Educational Authors
Do you write educational books? Any age. College material, high school, middle grades, elementary, kindergarten, preschool. Doesn’t matter.
Or have you been thinking about writing educational books?
Have you had any troubles or concerns with writing or publishing educational content for Kindle?
If so, I would like to hear from you. Not just me. Maybe even Kindle will talk with you.
Kindle Educational Team
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from the Kindle Educational Team.
Wow!
Personal service. Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is a self-service website. Amazon is huge. The number of authors is huge. Personal service is a real treat. As you might expect, the Kindle Educational team’s role doesn’t ordinarily consist of contacting authors.
Kindle has plenty of fiction. They are looking for ways to make more quality educational content available to Kindle customers.
Evidently, they asked CreateSpace to identify some authors who have published educational material in print and who have opted to receive emails from Amazon. Lucky me, my name came up.
A few days following the email, the Kindle educational team actually called me. I was able to speak with two representatives on the phone.
They were interested in my concerns about publishing on Kindle. I mentioned such things as formatting challenges, difficulty with visibility on Amazon (I’ve gotten specific, like mentioning that if a customer goes to Amazon, clicks children’s books, and then clicks the K-12 Teachers link, CreateSpace and Kindle books rarely show up there), and category issues.
It looks like the Kindle educational team wants to help with visibility on Amazon, and it looks like they are thinking about long-term self-service options that can aid in formatting and publishing educational books.
Note that fixed-layout currently has features that might help with children’s book formatting and technical textbook formatting: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000729511. Hopefully, this will become easier for the average self-publisher to implement. The Kindle Comic Creator looks promising.
Are You Interested?
At the end of the telephone conversation and in a follow-up email, I’ve been asked if I know other educational authors.
Do you write educational books?
If so, let me know. I can pass along your interest.
Maybe Kindle will speak with you, too.
(Of course, nobody asked me to write this post. I took this upon myself.)
Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers
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Reblogged this on Legends of Windemere and commented:
A call for Educational Book Authors! Very interesting news.
I hope to get some interest. 🙂
Good luck. I think it’s an important category to promote.
Sounds promising! Although I hope my books educate young people on Irish mythology and archaeology, I dont think they’re quite what Kindle has in mind, lol! Sounds like a great opportunity though so good luck!
Education is education…right??!! 😀
Maybe they are looking for this. One comment I received in my conversations suggests that they may be interested in hearing from different perspectives from different disciplines.
I am working on a children’s reader that will have a section in the back dealing with the ‘science’ and ‘zoology’ in the animals mentions, and the history of the area and the lighthouse where the story takes place. I don’t know if that counts, but I want it to be used in Elementary classrooms to encompass history, social studies, reading, and science…as well as being a jumping off point for the students writing a short story and presenting on a chosen animal (we just did this with my mother’s 2nd grade class and they ROCKED)
My father writes spiritual, straight from the Bible literature that he publishes on Kindle and uses to teach his Biblical Studies college courses. Again, not sure that this is what they’re looking for. But it’s a start
It doesn’t seem like they are looking for specific subjects, but seems more like they may be interested in authors with different perspectives and experience. Going into the classroom and rocking second graders sounds like it was a fun experience. 🙂
I got to see some of their presentations and they were phenomenal…better than some high school students would do! They get so excited…one kid even did a full on science tri-fold 3-d board on pythons.
Thanks for the heads up…I’ll send us that way! 😀