessment Programs” by Linda Carlson (PMA Newsletter, June, 2007).
Other than Lexile analysis, for school markets you at least need to determine the reading level, difficulty level, and age or grade level of your book, and this information should be prominent in your promotional literature. These are different measures, and various algorithms exist for computing them, based on factors such as word length, number of syllables, sentence length and the like (see “Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators” at http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/fry/fry.html). Use several scales to determine the grade level and readability of your product, such as the Fry Readability and the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease. For a quick free check on the readability of your prose, try uploading a portion here: www.timetabler.com/reading.html. Conceptual aspects of your content also may affect accessibility to students and age appropriateness.
One reason that reading level is important is that it links literature to the grade-based curriculum. The better you can explain the connections between your product and the curriculum to which your 2 nd-grade or 10 th-grade readers are exposed, the more successful you will be in placing your product in schools. For example, is yours a picture book suitable for pre-K to 1 st-grade students, a story with vocabulary taught in 2 nd grade, or a chapter book that can be read independently by 3 rd and 4 th graders? Is your book on a topic in the 5 th grade science curriculum or in the 9 th grade social studies curriculum? (For textbooks, the subject of my next article, connections between your book and the curriculum are crucial.) Another reason that reading level is important is that school library budgets often are allocated by genre or subject matter and by grade level to ensure even collections. At the same time, funds for all acquisitions may be disbursed only once or twice a year.
Librarians order from catalogs (school publishers and library wholesalers) and review recommendations, increasingly online. For insight on the role of catalog sales in this market, see “Publishers and Vendors” at the Resources for School Librarians Web site (www.sldirectory.com/libsf/resf/vendor.html#top). Librarians also are influenced by book exhibits at library shows, especially the regional and national conventions of the American Library Association (see www.ala.org) and the state school library associations. As in public libraries, librarians also place orders based on patron requests. Giving presentations, demonstrations, or readings in school libraries is a time-honored way to promote books for students, and it is customary to donate a copy of the book to the school library as part of the promotion. School visits require a lot of planning and preparation but have proven value in selling books.
Consider, too, that you can market your children’s literature or YA books to college stores that buy trade books. College students buy these books as gifts for family members and friends, especially before holidays. In this case an age range or grade level noted on the back cover simply aids the consumer in making an appropriate purchase. Your real buyer, however, works for a bookstore—a specialized independent store or retail chain—and applies the same values as any trade bookstore. College stores are not easy to penetrate. Those that are franchises of chains, such as Barnes & Noble and Follett, stock trade books that corporate buyers purchase at a national level from vendors of record. College stores are retailers that serve only students and sell many items other than books, such as sweatshirts, mugs, and other items with school insignia. To compete for attention, you might look into becoming a trade book vendor of record to NACSCORP (www.nacscorp.com) or otherwise working through the National Association of College Stores (www.nacs.com) and the Independent College Bookstore Association (www.icbainc.com).
This article has explored how to determine where your products fit in the education market, whether those products are market ready, who your real customers are, and how to reach them. The last article in this series, appearing next month, will focus on how to market your textbook or professional book.
Publishing Educational Books and Materials
Part III:
Marketing Textbooks and Professional Books
This article, the final in the series, now surveys what is involved in marketing textbooks and other instructional materials, which is different from cross-marketing trade books. It also addresses how higher education textbook markets differ from those for professional books.
Educational standards
Elementary and high school textbooks (elhi) cover the core curriculum and are the province of big players in the industry. The cost of creating, producing, vetting, and fielding core textbooks, such as language arts readers and histories of the United States, may be prohibitively high for small publishers. Yet small publishers fill an important niche in this market by providing print and electronic supplements and consumables for classroom use. Small publishers also provide titles that big players cannot, such as supplements about local and regional subjects that tie in with district and state curricula.
Even more than in cross-marketing trade books, publishers of textbook supplements must know how their products fulfill national, subject area, state, and local standards. Submitting a product for textbook adoption involves a lot of paperwork, because publishers must demonstrate how their project meets all relevant standards. It’s important to find out about relevant standards well in advance, preferably when your product is still in development. That way, you can modify your product for better market fit and can develop the marketing tools you will need to sell your product to citizens and educators.
Educational materials normally are held to higher standards for accuracy, completeness, currency, and authority. High-profile subject area experts, educators, and classroom teachers need to review, test, and endorse your product. A teacher’s guide needs to accompany student supplements intended for distribution as class sets. And your non-fiction product needs to include references or a bibliography somewhere in its package. Educational materials for private, parochial, and home schools often have additional requirements for acceptability.
For more information about national standards in school English, mathematics, social studies, history, geology, technology, and art, see www.education-world.com/standards. This site also has links to all the state standards, organized by state as well as by subject. Other links will take you to national content standards for science, physical education, civics, music, and other areas. The standards also include skill sets (such as reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving, reading, writing, or calculating) and are calibrated to grade levels. How does your product fit in with these subject area and skill standards? To get ideas on how to align your product with the various standards, see Teacher Tap, a site for teachers seeking to align national and state standards with their local curriculum standards (http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic28.htm).
Textbook adoption process
Understanding standards and aligning your products with them are only the beginning. You also need to understand the textbook adoption process, which varies from state to state. In about half the states, state departments of education handle the approval process that makes books eligible for adoption throughout the state. School districts can order only textbooks and ancillaries that are on the approved list. In the other half of the states, individual school districts manage open textbook adoptions.
One of the best resources for understanding the textbook adoption process in general is provided at www.tea.state.tx.us/textbooks/adoptprocess/index.html by the Texas Education Agency. Texas defines its state standards in terms of Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), and at http://math.escweb.net/textbook/Presentation_Files/index.html there is an audio slide show explaining how to submit instructional materials that meet the TEKS in math. This is a good example, and many other states have online explanations of their adoption processes as well.
Whether you are seeking a state adoption or an open adoption, submitting a product in a bid for adoption is an involved process requiring long lead times. Long lead times are needed for sampling and approvals, as everyone on the adoption committee must receive and examine a copy of your product and discuss and vote on it, often after a public hearing. In addition, adoptions are by grade level and subject area and do not come up every year. New products for 5 th grade science, for example, may be considered for adoption only once every three or five years. State adoption schedules, procedures, and standards contribute to the costs that make it difficult for small publishers to compete in the elhi market. Sampling costs and book depository fees add to the expense.
In addition, textbook supplements often must meet product acceptance criteria put forth by adoption committees. These criteria vary widely and may affect publishers’ bottom lines. Some states and districts even specify acceptable trim sizes, paper quality, binding, print run quantity, pricing, shipping standards, and so on. Thus, as you can see, finding out in advance about the adoption standards and process in a state or school district is a critical task. For a comprehensive list of state contacts for getting information about textbook approval procedures, see Linda Carlson’s article, “Selling to the ElHi Market: Part 2, Getting Books Approved and Adopted” (PMA Newsletter, July 2007).
Research confirms widely held beliefs that state adoption processes are deeply flawed, as pointed out in a 2003 Fordham Institute study (see www.edexcellence.net/institute/publication/
publication.cfm?id=335).
Reforms in state adoptions are slow to come, however, so it would be wise to decide at the outset if potential return on investment (ROI) is worth the hassle for your products and company. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the elhi textbook market in any case. Savvy small publishers start by working within their own school district and state and then expanding within their region.
College market
Note that books for teachers are not in the elhi market, just as books for college instructors are not in the college market. The elhi and college markets are for student distribution. Books for teachers and college instructors, on the other hand, are professional books and are sold to end users and academic libraries through direct marketing, catalog sales, library wholesalers, and online retail stores. An exception is books for teachers that are intended as supplements in teacher education courses, which are sold via college stores through course adoption. College stores may be independent or managed by chains such as Barnes & Noble (www.bkstore.com) or Follett (www.fheg.follett.com). In any case, college stores do not buy textbooks or supplements unless they have been explicitly ordered by an instructor, academic department, or academic institution.
Some distributors, such as Independent Publishers Group (www.ipgbook.com) have divisions specializing in academic books that may be adopted as course supplements, but distributors sell principally to bookstores. See also John Kremer’s list of academic wholesalers and distributors at www.bookmarket.com. Library wholesalers with divisions specializing in academic books include, for example, Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services (www.ybp.com) and J.A. Majors (www.majors.com). Small publishers sometimes can coattail on the catalogs of larger publishers in their market and can exhibit along with bigger publishers at academic library shows and at the conventions of academic associations.
Some state college and community college systems adopt books for courses on a statewide basis, similar to state adoptions of elhi textbooks. More typically, however, in the college textbook market, individual instructors or committees formed in academic departments are the adopters. Adoptions are by semester or academic year, so less lead time is involved than in the elhi market. Nevertheless, instructors often must choose texts a semester in advance to enable college stores to acquire them and students to buy them before the semester starts. College textbook adoptions are guided by course syllabi for the courses listed in the institution’s course catalogue. As a result, governmental and educational standards are less relevant. Rather, your product must fit what instructors who teach the course want. As always, market research remains the crucial first step.
This article is the third and last in a series that explored how to determine where your products fit in the education market, whether those products are market ready, who your real customers are, and how to reach them.
Mary Ellen Lepionka founded Atlantic Path Publishing in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and is the author of professional books and articles on academic writing and textbook publishing. She blogs about publishing academic materials on her Web site, www.atlanticpathpublishing.com, which also provides links for small publishers. Lepionka is a member of SPAN and PMA and also a board member of the Independent Publishers of New England (www.ipne.org).©Mary Ellen Lepionka 2008
