There is more than one route to ELT writing success... and income!
Image: Gary A. K.
The latest post over on Scott Thornbury's blog explores some of the ways budding ELT writers can "make it" -- and I have to admit, as someone who has had a series published, that most of the advice there is overwhelmingly sound.
The way I got "noticed" and published followed pretty much the route described by several people on that post. Basically, many publishing people got to know me through my role (and presentation experience) in a TEFL/TESOL organisation, which led to being asked informally for some advice and opinions on potential new series, which in turn led to being offered a regional editor role for a specific series, which switched to an actual writing role for that series.
Something I found a little eye-opening through that recruitment process was the fact that the publisher concerned showed absolutely no interest in my previous writing experience. I also found myself chuckling a little when I was referred to around conference events as a "newbie" writer.
You see, I'd already designed, written and implemented more than 100 different coursebooks which went through the hands of about 200 teachers and somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 learners... before I ever set out to write for a major publisher. In fact, I wasn't even deliberately looking to catch the attention of big publishers at the time I was approached by one; I was quite happy and doing very well for myself with a different sort of ELT writing arrangement.
This ELT writing was, in a nutshell, in-house publishing with individual schools I worked for and managed as an academic coordinator over a period of about five years. As in, you write material which the school publishes itself through a local printing company.
I'm mentioning it here because I think it is an alternative route to successful and rewarding ELT writing experience, and it is something I would highly recommend to budding teacher-writers out there.
In fact, having done both (writing materials for in-house publishing and major commercial global publishing), I might even confess to feeling that the in-house route was a better experience for me on a variety of levels.
How I got into writing in-house materials is a long story probably better suited to a separate post at some stage, but I could summarise it along these lines (in rough order according to the way it panned out for me):
- Making supplements and lesson plans to improve a school's existing programme, and making them available to all the other teachers;
- Upon developing a strong relationship with school owners (and a track record with the work mentioned above), going to them with ideas for supplementary coursebooks that could be printed locally;
- Building up a portfolio of printed work that could be used to negotiate better salary and conditions at an existing or new place of employment;
- Once a certain level of experience and expertise had developed, negotiating completely separate terms and conditions for writing work with a school (as opposed to regular teaching and management duties), in my case usually around 50% of the profit from each book sold to students;
- In the right school/employment environment, developing a team of writers amongst the teaching staff, securing them their own extra income for their work and taking a small slice as editor/manager/trainer.
As I mentioned, that all took years to develop, and I can't begin to stress the importance of building up the necessary relationships with employers, as well as learning to walk carefully atop a fence where it can be easy to end up taken advantage of on the one hand, or come across as greedy on the other.
But if you can manage to pull it off -- and let me just say now that it is a whole lot easier than trying to get a major publisher to even look at your ideas -- there are some huge advantages:
1. You can start small/manageable and work your way up within your own comfort level.
2. You can make specific material that targets genuine needs (as well as limitations) inherent to your teaching context on several levels (term duration, localisation, student needs, teaching limitations).
3. You potentially have a whole team of people who can give you great feedback about your material on an almost daily basis (and yes, this feedback can sting a bit if you're getting things wrong!), and this creates a huge, fast-paced learning curve for a materials writer.
4. Based on (3) above, you can review and improve the materials you make from one term to the next (as an example, one of my writing coursebooks reached its 8th edition in less than 3 years!).
5. In certain contexts, good effective locally produced and oriented material is considered a source of pride for the school and even the students. It's a little hard to explain, but I never got quite the same level of respect and appreciation based on the materials I made for the mass market with a major publisher (even with all the gloss and bells and whistles that avenue afforded). Every writer, however humble, has an ego...
6. You can experiment more with methodology (for example, the later stuff I designed for institutes became increasingly "unplugged" in orientation), supporting the material and approach with on-the-spot and ongoing teacher development. Even when the odd experiment falls flat, it can be rectified quickly from one term to the next (or even during the term -- I once had books completely re-designed and reprinted 3-4 weeks into a term based on a curve ball a certain situation caused for the school).
7. You can potentially make just as much, if not more, money from this than writers of international coursebooks with major publishers, depending on how well you position yourself and negotiate terms -- and yet still produce material that is half or even a third of the cost for the learners to buy. It also represents more income for an institute, too (again, depending on the terms agreed to), which helps to keep your employer happy (with you).
8. Once you're in the right place with the right people, you can go through the challenging but rewarding process of bringing more of the other teachers together into a writing team, offering them new income streams and more diverse experience and expertise. It's a great thing to write your own books. It's a greater thing to write them with others, and/or to help them realise their own talent for writing good learning materials.
9. You're under the (healthy, I think) pump to keep things real, realistic and relevant. No ducking down behind a big publisher and sympathetic public reviews from people who basically write them with the hope of being offered writing gigs of their own...!
10. Your writing success and offers of future work are dependent on how good your materials are and how well they work -- not how expert you are at charming rooms full of teachers you don't know from a bar of soap, and/or how willing you are to do non-stop author tours on the other side of the world.
11. (Could have just as readily made this number 1 on the list!) You get to use materials you genuinely like and believe in with your own classes.
So, I guess the whole point of this is to say to any aspiring ELT writers out there:
Before you go diving (and falling, in many cases) to write for any of the ELT publishing superpowers out there, first take a look closer to home. There may be more opportunities there than you realise, and they might even be better for you.
=D
