How to Market A Book

A few weeks ago, we finished the first marathon and sent our manuscript to the printer. We immediately had to decide how many books to print in the first run. This felt like a really consequential decision for us and we did not have a solid basis for choosing a number – 2000, 5000, 10,000? We did not want to have stacks of unsold books that would gather dust in a California warehouse. Nor did we want to print too few books and not be able to fulfill orders if sales exceeded our expectations.

We gathered as much intel as possible from our editor, the sales team and our own research and assumptions and put our best guess on paper. That decision positioned us on the starting line of our second marathon, introducing Wonder Year to the world and activating channels to sell our book.  

Whoa, where to begin? Should we start slow with a jog or hit it hard from the beginning? According to book marketing wiz, Naren Aryal, “to be a writer today is to be a marketer.” Looks like marathon #2 would be just as important as marathon #1. He argues that authors should start building their platform yesterday. Oops. 

We’d have to establish Wonder Year as a brand and the three of us as authors. We’d have to associate Wonder Year with long-term family travel and worldschooling. And then, connect with people who are curious about family travel to the book. 5-4-3-2-1: let’s go! 

Miles 1-3:

Establish a Website. For many authors, the website is the foundation of their platform, and this was certainly the case for us. We launched a fairly basic website in March 2022 and built out many more features over the following year. Our site had a book landing page, pre-order buttons, a blog, contact page, newsletter sign-up form, photos, and branded artwork. We wanted to be sure the

website did more than promote the book. It was important that it was also a valuable resource for current and prospective traveling families.

Miles 4-10:

Consistent Quality Content. With the website launched, the next order of business was to load it with helpful information about relevant topics. We are writing about topics like making the decision to travel, funding long-term family adventure, closing up home life, working on the road, and what it feels like to be a long-term traveling family in motion. We brainstormed topics of interest, like destination inspirations, a discussion on how to choose destinations and created a schedule to publish blogs, with a goal of posting at least one per week.  

Miles 10-14:

Social Media Platforms. The matter of social media was definitely a hard nut for us to crack. Each of us maintained a blog during our respective travels, but none of us was particularly active on social media anymore. We did not have thousands of followers. We had some moments of doubt and insecurity about putting ourselves out there so publicly, seemingly self-promoting, which felt antithetical to our purpose with Wonder Year. Yet, we knew it was imperative and we understood how effective it is to share information and build community through social platforms. 

We pushed on and picked up our pace a bit. We found joy in sharing tips, tricks and wisdom, knowing that our content was designed to inform others rather than spotlight ourselves. We diversified our posts with videos, photos, motivation Mondays, Tips Tuesdays, Where in the World Wednesdays. Later, we learned how to effectively present information in a variety of formats on different platforms.Now, we have started to see steady, organic growth across several months of concerted effort. 

Miles 14-18:

Strategic Partnerships. Wonderwell, our publisher, provided us with a framework to organize our partner outreach campaign. We brainstormed a long list of organizations, nonprofits, and influencers. We looked for those who share an interest in one or more of the Wonder Year themes–travel, education, family, inclusivity, global community, outdoor adventure and sustainability–and began reaching out. The process of building partnerships is a bit improvisational, more art than science. Our goal and hope is to find shared purpose with a set of public, private, nonprofit, and individual partners and appeal to their customers, stakeholders and members together.

Miles 18-22:

Media and Publications. Many authors, including us, use a public relations professional to assist with outreach to traditional media. Publicists know the ropes and how to pitch a story. However, because we are family travel and worldschooling experts, we expanded the media/publications list by identifying specialty outlets in these sectors. We are thinking broadly about local and national outlets including magazines, podcasts, radio shows, news sources and other print or digital media sources that connect with the Wonder Year journey. 

Miles 22-26:

Pre-launch. The six weeks before book launch are going to be dizzying. Testing our endurance, we’ll have to dig deep and keep running toward our goal of bringing a book to the world that will inspire and help families to get on the road together. We’ll be calling on partners, followers, and our personal connections to help spread the word about Wonder Year. We’ll ask folks to follow, like, repost, refer a friend, tag, pre-order and otherwise put good Wonder Year juju out there.

On September 5, 2023 Wonder Year: A Guide to Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling will hit the shelves. We appreciate your cheering from the sidelines and your encouragement along the way. We just have one more question for you: Have you ordered your copy? If not, you can right here!

Opportunities abound! Podcasts, magazine features, social media events, as well as the traditional book tour!

The post How to Write a Book: The Second Marathon appeared first on Wonder Year Travel.

What is worldschooling, anyway?

Simply put, worldschooling is learning through direct interaction with the world. 

Learning about forced removals in Cape Town

Worldschooling is an educational approach shaped by the experience of learning in the world. Worldschooling is a form of education that combines travel and experiential learning. Rather than being confined to a traditional classroom setting, worldschooling families believe that real-world experiences, cultural immersion, and travel can provide rich educational opportunities. 

Worldschooling allows children to learn about different cultures, languages, history, science, geography, and social dynamics by experiencing them firsthand. It often involves families traveling to other countries or regions, exploring local attractions, engaging with local communities, and participating in activities and experiences that enhance their learning. Worldschooling can happen anywhere, any season, any time of day. It just requires a little curiosity and a lot of wonder. 

One of the limitations of classroom learning is that we tend to learn about others. With worldschooling, we begin to learn from others. It’s an exchange. Learners create their own opinions based on direct experiences rather than simply repeating what they hear from others or read in a textbook. You can’t fake a personal interaction. Your kids might reach the conclusion, for example, that countries maligned in the mainstream US media are full of good and kind people. Worldschooling is fact-finding; worldschooling is peacebuilding.

Worldschooling can be:

• learning to tap a rubber tree in Krabi, Thailand
• visiting WWII sites in Normandy, France to understand the legacies of those who battled
• sourcing ingredients and learning to cook kebabs with a hostel owner in Istanbul, Turkey
• taking the Junior Ranger pledge after completing educational activities at Dinosaur National Monument
• visiting the bridge on the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn to learn about navigation equipment
• collecting river water in your neighborhood and looking at it under a microscope at your kitchen table
• calculating currency conversion to buy Uyghur currants at the Xinjiang market
• visiting with a Ski Patrol team in Colorado to learn how dogs become avalanche rescuers
• talking with your elderly neighbor about what life was like when she was a kid
• listening to an audiobook about the ancient Mayans while exploring the temple regions of Guatemala
• learning how to say hello, goodbye, please and thank you in a local language new to you
• drawing a picture and naming the phase of the moon every night for a month from your campsites

The possibilities are endless.

Learning to weave from local experts in Laos

Worldschooling varies in its ties to formal educational structures. Worldschooling can be closely aligned with unschooling (see below), theme-driven, subject-driven, or opportunistic based on where a family is traveling and what the day presents. It can also include online learning while on the road, with students completing tasks independently or connected with remote classmates. 

Over the past couple of decades, the term worldschooling gained traction. Several traveling families who considered themselves worldschoolers brought awareness to the concept as they shared their experiences online and in popular media. You might also come across the term roadschooling. For clarity, here at Wonder Year we use the term worldschooling to mean it all. We want everyone to feel welcome whether you are traveling in the US or overseas, full-time or part-time, following a curriculum or going with the flow. This growing all-comers inclusivity around the term is also what we see reflected on the internet and social media.

Worldschooling is not something you sign up for. There’s no one to register with, no dogma or governing institution. There are many resources to help you design what worldschooling looks like for you and your family. We walk readers through many of them in our upcoming book, Wonder Year: A Guide to Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling.

What is Wonder Year?

A Wonder Year is a season of discovery. It is an experience of being in motion with your family and adopting a mindset of growth and curiosity. Not necessarily wedded to one year, the notion applies to any length of time–three weeks, three months or three years. For these reasons, it is also the name of our book.

Worldschooling is the educational foundation of a Wonder Year. Our belief is simply this—the world is a very good teacher, and the more interaction our children have with it through family travel, the more their hearts and intellect will open and grow. 

Wonder Year = long-term family travel + worldschooling

Finding favorite books at a market in Beijing

Can anyone do this?

You may not know this, but as a parent in the United States, you have the right to withdraw your child from traditional school and choose an alternative means to educate them. Some districts now have fully online options that you can do from anywhere. In most states, you will need to register your kids as homeschoolers. In some cases, you will need to record what you teach and how you teach it. But then you get to watch the magic unfold. What happens when your concept of education expands beyond the four walls of a classroom? What happens when you notice learning opportunities can be anywhere at any time? The world becomes your school. 

Changing his own flat on the Oregon coast

Won’t my kids fall behind if they don’t go to school?

By rolling into worldschooling, you are choosing to step forward and align yourself with the forefront of innovative educational models. Public and private schools are recognizing the value of travel as part of education. International Baccalaureate (IB) programs promote “intercultural understanding and respect…as an essential part of life in the 21st Century.” Leading universities encourage study abroad programs. Some people may say worldschooling lacks academic rigor, but the evidence will be clear when your kids return to traditional school from a Wonder Year with grit, confidence, and a global frame of reference.

What are some terms used in the worldschooling community?

• Homeschooling: learning at home rather than at a public or private institution    
• Worldschooling: learning through direct interaction with the world
• Roadschooling: a form of worldschooling that most often refers to domestic travel
• Nature schooling: using the natural world as the primary classroom; sometimes called forest schooling
• Gameschooling: a form of homeschooling that teaches concepts and skills through games like chess, cards, board games, and manipulative toys like Rubik’s Cubes  
• Unschooling: using students’ curiosities and interests instead of prescribed curricula to drive self-paced learning (more on this soon)
• Hybrid schooling: anything goes! a blend of any of the above

We hope these definitions and context help you enter the conversation and community. For a peek at what worldschooling can look like, check out our Fernweh Families posts in this blog. We hope they help inspire your own journey!

The post What is Worldschooling? appeared first on Wonder Year Travel.

If you’re following along here, maybe you are thinking of heading out to travel with your family. You might be in the idea stage or even actively planning a long-term trip. Perhaps your experiences with virtual work and remote school have created new opportunities for your family, or you are simply ready to shake things up and head out on a life-changing adventure. Maybe you are already living on the road together as a traveling unit, discovering all the world has to teach us.

We call the experience of long-term family travel a Wonder Year. A Wonder Year is a season of discovery; it’s being in motion as a family and adopting a mindset of growth and curiosity. The journey can be for any length of time–be it two months, two years, some months traveling and some at home, or even an open-ended, full-time adventure–whatever works for your family.

 The educational component of a Wonder Year is called worldschooling, which is learning through direct interaction with the world. We authors believe that the world is a very good teacher and the more interaction our children have with it, the more their hearts and intellect will grow.

Wonder Year = long-term family travel + worldschooling

 This blog–and the accompanying book we’ll tell you more about soon–will walk you through the key aspects of planning, executing, and hopefully thriving during a Wonder Year. We aim to provide you with insights and inspiration as we share our experiences and offer resources along the way so you can travel with your family. 

 Welcome to your Wonder Year.

The post What is a Wonder Year? appeared first on Wonder Year Travel.