- A free e-book on how to meet the CCSS from the iNK authors. We already have more than 1000 posts from the blog, written by these top authors on all aspects of researching, writing, speaking, and listening—the four skills mandated by the CCSS. We are developing an e-book from these posts that will be a lot more useful to teachers than the random postings over the years, even with the searchable tags.
- A book club that offers new nonfiction books by our authors at a discount. We would work with publishers to create this. There are many business models for book clubs.
- A bimonthly webinar that is discussion of how a particular book-club book can be used in the classroom with the author participating. These webinars would be broadcast live and then archived.
- A forum for sharing lesson plans based on iNK author books, with the best plans being added to the database for that book’s title. We can invite teachers to share their best ideas, which can then create valuable instructional documents that members can access. This would give these books the kind of instructional support currently packaged with text books but the quality would be better because it would be curated by top educators and the authors themselves. It would be to our advantage to find a way to monetize the lesson plans for the teachers.
- A secure way to post videos that will allow teachers to share their ideas and projects as they relate to the nonfiction books by our authors.
- A feature called iNKubations that would offer members a way to publish new ideas. Authors could publish samples of works-in-progress that could test the viability of the ideas, we could even open it up to new authors who could use this to try out concepts—in effect creating an open-source mall for prospective publishers. For example, Vicki Cobb has three beautifully produced projects from a book called Arts and Crafts You Can Eat. She could offer these free and the number of downloads would be a measure of public interest. Publishers could also troll these samples, anyone could contribute, but we would curate and only publish those ideas we think has merit.