How To Reach the Education Market: Determining K-12 Market Fit, Market Placement, and Market Appeal
By Mary Ellen Lepionka (© Mary Ellen Lepionka, 2005. All rights reserved. [NOTE: This article was first published in the Independent, a newsletter of PMA—the Independent Book Publishers Association, November, 2005, pages 9; 11-14.]

"We publish a series on natural history. How can we get teachers to buy it for their students?

"I publish children's nonfiction about friendship and other aspects of interpersonal relationships. How can I get my books into the classroom?"

"I wrote a civics text for today's teens. How can I get it into the hands of high school freshmen and sophomores?

"We publish illustrated children's fiction. How can we get our storybooks into schools?"

Questions like these reflect the fact that the education market is really many different markets. Titles that fit the category include:

• Early childhood and pre-K materials designed to stimulate development and reading readiness.
• K-6 and K-8 textbooks, workbooks, and other ancillaries for elementary education. Often the
market for them is divided into K-4 (primary) and 5-8 (intermediate). In some subject areas   each grade level represents a separate market segment.
• K-8 literature for school libraries and reading programs.
• Grades 6-8 and 7-9 textbooks and ancillaries for middle school education. Definitions of middle school vary widely from state to state, and so does the existence of junior high schools.
• Grades 6-9 literature for school libraries and reading programs.
• Grades 9-12 and 10-12 textbooks and ancillaries for high school education.
• Grades 9-12 young adult (YA) literature for school libraries and reading programs.
• ESL, bilingual education, and foreign language programs at all grade levels.
• Books for parents who home school their children.
• Materials for special education and gifted education programs and schools for students with disabilities
• Materials for educational programs in hospital and correctional settings
• Materials for college preparatory schools and AP programs
• Materials for parochial, missionary, denominational, and proprietary schools.
• College textbooks for undergraduate courses at 2- or 4-year public and private institutions of higher learning.
• Academic and scholarly books for graduate programs and university libraries.
• Professional-technical and reference works for adult education libraries, professional development programs, and corporate resource centers.
• Materials for postsecondary, for-profit career training, civil service training, and training for certification or licensing (e.g., books on nursing, accounting, homeland security).
• Materials for vocational and trade schools (e.g., books on agriculture, aircraft, culinary arts, IT)
• Materials for professional schools (e.g., business, medicine, law)
• Materials for international schools

Given the diverse nature of the education market, the first step for publishers interested in it is determining which subcategories your products might fit.

The most accessible education markets for trade book publishers are probably school and college libraries. If you publish to the children's book market, for example, school libraries and K-8 reading programs might use your products. If you publish trade fiction or nonfiction for preteens, teens, or young adults, middle school and high school libraries and reading programs might use them. Likewise, your reference works or professional-technical books may be marketable to college and adult education libraries.

However, unless you publish textbooks or adapt your trade books to curriculum and instruction needs and standards, your products are not likely to be widely adopted for use by school districts, schools, or teachers.

How Adoption Happens
Textbooks at all educational levels must meet specified requirements and standards to qualify for adoption. There are national standards for each discipline or domain of learning (e.g., mathematics, social studies), based on the recommendations of relevant academic associations (e.g., Mathematics Association of America [MAA], National Council for the Social Studies [NCSS]). National associations publish academic standards and curriculum content guidelines for their areas, as well as standards for instruction, degree requirements, and teacher training. Products intended for educational markets must address these standards.

The state standards are the most important for publishers with K-12 products and they tend to have common themes. Twenty-three states have state-level (rather than district- or local-level) textbook standards and formal procedures for the adoption of textbooks and non-textbook materials for teaching and learning (see www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/57/75/5775.htm). State standards for textbook adoption are readily available to the public and so are adoption schedules and contact information for textbook adoption administrators (see, for instance, the textbook adoption sites for Louisiana (www.doe.state.la.us/lde/ssaa/577.html), North Carolina (www.ncpublicschools.org/textbook/), Tennessee (www.state.tn.us/education/ci/citextbooks.htm), and Texas (www.tea.state.tx.us/textbooks/adoptprocess/).

Although state adoption procedures vary from state to state, they typically take the following course:

1. Boards of education or school boards form adoption committees for each subject area for which textbooks are being adopted. Committees may be established at the state, county, or district level, depending on how centralized the state's educational system is. Usually, these committees include curriculum experts, classroom teachers and administrators across the various grade levels in which the subject is taught, as well as laypeople.

2. Each adoption committee determines what materials are needed and publishes its list along with the state's adoption standards. These standards cover curriculum and instruction, specific textbook content, instructor and student supplements, manufacturing quality, cost, delivery schedule, and other considerations that tend to make textbooks expensive to produce and manufacture.

3. Publishers make competitive "bids." That is, they submit review samples of relevant products based on the needs list. Some states require publishers to pay an entry fee (say $100) that is used to fund the committee. Publishers also submit the state's forms, on which they explain in detail how their products meet each of the state's content standards. For example, a form might ask you to identify specific pages and features in a book that demonstrate compliance with the state content standard calling for "fair and accurate representation of cultural diversity."

4. The adoption committee evaluates the publishers' samples and the information they provided on the forms, ranks the samples, and in some states puts recommended books on display so that parents, administrators, and teachers can view and comment on them, sometimes through public hearings.

5. The committee recommends a list of textbooks to the district board of education or state board of education for final approval.

6. States, counties, districts, and/or individual schools order from the list of approved textbooks.

Timing is everything with the textbook adoption process. States have adoption schedules that call for approval of textbooks for a given subject every 5 to 7 years. Products for history, social studies, and health may be considered one year; products for chemistry, English composition, and algebra the next, and so on. Evaluation committees for a content area may be formed every other year. Reviews of new products for a subject may take place only at 3- to 5-year intervals. Textbook adoption schedules and contact information for textbook adoption administrators are readily available online via links on the state or district textbook adoption home pages.

For example, in 2004-2005 the Commonwealth of Virginia evaluated textbooks for K-2 reading and language arts, looking to see how candidates from each publisher correlated with Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOL). Publishers whose books were approved won six-year contracts to supply Virginia with books for all students enrolled at the given grade level. Reading and language arts texts for grades 3-5 will be approved in 2005-2006. However, new books for K-2 reading and language arts are not scheduled for review again in Virginia until 2011.

Understanding the timing of adoption cycles -- and the gap between approval and sales and between sales and revenue -- is crucial for small publishers planning to make inroads on the education market. This must be regarded as a large long-term investment.

As many as three or four years can pass between approval and classroom placement, including the six to eight months it takes for local schools to order state-adopted textbooks for their students. Then there is the all-too-familiar time gap between shipment and net-90-day payment at wholesale prices.

So why try? Well, you have chosen to publish products for learners and if you won a contract with the Commonwealth of Virginia for your third-grade language arts textbook, you would have potential sales of 88,255 copies (based on the total number of third graders enrolled in Virginia in 2005-2006) in that state alone. If every third-grader in Virginia used your book over the next six years, even at deep discount, it would make a lot of money. And what if West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio third graders used your text as well?

You can see why there are big players in the school markets—companies like Houghton Mifflin, Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, and the like—but there is a place for the small education publisher too.

Best Bets for Smaller Publishers
The secret of success for small publishers in K-12 education markets is: Begin by publishing for local and district school markets rather than competing in state markets.

In many states local school boards are free to adopt educational products that are not on the state board of education's approval list, provided only that they meet content standards. Also, some subjects --such as health, vocational education, character education, art, or physical education -- may not be even be included in the textbook approval process.

You should make sure nevertheless that you can correlate your products with national, academic, and state standards and coordinate your efforts with state adoption cycles in the states you choose to market in initially. And you should also make sure you can offer information to teachers or instructors on how they can use your product with their students at their grade level in their classrooms with their curriculum.

Five steps will help you determine market fit, market placement, and market appeal for your textbook or trade book in education markets, and will enhance the chances of its adoption for classroom use.

* Find out the subject area your book represents or fits best. This is not the same as the genre category; it pertains to academic criteria and course descriptors, which you can determine by reading state standards broken out by subject area, or by examining college course catalogs. Then identify your book by subject area in your promotional material.

* For K-12 products, figure out how your book meets relevant state standards and document this. Also figure out how your book meets national standards for its subject area (search "national standards" and "associations" with the name of the subject area). Include this information in your promotional material. Also, bear standards in mind later, as you revise products or develop new ones, so that you can appeal to your customers more effectively.

* Figure out the grade level and reading level of the writing in your book and the intellectual level of the conceptual content by using readability tests. The most commonly used readability tests are the Gunning Fog (also called SMOG), Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and Fry, but there are several others. Algorithms or graphs for these tests are all online (search "readability"), and your word processing program will calculate one or two of them for you automatically. If readability is an issue for your product or its market, try a cloze procedure (search "cloze").

Taken together, readability tests can give you a sense of how readable your content is and the ages or grade levels for which it is most appropriate. You need to assess age or grade level accurately to target your market and plan your marketing in relation to state adoption cycles for the subject areas and grades, and to specify the grades and chronological ages for which your book is most appropriate in your promotional materials.

* Find out the curriculum for your book's grade level in its subject area. What is included in the scope of study? What are students expected to learn in what sequence? What are the outcomes of study supposed to be, and how are teachers supposed to teach to those outcomes? In light of these facts, determine how a teacher might find your book useful.

* Based on the research outlined above, develop a teacher's guide (or instructor's manual or book club reader's guide or user's guide) that explains specifically how teachers and students at your book's grade level with their curriculum in their subject area can use your product to meet their objectives. Spell it out for them. School districts, schools, teachers, and parents (and students) will order books that they can see will help them do their job.

Four Stories
How does all this play out? Let's look at the examples we started with.

"We publish a series on natural history. How can we get teachers to buy it for their students?
The publisher found out that its series fit the grade 6 science curriculum best. The books in the series met common national and state standards for skill development in observation and measurement, conceptual development concerning life cycles and environmental adaptation, and affective objectives relating to principles of conservation. To show all the correlations, the publisher printed short-run annotated teacher editions of the books for targeted school districts in a few states that best reflected the specific environments or natural history subjects in the series. These state- or region-based teacher editions included practical suggestions for using the series with the local curriculum, in conjunction with state-adopted textbooks, and with respect to students' actual environments.

"I publish children's nonfiction about friendship and other aspects of interpersonal relationships. How can I get my books into the classroom?"
This publisher learned that her books best fit K-4 social studies curricula and could be especially attractive for secular character education programs, conflict resolution programs, school guidance counselors, and charter or private schools emphasizing moral or social development. She targeted school districts in a few states with high-profile curriculum reforms in character education to test her markets. She had her products reviewed and endorsed by a prominent educational psychologist and sent samples to school counselors. She also co-marketed to school districts and curriculum developers with a producer of games and activities for K-6 character education. She plans to publish a line of student workbooks and activity books to accompany her products.

"I wrote a civics text for today's teens. How can I get it into the hands of high school freshmen and sophomores?
The micropublisher with this goal discovered that the reading level of his book was too high. Using print-on-demand technology, he revised his text for the intended audience. In his revision, he referred specifically to national standards for civics and he added a section pertaining specifically to his state. Then he developed a civics workshop with classroom activities, designed to coincide with preparations for student class elections. He offered this workshop to civics teachers in local high schools each fall. Participating teachers got free examination copies of the text and promotional material showing how it would help them meet curriculum standards, how they could use it in conjunction with the state-adopted social studies text, and how its local applications would benefit students. The publisher plans to expand his market by enlisting more teachers, one by one, and then by adapting his civics text for other states in his region.

"We publish illustrated fiction for young children. How can we get our storybooks into schools?"
The author-illustrator team that produced these preK-2 products had placed them in bookstores and public libraries using a wholesaler. Through a series of tests, they established reading level, interest level, grade level, and age level. Also, they classified the books in terms of categories of interest to educators (e.g., alphabet book, concept book, counting book, early chapter book, easy reader, photo essay, picture book, read aloud, wordless book, etc.). Then, they identified the specific pre-reading and literacy skills their books promoted and found out how their books connected to the curriculum (e.g., in the areas of phonemic awareness, rhyming, opposites, vocabulary, literary elements, etc.). Recognizing that awards generate prestige and endorsements that lead to widespread acceptance and sales for illustrated children's books, they applied for selected prizes. They got two of their storybooks listed in the California Department of Education Reading List (www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/readinglist.asp; see also www.education-world.com/summer_reading/). They look forward to getting books on other state education readings lists as well.

Mary Ellen Lepionka publishes her own and others' books on writing and publishing as Atlantic Path Publishing, and conducts workshops on higher education publishing for authors and editors. Her books in print include Writing and Developing Your College Textbook (2003) and Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements (2005). This article is adapted from her forthcoming book Writing and Publishing for Education Markets. To learn more, visit www.atlanticpathpublishing.com.