TeachersPayTeachers Worth The Effort?
- Details
- Category: Lessons
- Published: Wednesday, 13 May 2015 20:18
- Written by Brian Jaeger
- Hits: 2653
If you want to make some money selling lessons, try TeachersPayTeachers. If you don't want to join the site as a seller, but you think some of my lessons might work in your classroom, check out my store on the site. While I can sell my own lessons on Educabana.com, and I can also ask that you join this site, the fact is that TeachersPayTeachers and Amazon are better at advertising than anything I've ever devised.
That's why I spent the big money and became a premium seller on TeachersPayTeachers. They charge $60 a year, which really sucks, especially since they still take 15% of my sales even after that, but it's a simple math problem: had I started the year paying them the $60, I would have made it back by early May, since the basic members only get 60% of sales AND get slapped with a $.30 transaction fee, meaning my $.99 items were netting me around $.30, or less than a third of sale price.
You can pretty much figure that if you can sell at least $250 worth of items on the site, it's worth getting 85% and no fees instead of getting only 60% and added fees. It's really sad to me that I had to make that choice. I mean, these folks are millionaires, while I'm a laid-off teacher trying to sell some of my lessons, and a straight 15% cut isn't good enough for them, even if they took that extra $.30 to let computers do the work of accounting? While I totally support taking the textbook and testing company middlemen out of the equation, I guess I wonder why greed has to creep in at all.
The way I set up Educabana was to give many lessons away for free, and then charge about $10 a year for ALL of my lessons, plus those added by other teachers. The idea is that more teachers joining would mean more lessons, more tutors, more students, and so on. I'd still charge the same small fee, and you'd be able to sell tutoring services and trade lessons. You'd have a forum and a meetup-like group system.
But most people still don't know we exist, and I hate to give more money to resellers of my work than I have to, so I have to give TpT $60 to sell my educational material. Whatever. They had the good idea and got the right publicity first. Maybe Educabana is next.