The Educational Market: Marketing Your Books to Schools and Teachers
Teachers and school administrators are constantly looking for fresh teaching materials. It's not always easy, however, to figure out how to sell to the school market effectively.
Selling effectively to the educational market begins before your book is even published. Before publication you should examine how your title will fill curriculum requirements. If you can tweak your text to more perfectly align with particular objectives and outcomes for a specific curriculum area, you'll have a much easier time selling your book to schools and teachers.
Plan Ahead
In the US, not all states use the same curriculum framework, so you should go beyond federally mandated common core materials when researching curriculum requirements and also investigate state mandates as well.
Many supplemental materials used in schools are funded with special programs. Whether that's gifted education, ESL training or special needs help, knowing what needs these programs fill will help you explain how your book meets the funding objectives. That crucial information might help you make a sale in a market where money is tight.
Additionally, when teachers seek out resources, they're also often looking for materials that represent their increasingly diverse student population. If possible in your title, be sure you appeal to and/or include all ethnic groups, economic situations and family types.
Finally, you should time your educational releases to take advantage of the educational cycle. New releases are best published in August/September so they can be evaluated during the current school year and purchased over the summer for the following year. (No one said the educational market was a fast sale!)
Seek Out Endorsements and Reviews
If you plan on selling to the school marketing extensively, you'll want to develop relationships with well-known educators, and understand the power of reviews in this market. Advertising and seeking out reviews in educational periodicals can pay dividends. Educational organizations often endorse products and administer awards in their fields. These too can be great avenues to give your title credibility to teachers and administrators.
Be Helpful
Teachers are busy and often overwhelmed. The more assistance you can give them in the form of lesson plans, handouts, activities, supplementary material and other teaching ideas can make a huge difference in the willingness of educators to introduce your book into their teaching plans. Be sure to emphasize these materials when you send out marketing materials to these markets.
In addition, hosting these materials on sites like TeachersPayTeachers.com, TeachersNotebook.com and ShareMyLesson.com can create awareness of your books in places that your marketing cannot reach.
Read These Next
What’s on Your Back Cover?
New publishers and self-publishing authors often spend a lot of time on the front cover design of their books, but not so much time and effort is made on the back cover. The back cover of your book is a valuable sales tool and should be used to its best advantage.
Notes on the Romance Publishing Industry
On the top of popular fiction charts sits the often disrespected romance genre, but these stories of love and happily-ever-after manage to keep many publishers afloat, as readers purchase from publishers both large and small.
Will E-Books Topple Publishers as We Know Them?
Are the major publishing houses we love and revile about to come tumbling down, undermined by a million e-bookers? Yes, says Smashwords’ founder Mark Coker, there’s a revolution afoot. No, says Berrett-Koehler’s David Marshall, the new publishing houses will just be different and better. The odd man out, publishing consultant Peter Beren, thinks the traditional publishers will not only survive, they will probably just absorb the current e-book craze and crazies.