Ancillary Materials: A Key to Text Adoptions

So you want to get your book adopted as a text? Of course you do! Text adoptions can be a source of effortless sales for years, sometimes long after the book has slowed down in all other sales channels. But writing a good book is only the first step.

Over the past few decades professors have gotten used to being supplied with all kinds of teaching aids—what we call ancillary materials. They don’t necessarily always use them, but they like to know they’re there. So any assistance you can provide to a professor considering your book is helpful. These ancillary materials can be relatively simple, just a few pages, or they can be almost as long as the book itself.

Discussion Guides

On the simplest level, you can provide a discussion guide. These can be pretty short—a few questions per chapter, say. That’s what the authors of The Business Solution to Poverty did—a handful of pages at the end of the book that are also available as a download on our website.

But discussion guides can also be more elaborate. Our book Making Sustainability Work has a 59 page discussion guide that includes an outline of the key points in every chapter, review questions, and discussion questions. That discussion guide is really more like an instructor's guide than a discussion guide. Which brings us to:

Instructor's Guide

An instructor's guide is, as the name implies, a guide to actually teaching a course based on the book. So it goes beyond just a set of questions. Peter S. Cohan, the author of Hungry Startup Strategy, included course objectives and links to supplemental readings along with discussion questions for each chapter in his discussion guide.

Richard Swanson's Foundations of Human Resource Development goes even further. It includes PowerPoint slides for each chapter, figures from the book, and supplemental readings (go here and click on the book on the right-hand side of the top shelf).

The most elaborate one we've done to date is for Joseph Weiss's Business Ethics. Professor Weiss developed a full suite of ancillary materials. For every chapter he provided lecture outlines, discussion questions and supplemental readings for each chapter and for the case examples in the chapter, PowerPoint slides, and exam questions and answers.

How far should I go?

If you book is actually designed to be a textbook, it makes sense to really go to town on the ancillary materials, like Richard Swanson and Joseph Weiss did. It's expected—all the books you're competing with will have similar suites of resources available.

But if your book is a "regular" book that is more likely to be picked up as a supplemental text you don't have to knock yourself out so much. Many of the books you're competing with won't have anything at all, so whatever you supply will give you an edge. It's worth sitting down and spending a little time at least coming up with a few questions.

When do I need to turn it in?

If you're just doing a relatively brief discussion guide—a few pages of questions—it's nice if it can be included in the book itself. So you'd want to turn it in as part of the manuscript. Although it's also fine to make it available as a download separately from the book.

If you're doing something more elaborate it doesn't need to be ready until the book is actually printed, meaning you can finish your book and then turn your mind to the ancillary materials.

Ancillary materials can be a relatively simple afterthought, or something almost as involved as the book itself. But if you'd like some text adoptions it's worth putting some effort into them.