Another phase of intensive work comes to end. That’s right, my new book “How to Teach Online Without Selling Your Soul” is finally done and ready to see the light of the world.

The reason for writing this book is simple.

When I started working as a language teacher online in January 2009, it was like a new reality had opened up for me. I met all kinds of awesome people from all over the world and my life changed a lot.

I’d been teaching languages at private schools for almost a decade. But doing it online changed everything! It allowed me to work whenever and wherever I wanted. No more wasting precious time on trains and buses while commuting. No more having to attend board-meetings and standing next to the photocopier.

I’ve written this book for everyone who wants to do the same: Making a living by online teaching without working for anybody else than your students and yourself.

Thanks & Comments

Thanks to the many people who participated in the pre-release I managed to incorporate quite a few improvements and make the final result even better. What started out as an experiment in reader-participation turned out pretty well and I’ll probably do it again. The improvements include but aren’t limited to:

- new cover image

- improved title

- added article

- integrated bookmark navigation

- typo corrections

Also, I’ve set up a little webpage for the book where you can find out more in case you’re interested. (If not, no problem, I’ll continue writing here on the blog as usual)

~~If you want it in Kindle format, you can get it here. Yes, title and cover are different and so is the content. It’s a trimmed-down version in many respects. But also it is cheaper~~

UPDATE: A full Kindle-Version has just been released. You can find it here.

What I am seriously considering, though, is to put the book up on ebookling, as well. What this means is that I’ll lose 50 % per sale but also that readers like yourself could get a hold of an affiliate link and cash in 25 % per referral.

“Affiliates, mmh?” , I hear you say. Yes, I know. It has a poor image. And mostly for a reason. But we shall see.

UPDATE: The book is now live on ebookling and you can grab an affiliate link from there.

My first aim is for my writings to spread. Pricing and publication are somewhat secondary and I like to keep them flexible in order to enable increasd access to these texts.

For example, since today I published a new book I signifcantly dropped the prices of “A Mindful Guide to Online Living” which although it was my first ebook publication and might not be perfect in terms of layout and everything, I still live by in terms of a general approach to online living. Its little brother “A Mindful Guide to Social Media”, by the way, has always been and will always be available as free download.

How To Teach Online Without Selling Your Soul is a collection of essays which have appeared on this blog over the period of the last year, containing my personal experience of different places to teach online and why nothing is better than dredging out your own pathways.

If you’re wondering why I publish a book of articles that have already been published here on this blog, I have actually asked myself the same question, and came up with the following answers:

Blogposts are part of the day-to-day operations, they sometimes appear in a flurry, with typos and structural inconsistencies because what matters is to get the idea out!
Publishing articles in book-length format has the advantage that those imperfections can be corrected to a large degree (being overly perfectionist won’t help, either!) and that articles which express different parts of one idea can be grouped together to get the big picture.
Reading an ebook is a different experience than reading from a blog. I don’t know how it is with you but I tend to skim blogposts, a lot. Sometimes people just read a few lines or just hit the “share button” because they like the headline. Reading an ebook is potentially more focusing, less distracting.
Also, it simply just looks cool: When Typography and layout are excellent, the content can shine like it just won’t when squashed in a gazillion different results depending on browser or browsing device.

Those are my thoughts so far and I’m looking forward to hear your own.

If you’re interested in online teaching or have friends that complain about their daily teaching business in school or wherever, check out the book’s homepage or share this article!

Thanks for reading this somewhat unstructured article. If anything, it proves what I’ve said above about the nature of blogging.