Promo Question

empther said:

Was such a "Scholastics package" needed for the Harry Potter series, or Twilight, or To Kill A Mockingbird, or Huckleberry Finn, or Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility which Jane Austen was thought to have started writing when she was as young as 19 ?

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You can find lesson plans for all of those books. Examples: Pride and Prejudice. Twilight.

empther said:

There are amazingly few books written that have what English teachers would consider worthwhile to recommend to their classes.
Do you have one?
Send printed copies of it to middle and high school English departments. All it takes is one in twenty English teachers to get excited about your book, and you could soon have hundreds of sales in one school.

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Before recommending a particular course of action to others it might be wise to a) try it yourself, and b) determine that it does in fact work.

empther said:

Tell that to teachers in Catholic high schools of which there are well over a thousand in the U.S.

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Tell the teachers in Catholic high schools that they don't have any books worth assigning? When I was in a Catholic high school forty-plus years ago the English teachers didn't seem to have any shortage of books to assign. Nothing I've seen has indicated that they've run out of assignments more recently.


Here's something else to try while you're working on your next novel: Get one of those school summer-reading lists and read every book on it. Note who published those books, where they've been reviewed, and whether lesson-plans are available for them.

My first published YA novel was required summer reading at a high school in 2010.

However...
1. It was the high school in the town where I live, which my daughter was attending. That is, I had a personal connection there.
2. I had done a visit there earlier in the year and had spoken extensively with the librarian, who persuaded the English department to "support a local author"
3. It was the year the Phoebe Prince case occurred, and bullying was hugely on everyone's mind. The Massachusetts laws regarding bullying in public schools were passed. And my book had a strong anti-bullying component. (The school also invited me in that fall to present an anti-bullying assembly.)
4. As a former teacher, I had some clue as to curriculum guidelines, and I was able to develop a teacher's guide to accompany the book that touched on some of the high school English curriculum requirements.

Also, my book was not self-published (it came from a small, royalty-paying publisher), and the school went so far as to contact the publisher for more information about the book before they assigned it.

It is not easy to have a book placed on a summer reading list. School districts have set requirements, which have to meet state requirements, which have to align with federal guidelines. Contacting schools willy-nilly asking them to use your book in their curriculum will not be likely to gain you any positive attention.