High School Teachers Guide Students Into Self-Publishing

In some high school classes, teens are becoming published authors through self-publishing projects.

"It gave them real-world skills," says Tonya McQuade, an English teacher at Los Gatos High School in California, whose students published an electronic poetry anthology they created in class last year. "It made them more excited about poetry than they might have normally been."

National Poetry Month is in April and publishing a class poetry anthology, like McQuade's classes' did, might be a timely project for high school English teachers. But educators can also assist their students in self-publishing individual short stories, science-themed nonfiction books and other written works during class.

Self-publishing platforms, such as Amazon's CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing, allow virtually anyone to publish a book for free or minimal costs. Usually authors upload a file of their complete book and the program handles the rest.

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Depending on the platform, a customer could buy a print book or an e-book. Both options are typically free to authors, although self-publishing distributors usually take a cut of any profit. Authors also typically need to do all the editing, proofreading, formatting and marketing on their own.

Rob Durham, an English teacher at Marquette High School in Chesterfield, Missouri had upperclassmen creative writing students self-publish their own short stories this year during a semesterlong course.

"Instead of doing punctuation worksheets, they are actually editing real punctuation and everything," says Durham, who got his sophomore honors English classes involved by having them edit the stories.

Graphic design students at the school worked with the authors to create the cover art.

"They also learned to give and receive constructive criticism," says Durham, who got the idea for the project after self-publishing a few books himself. He says the older students did take offense from the younger editors at first, but came to respect them more when he reminded the authors of how hard they were on their cover artists.

Students can also develop workforce skills, such as marketing and event planning, through these projects.

McQuade, the teacher in California, had students from her three English classes work on the production of the poetry anthology. They worked in teams on event planning, marketing and layout and design, among other tasks. Two other English classes contributed poems to the anthology as well, but did not participate in the production process.

"I am not a high-tech person and so this was definitely something outside of my comfort zone initially to learn all of these things," says McQuade, who was approached by officials from the local library and Smashwords, a self-publishing platform and distributor which had a partnership with the library, to create the project. "I hadn't even used iPads, but the kids knew exactly what to do."

McQuade's classes' project took a little more than a month to complete. Proceeds from the book go to a class fundraiser. The finished product also features a guide for teachers who may want to do something similar.

But self-publishing projects aren't limited to English classes.

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Physics and engineering teacher Bryan Holmes has been advising a handful of students this year on a self-publishing project at Ridgefield High School in Connecticut.

"Communication has always been important, but it's ever more important in today's world," says Holmes, who also got the idea for the project after self-publishing a book.

Holmes says in science, if a student can clearly explain a topic in writing, that shows they understand it.

Some of his students have been working outside of class on publishing a science-related book. One student is writing a children's book about sharks, another student is writing a book on cancer research and one student is writing a nonfiction book on education.

"I'm not an English teacher," says, Holmes, who is documenting the process on a blog. His advises the students and keeps them on schedule. He's taken them to a writers conference and facilitated a writers critique circle, among other activities.

"I'm always looking for new ways to get kids to think about learning and there's a huge amount of learning involved in this for them," he says.

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Alexandra Pannoni is an education staff writer at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at apannoni@usnews.com.