Job Discussion Forums

[mejms]

Does anyone here have any experience doing this?

[Phil_K]

In what way? As a teacher looking for opportunities (try LinkedIn)...

[MotherF]

I have some experience in materials development with publishers. But don't really know what you want to know, can you be more specific?--pm me if you perfer.

[mejms]

[MotherF]

For the large publishing houses most of the content producers are in England--even for the "American" course books! I'm not sure if that is the case for books published by Pearson, Thompson, Longman, or whatever combination they have merged into now. But OUP, CUP and Richmond all run their show from England. That's not to say you can't get your foot in the door here in Mexico. Network at conferences, MEXTESOL and British Council events especially though try to make sure you are meeting the right people--not just the sales reps. The academic coordinators and any editors or authors that might be present at the conferences are who you want to meet.

The lowest rung on the materials development ladder is commenting on manuscripts. Editors send you books in progress and you make your comments on those as a teacher, what you like, what you hate, what you don't think would work, what's out of sequence, too hard or too easy, etc.
From there you can get asked to write other parts of courses, like workbooks or teacher's books (which are often written by different people than the main text.)

If your book is really good, you could just try to pitch it to a publisher. You could also self publish it, then later talk with the bigger publishers when you have a second book, and you'd have your first book to show them.

Good luck. I think it is also important in this field to network and maintain positive relationships with the people you work with. I got my first work with a publisher when at a conference, I ran into a guy I had worked with at my second job. Five years had gone by and he worked with a publisher in proofreading. He's ask me if I'd be interested in commenting on a manuscript.

[mejms]

[MotherF]

[Phil_K]

The route of contributing to a complete work could be more viable. I see trying to produce the whole work yourself fraught with difficulties, such as following up copyright issues on articles, illustrations and photos, which are essential in a modern coursebook. But good luck with your endeavour.

[mejms]

[Guy Courchesne]

[Phil_K]