My Why!
From the beginning of my journey as a travel writer I was inspired to start my blog after a trip to Finland. Check out some of the reasons why I love Finland here. After visiting Helsinki and learning about the education system I became even more curious about what education looked like in other countries. I met some incredible teachers in Finland, who shared both the positives and negatives of their roles. But the balance they held in their lives was significant, in comparison to teachers I knew here in the U.S. They weren’t burnt out and they held a lot more autonomy with respect to what they wanted their classroom experiences to be. I became even more curious after the pandemic of 2020. I wanted to create a platform where people could hear from teachers who would be willing to share what teaching around the world was like.
The Process:
I will begin by saying writing a book is a lot more difficult than it looks. From the writing to the editing and the publishing. The process takes time and dedication. I encourage everyone to try it if they can, but be prepared for what comes with it. The process for me started by hand-writing each chapter in a notebook, going back over the podcast episodes one at a time. I did a lot of research to fill the gap and answer questions I believed the readers would want answered. Especially since, these were questions I would hope to have answered myself being on this journey to teach from anywhere. I spent several weeks typing the manuscript and having it edited. This itself was time consuming, but it makes a difference if you want to produce quality work. From there I moved on to self-publishing through Amazon Kindle Publishing.
Becoming Self-Published:
Becoming self-published is possible. I encourage anyone who wants to write a book to get started as soon as possible. We live in a time where we no longer need large publishing houses or literary agents to open the doors to publishing. And I took full advantage of this with Amazon KDP. The process was interesting. Amazon KDP gives you a lot of options to create your own book cover among other features. Adding the manuscript to the KDP publishing software is also straight forward. Once everything was submitted and reviewed. The approval take several days. And then you’re a published author. This was not only an exciting experience, but I felt I could finally get the word out to educators who really needed it. There are a variety of tools on Amazon KDP to help with marketing. But on the most part, you are on your own.
If you’re interested in writing your own book, leave a comment below. I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.
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