Paul Wassell (EnglishGCSEcouk) is one of our gold tier authors who has provided advice on how Tes authors could work together on their online marketing at the authors train authors live event in June 2019. Here we revisit some of his suggestions in the recording of our live webinar from September 2019.
Authors train authors webinar: Collaborating and promoting together with Paul Wassell.
Use Twitter
- Twitter is particularly useful for some subjects because of the number of teachers that use it.
- This is an area that could be used for collaboration through agreed #hashtags. Using hashtags like #teamtes or #eduauthors might be a way of helping users to find certain resources.
Use Pinterest
- Tes has hundreds of its own Pinterest boards with over 800,000 followers in total, but there are opportunities here to create ‘freebie’ boards and work together to make teachers and educators aware of the fabulous resources that you have on offer.
- Promoting free resources is a great way of allowing teachers to see the fantastic quality and depth of your resources.
Promote positive messages about Tes Resources
It’s vital that we work together as authors to promote the amazing work we do, to get across that buying resources actually helps teachers, and to dispel some of the myths being communicated on social media. Some great positive messages include:
- Allowing authors to sell resources means that the authors can afford to spend many, many hours making those resources.
- Many authors recruit proof readers and other staff to help quality assure their resources.
- Textbooks have their issues as well – there have been notable and numerous examples of huge corporations making mistakes and errors in the past few years.
- Many departments buy through Tes, not just individual teachers.
- Teachers should have a choice – spend many hours tweaking freely shared resources or use ones that are ready made for them.
- Around 96% of resources downloaded on Tes are free. Allowing authors to sell resources keeps them online. The running of the free-sharing platform is supported by the comparatively small proportion of resource purchases.
Remember, you’re doing great things for teachers!
Most importantly, however, please remember that you’re doing great things for thousands of teachers and students across the world. Tes Resources has such a tremendous ‘reach’ right around the globe and provides a platform for the educational world to access truly great quality resources and teaching materials. Let’s work together to take this even further.
From authors to authors
Becky Humphrey-Bullen, one half of author team LittleStreams, talks to us about her background in education, why she started publishing resources on TES and how to make a successful author partnership work.
LittleStreams is a partnership. How has this benefitted you?
It takes the pressure off – a lot, because there are two of us. You have to really trust the person you are in partnership with. Sam and I have the same ethos when it comes to education; I know we are on exactly the same page. However, we are also different in what we can do. He’s a whizz at design, so when I make things, he will tidy them up. Similarly, he can come up with educational ideas, but he is not a mathematician, and university teaching is very different from secondary teaching. It’s useful to have clearly defined roles, though also equally important to be able and open to work in each other’s roles.
Mike Jackson and David Horner are the brains behind Goodeyedeers and publish primary resources with a focus on poetry and Spag. Read on to see how their partnership works and why they sell resources.
What are the benefits of collaboration on resources?
It is much more fun than working alone! Having to share and justify our ideas ensures we're always stretching and developing our thought processes.
The breadth and depth of our combined knowledge and expertise means we bring complementary skills to the job. It also allows us to meet up for coffee on a regular basis and tell our wives it's work...
Because we are not creating resources to make ourselves a fortune, we decided at the outset to give any profits we make to a local children’s charity, MedEquip4Kids.
Prolific Tes author Charlee Iddon, aka The Ginger Teacher, shares how connecting with other teachers has inspired her author experience.
How have you connected with other teachers and authors to share ideas, experiences and advice?
When Tes first started to sell resources, there weren’t many of us and I started a forum on the Tes community to see if I could reach out to other teacher-authors. At first I was the only person in there talking to myself, but now there are loads of us and we have Facebook groups and meetups in real life to share ideas and experiences. I’ve met some amazing people doing this. It inspired me to put together a Seller’s binder to help other authors with promotion and general advice.
What are the benefits of collaborating with other teachers?
Sharing resources is incredibly important as it allows teachers to collaborate to create the perfect lessons. This has become ever more important since the change to 9-1. I’ve found the new content quite daunting as there’s so much to cover. Seeing other teachers uploading their resources of such a high standard has helped me greatly. It’s given me the inspiration and drive to share my own materials in the hope that I’ve also made something another teacher is looking for.