Over the years I’ve made some really killer materials and started wondering whether it would be possible to publish them. I teach advanced literature mostly so I’ve put together study guides for various novels but also TV shows. My work has some similarities to Cliffsnotes but with activities involving vocabulary, pre-reading, comprehension quizzes, information on related topics etc… Also I teach some more obscure novels for which Cliffsnotes doesn’t exist.
My coworker buys a lot of study guides from teacherspayteachers and recommends selling them on there, but I’m not actually as interested in monetising my materials as I am in making them available to others (as they are novels/TV shows close to my heart) and gaining some recognition in having something published for potential career benefits.
Any ideas?
8 comments
JALT?
I have found a couple of issues in this area when I was thinking about publishing my own materials.
1) Publishers in Japan are broke (I have been told), so they will often ask authors for money to cover expenses, and offer no royalties in return… oof
2) Self-publishing online is so easy nowadays anyone can do it, and there is no filter on what gets uploaded, so it will probably add little value to your resume.
Im not trying to rain on your parade, this is something I have looked into in the past, and there is just so much out there already, unless you have an in with a publishing company, it is very hard to get published.
However, It might be worthwhile trying to get some of your materials published as lesson plans in JALT SIG newsletters or journals. Maybe Extensive Reading SIG, but Im not sure whether what you described would fit into that category.
ETJ houses and ships out some teacher-made materials. You can present at their expos to demo them as well.
Info here- https://www.etjbookservice.com/product-category/etj-members/
>I’m not actually as interested in monetising my materials as I am in making them available to others
Well, if you really don’t care about making money then upload them to your schools OneDrive (free cloud server from Microsoft for schools) and then share the link on social media (this sub, twitter, etc.)
If you want something more formal, you can contact publishers. International publishers will give you a pass (too many tricky copyright issues for these particular materials). Japanese publishers will probably be interested and will want to know how many students you have in your classes because that will guarantee a certain amount of sales. If you only have one class of 30, they’ll probably pass. But, if you have three or four classes, guaranteeing they’ll sell about 100 copies a year, they might be interested. If you look at their catalogs, you will see quite a few textbooks that are written for a single person’s classes and with print on demand, they will often take on small projects. Also, you’ll notice that they publish a lot of books that are exactly what these materials are, companions for movies, TV shows, and other media.
You can also get in touch with one of the several independent textbook publishers in Japan that are kind of/sort of like CO-OPs for teacher/authors. These groups are somewhere between self publishing and a proper publisher. The biggest one is Perceptia Press ([http://www.perceptiapress.com](http://www.perceptiapress.com)), but there are others.
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>gaining some recognition in having something published for potential career benefits
On the gyosekisho, part one, section two (2. 作成した教科書，教材) is were you list materials that you have written. It doesn’t matter whether or not they have been formally published. Handouts that you’ve created for your classes can (and should) be listed. Be prepared that a hiring committee may ask to see copies of these handouts, so make sure that you are comfortable with the content.
However, the real way to leverage materials that you’ve made for your career is to go to conferences and present about them. Go to teaching conferences like JALT or JACET (here in Japan) or conferences like Korea TESOL or TESOL in North America and show the materials to other teachers. Then you can list the presentation on your gyosekisho. Also, make sure to write a proceedings paper for each conference that you present at and then list those papers on your gyosekisho. You can also write a paper/article about how you created the materials and publish it with the material writers SIG at JALT ([https://materialswriters.org/](https://materialswriters.org/)).
The reality is that teaching materials don’t really count for much career-wise, but talking about and writing about the materials does. That’s the real secret to using them to level up your career.
Good luck!
EDIT: Typos
I asked myself the same thing a few years back and have had moderate success so here are some thoughts.
**Sharing:**
* Upload to your schools CMS for other teachers. Awesome.
**Selling:**
*”I teach literature so have put together study guides”*
* You cannot sell anything with content belonging to someone else (intellectual property – IP). So you cannot use book titles, book characters, quoted text, images, author name, even color schemes. This includes product titles, descriptions, and tags. You will not find anything in TpT or Etsy connected with Harry Potter as an example.
* Specific vocabulary lists are protected too. Not the words themselves but specific lists created by exam boards or publishers. No Jolly Phonics resources in TpT for example.
*”…I’m not actually as interested in monetising my materials…”.*
* Why not? It’s satisfying each day to wake and find a teacher or parent valued my work sufficiently to pay for it. Would you like a brand new computer? A free weekend holiday away somewhere? You’ve worked hard for your skill set so don’t undervalue yourself. Often it is the school paying too not the teacher.
* I find the perceived value of my products is higher if they need to be paid for.
**Your own website / Store.**
One upside to to Covid was the boom in online e-commerce and website builders. Their ease of use is far more intuitive than it was a decade ago too.
* It does take a significant amount of time to build and fill with content a useful website or blog. Software and hosting has costs. This is why I recommend charging for your resources. In my case I spend one month of the summer working for myself and generally speaking 12 months later I add up the small amounts I’ve charged and I’m up.
**My** [**English Languages Resources**](https://www.themagiccrayons.com) **website then, The Magic Crayons.**
* My classroom games pages are all free for teachers, specifically those teaching English to Kindergarten students in Japan. They are all 100% written by me. The Flash Cards and more recently Gifts/Merch are all drawn by myself, and the songs were written by myself and friends.
* The Flash Cards are also in TpT, with songs in iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube etc.
Hopefully some ideas for you, and also I wouldn’t want you to spend time creating materials that you cannot actually sell.
Good luck and ask below if you have any questions.
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**Update:**
*Career benefits.*
My website is a visualisation of my skill set and is the first line of my CV. Any applicant can copy and paste a glowing CV. Not every applicant can demonstrate it.
A guy I work with pats a company to publish his textbooks and makes a nice sum from it .. more than if a company published it ..
Make a blog and post them on there (this is mine where I share my bilingual teaching guides: [https://sendaiben.org/about-2/](https://sendaiben.org/about-2/)) or make a separate website (my course for JHS students: [https://fluency-course.com/](https://fluency-course.com/)).
You can still list things on teachers pay teachers for free! Most teachers I know use TPT, but I’ve only ever used the free materials.