The content is up to you—it could be lesson plans, exercises for students, essays and reflections, research results, or whatever strikes your fancy! Not every work will be something suitable to sell, but you’ll learn the entire process, from considering an audience/market for your work, formatting .epub files, working with images and audio, creating a cover, determining where to publish, setting prices, and marketing.
This is the eighth year that Dorothy has offered this course. Every year we have learned more about what works, and every year ELT professionals become self-published authors.
1. Starting with a manuscript to work with. If you just want to learn the skills involved in creating, formatting, and self-publishing an ebook, you can do the course with as little as a chapter completed. If you are interested in the course but not sure if your project is suitable for self-publishing, Dorothy is happy to give you feedback to help you decide whether to join or not. In fact, you need to get her approval for your project before you will be able to join.
2. Having access to troubleshooting and support. We've added an extra week this year that is dedicated to troubleshooting, and Dorothy offers two open sessions each week (to work for different timezones) so that everyone has a chance to get personalized help while working through the technical parts of self-publishing.
Six live online sessions will be held in the iTDi virtual classroom in June and July. Live sessions will happen at 03:00 UTC/GMT, which will be Saturday in the Americas, and Sunday in Asia.
Don't worry if the time doesn't work out for you to join the live sessions. We will send all registered participants a recording and a copy of Dorothy's slides after the session ends.
Live session dates: June 23, 30 and July 7, 14, 21 and 28.
Time: 03:00-04:00 UTC/GMT. Check your local time.
Cost: $240 USD
We can provide receipts for research funds, if needed.
Required: a legal copy of Microsoft Word and material to work with (not necessarily a full manuscript).
About Advanced Skills Live Courses
Advanced Skills courses are workshops and tend to be very hands on. You learn skills and apply them in. In order to provide an exceptional experience, registration is limited to 25 participants. Registration includes six live sessions, unlimited discussions each week in a private forum, and access to a private Dropbox folder. Participants will be expected to submit work for peer feedback and provide feedback on other participants' work, in Dropbox. If you are not planning to complete a book but wish to receive a certificate, you will be expected to submit an .epub of your project to demonstrate competency with the publishing tools.
As a registered participant, don’t worry if you ever have to miss a class or if the time for the live sessions doesn't work well for your time zone. You’ll receive weekly recordings of each class, full transcripts of the text chat during class, assigned readings and a PDF of the PowerPoint slides. Furthermore, the online community will certainly become a wealth of ideas and information, and it will remain private and online for your use anytime in the future.
Registration
You don't need to have a completed manuscript, but you need to come into the class with material you can work with as you learn how to format for ebooks and design covers. Your work can be as short as an article or one unit. Please complete this form to receive approval from Dorothy before registering for the course. She is happy to work with you on your ideas for ebook content before the beginning of the course so that you can get the most out of your participation during the course.
Scholarships
iTDi believes that all teachers deserve the same opportunity to improve themselves. Therefore, a limited number of full and partial scholarships will be available for this course. Please apply through our scholarship application.
Dorothy Zemach
Dorothy Zemach holds an MA in TEFL and has been teaching English for 30 years. Since turning to materials writing, she has penned everything from the Teddy Bear's Magic Music teacher's book to the lowest and highest levels of Macmillan's flagship course Open Mind to the groundbreaking English for Scammers (self-published). She’s worked with CUP as an in-house senior development editor, and has written and/or edited as well for OUP, Macmillan, Pearson, Cengage, and University of Michigan Press, among others. In 2012, she founded Wayzgoose Press, an independent publisher of fiction, literary non-fiction, and educational materials. Dorothy’s website: https://www.dorothyzemach.com
