Why should I “market” my book as a teacher?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? This famous riddle is true for publishing a book with Book Creator: If no one knows about you or your book, they’ll never read it, and miss out on all of your great content.

Publishing a book with Book Creator is just the start of your storytelling journey. The home stretch is all about marketing your work—putting your book in front of people who might benefit from reading your project, and those who can share your work with their friends, colleagues and followers. But why would you want to market a book you’ve made for your students or colleagues?

Not all books are meant to be shared publicly—your book may have student examples or other content that needs to stay private to you or your students. But there are many reasons to share your work more widely. Maybe you need to generate support for a fundraising campaign, increase attendance at workshops, or just take ownership of the narrative of your school and classroom.

Promote an idea, methodology, or teaching philosophy

Authoring books is about more than delivering a physical or digital document—it’s about sharing and distributing ideas widely. Maybe you and your colleagues have developed a way of teaching that you think others might benefit from. Or maybe you’re fortunate enough to have the bandwidth and support to develop new projects or lessons that teachers in other schools might not have. Publishing your ideas and examples in a digital book is a great way to elevate learning and teaching practices for educators around the world.

Promote an event

Another reason to market your book would be when you want to promote awareness of an event you’re hosting, like a conference or school-wide event.

You might use Book Creator to publish digital programs, handbooks, guides, or workbooks for attendees at a conference, professional development training, or a school-wide event for parents or community members. Sharing this document in advance can get others excited about your speakers and workshops, and drive higher attendance.

• Using Book Creator to publish conference proceedings

Share best practices

When I started teaching, I was hungry for ideas and advice about how to teach. To this day, I still love observing other teachers’ classrooms and learning new techniques that I can use to elevate my own teaching. Sharing educator stories or sample lessons through digital books can encourage new teachers, and inspire veteran teachers.

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Publish student success stories

Remote school put a damper on in-person performances, science fairs, art shows, and back to school nights. But publishing digital books with Book Creator allows you to bring your classroom to the audience when you can’t have it the other way around. Embed video and audio files of student performances, images of their work, and written and creative projects.

When the audience can’t be in person, or when you need to tell the story of your classroom, Share the great work made by your students so parents and administrators can see student successes and growth, and create an analogous experience to being in person.

• Documenting my first year at secondary school
• Want to turn your students into producers as well as authors?
• Putting publishing into the hands of students

Convinced? Heres' how to market your books

Word of mouth still works really well because your message is shared by people your audience trusts. Let people know about your books in staff meetings, department planning sessions, or at PTA meetings.

Social media is used by businesses, politicians, artists--and, yes, educators--to share and promote their ideas. It’s one of the best ways to promote your work, simply because it's free, convenient, and everyone uses it.

I use Instagram and Twitter to share my work, and there are many resources for how to develop a marketing plan for your own books.

Here are some tips as you create social media posts to promote your book:

• Determine who your audience is: parents, administrators, colleagues at other schools, etc. This will help you write your posts and design images in ways that resonate with that specific audience. It also helps you choose what social platform to use.
• Create clear, concise posts that cover the 5W’s and H: Who, what, when, where, why, how.
• Let folks know where to find and view your book (be sure to share a link!)

Create small images or graphics—like screenshots of pages, or social ‘cards’ designed specifically for social media— to add to your social media posts and enhance audience engagement. I love using Canva and Adobe Spark Post to create my graphics.

You could also take a short screen recording of your book with the pages turning - this is a trick the Book Creator team uses a lot to make their social media posts stand out.

Marketing your Book Creator book is a great way to tell the story of your classroom, create a professional presence, and share ideas that help elevate educators everywhere. More importantly, it models productive digital citizenship for our students and communities.

Do you have a book you'd like to share with the community? Let us know in the comments below!