How to Get Christian Children's Curriculum Published
Writers create to share their ideas with others, and that motivation is even stronger when the ideas witness to your faith and the others with whom you want to share them are children. Unfortunately, curriculum publishing is mostly a business like any other. What that means most of all is that your first step to sharing your faith through publishing should be to know the business value of your unique witness: What does your curriculum offer that others don't, in its format, its applications, its insights or some other factor? Communicating that business value is what will get your material published, purchased and used.
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Instructions
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Research the market for the kind of curriculum you're creating. Start with bookstores or websites that carry material from a range of publishers. Evaluate each product or series to see whether it will compete directly with yours or will complement it in some way. Organize your research according to the publishers you find, and note both the best features you see in other products and the places those writers could have done better: Do the illustrations support or distract from the content? Do those products make good use of music and electronic media?
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Investigate the process used by your own or related denominational publishers. Most national denominations have internal and/or affiliated curriculum-publishing operations, but they may also have established procedures for creating content for the official curriculum materials--review by panels of officials or certified Christian educators, for example. On the other hand, they may also be eager to see materials that fill niches around the official curriculum, such as children's sermons or a series of lessons on life experiences that are especially difficult for children, including death, divorce and moving to a new community.
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Assemble and submit a professional proposal. Make the case, whether to a denominational or independent publisher, for how your curriculum will fill an unmet need in the company's catalog of materials. The bulk of your proposal should point out the unique features of your work and provide rich examples from your drafts. If you're offering a multilevel curriculum, show how your handling of the same topic is tailored to each age group. In one section, show how your curriculum compares to that publisher's other products and those of competitors. Describe how you will participate in both production and marketing of your work.
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Publish it yourself. This is most workable if your curriculum is contained in one volume or can be published electronically in such formats as e-books, downloadable PDF documents and podcasts. Consider whether you can capitalize production of an inventory or it's better to use a print-on-demand service. In either case, you will need to plan to market the curriculum yourself, for which you almost certainly will need a website and perhaps a presence on social networking sites where you can build a community for your curriculum.
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Tips & Warnings
Publishing for children is complicated by usually including illustrations of some kind, especially for younger children. Some publishers will prefer you have illustrations ready to print, while others will prefer a consistent illustration style across their product lines. Tailor your proposal to what you can find out about each publisher.
Photos and colored illustrations are more expensive to reproduce by traditional printing methods than are simpler images. The simplest are line drawings. All illustrations are equal in electronic publishing or print on demand from PDFs.
Any illustrations or music you reproduce in your curriculum must have permissions attached from their creators who hold copyright. If you can't provide permissions when you submit to a publisher, you present an additional cost for the publisher to take on your project.
References
Resources
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