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How to Polish Your Manuscript into a Rock-Solid Book is in the NaNoWriMo Writing Tools bundle, a collection of a dozen books on writing. A portion of the proceeds goes directly to the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, a non-profit group created by the families of the crew of the Challenger shuttle. This bundle is only available through the end of November 2018.

Meet Andrea!

Andrea is a bestselling author who’s written more than 50 books and over a hundred articles for professional blogs and websites. She writes fantasy, sweet romance, and co-creates a book each year with her illustrator husband and students from the local elementary school. Andrea has written several books for authors, has a series of online courses on marketing, and hosts a regular podcast with her husband.

How to Polish Your Manuscript into a Rock-Solid Book

Are you an author who is struggling with finding volunteers and professionals to help polish your book? Do you wish there was a guide that offered plenty of suggestions for finding these people?

The Self-Publish Strong series, written by successful indie author Andrea Pearson, gives you advice and guidance on building your brand, publishing, and marketing your own books.

In How to Polish Your Manuscript into a Rock-Solid Book you will discover how to:

1. Find and train beta readers
2. Hire editors
3. Test covers and descriptions
4. Format ebooks and know where to publish them
5. Typeset print books and where to publish them
6. Choose a price for print and ebooks

Excerpt

One of the biggest mistakes new indie authors make is using covers that aren’t professional. Don’t hesitate to hire someone to take over this aspect of publishing for you. Good cover designers have been developing their skills for many years, and the cost of the cover will be worth the perfect design for your book.

A good cover will fit the emotions or theme of your book. Your cover needs to be able to catch (and hold) attention. It needs to match other covers in the genre, and it needs to look great.

A cover can cost anywhere from $25 to several thousand dollars, with the average landing around $300 to $450. How much it costs depends on the originality of the artwork and stock photos used. The illustrations and photographs from the popular PhatPuppyArt website, for example, can cost several hundred alone, and that’s before a cover designer starts working on them. Keep in mind that even if a book cover is expensive, it doesn’t always mean the cover will work. Get critiques on all covers, even when you’ve outsourced the creation to a designer.

– from How to Polish Your Manuscript into a Rock-Solid Book by Andrea Pearson

The Interview

What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give an author on how to go from a finished manuscript to a rock-solid book?

Revise, revise, revise! First, do everything you can on your own, then reach out to volunteers – friends and family, etc. (They tend to be the most kind, if you’re just starting out.) Then look for volunteers and professionals who don’t know you. Apply any revisions they suggest that ring true for your book. Pay extra attention to the things the professionals say.
 
 
What inspired you to create the Self-Publish Strong podcast, and why did you and your husband decide to team up and host it together?

We’ve always wanted to do a podcast—six years ago, we made up our minds to start one, but we couldn’t find the right topic until December 2017. I absolutely love teaching and I wanted a place that allowed me to help others without me needing to be everywhere all the time. I knew I could host my own show, but I didn’t want one with regular guest interviews, since there are so many of those already. On the other hand, podcasts that feature just one person can be a bit boring. My husband is 100% my business partner, and as our listeners can attest, he’s a smart guy with a lot of insight. 🙂 It was an easy decision to do it together. 🙂
 
 
How does your Review Crew and Street Team help you?

They’re soooo wonderful! Reviews are so much easier to get now that I have a review team. And whenever I’m running promotions or want feedback on weird ideas, they’re the first I go to.
 

 
You run a Facebook group, BookBub Promotions and More, which is a place for authors to share notes on promoting and marketing. What’s one of the most useful things you’ve learned from running this group?

That the indie community is fantastic, and people are almost always willing to share. But on the other hand, those who have the most to share usually have the least amount of time to share it. Which is why we do chats with successful authors on a regular basis—they’re unable to participate in the group all the time, but they still want to help others out. Win-win for everyone. 🙂
 
 
You write sweet western romance as Andrea Kate Pearson. What inspired you to focus your stories in a western setting, and why specifically in Montana?

I love westerns—I was raised reading them (I devoured pretty much anything sweet romance, but mostly western romances) and all growing up, I wanted a horse more than anything. I took horse riding lessons in high school and still love westerns and cowboys. We attend the local rodeo every single year—I haven’t missed once. And Montana because I hadn’t set a series there for my fantasy books. I’m taking a break from romance (my fantasy is more established), but I hope to return soon.
 

 
What’s one of your favorite resources for maintaining your business excitement and energy?

Finishing a book! There’s nothing more exciting and relieving to know I’ve finished another story. But also podcasts. I enjoy listening to other authors’ experiences.
 
 
You and your husband developed Bezza’s Book of Enchantments with a local group of kids with the intention of helping them learn writing and illustrating skills. What did you most enjoy about that experience? Do you feel it had a lasting impact on the kids?

We’ve done a book a year with the local elementary school—just tied up #5. It’s so much fun! We’ve been able to watch and interact with the kids as they’ve grown into young adults who have a passion for writing and illustrating. And yes, we feel it has had a lasting impact. They appreciate literature and art much more than they would have otherwise, and their parents and teachers tell us this regularly. It’s not a money-making project, but we absolutely love it and hope to continue serving there for several more years.
 
 
Why did you decide to have characters from one of your series, the Kilenya Chronicles, appear in book six of your series the Mosaic Chronicles?

Characters from my books tend to pop up in other series/books regularly. It makes it fun for me to write and fun for my readers to read! I personally love it when other authors do this, and I was really happy that my readers appreciated it too. It’s like finding an Easter egg. Even the books we write for the school share some characters with my books for adults/teens.
 
 
In addition to everything else you’re doing, you were one of the instructors at the 2018 WMG Publishing Business Master Class. What do you enjoy about teaching marketing to authors and publishers?

Everything! Knowing I’m helping other people, learning more (they say you learn more when you teach), and sharing my passions. I love marketing! I’ve been invited to return as an instructor for 2019, and I’m really looking forward to it.
 
 
What story (or stories) are you working on now, and what’s fun about what you’re writing?

I’m just tying up the final book in my Koven Chronicles. I’ve really enjoyed this series. Lizzie, the main character, has the ability to stop sparks, so she works closely with local government officials to stop bombs, guns, and fires—wild, residential, etc. It’s been a really fun series.

About Andrea

Andrea Pearson is an avid reader and outdoor enthusiast who plays several instruments, not including the banjo. She is the author of many full-length novels and novellas, including the bestselling Mosaic, Koven, and Kilenya Chronicles. Writing is the chocolate of her life—it is, in fact, the only thing she ever craves. Being with her family is where she’s happiest, and she loves thunderstorms, the ocean, hiking, public speaking, painting, and traveling.

Find Andrea

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

   

 
 
Become a Successful Indie Author is in the NaNoWriMo Writing Tools bundle, a collection of a dozen books on writing. A portion of the proceeds goes directly to the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, a non-profit group created by the families of the crew of the Challenger shuttle. This bundle is only available through the end of November 2018.

Meet Craig!

Craig runs the 20BooksTo50K author group, which has over 26,000 members. A successful indie author, he writes best selling fiction in genres he loves: space opera, military scifi, Space Marine, colonization, and genetic engineering. He lives in Alaska, where temperatures reach fifty below zero, and he and his wife get to watch the northern lights from their driveway.

Become a Successful Indie Author

Demystifying the tangled web of self-publishing to put you on the road to success.

This is a motivational guide based on Craig’s two and a half million published words (mostly with Amazon) to help you see past the hurdles that are keeping you from climbing the mountain of success. Nothing is overwhelming once it’s been explained. If you are smart enough to write a book, you are smart enough to do everything else needed to make your indie author business a success.

Clocking in at nearly 50,000 words, this guide has something for every budding author as well as those who have already published, but for whom success remains elusive. In this business there is only one hard and fast rule—you must find readers willing to pay for your stories. It starts with the first sentence. You have to write a gripping story that people want to read, wrap a cover around the book, and then do the marketing. There’s no doubt that you can do it. Let Craig show you how.

Excerpt

Why publish your books yourself? For the same reason most small businesses start—you have an idea and are the best one to make it a reality. That idea is a story, and you have to write it, then publish it, and then sell it. And then write another one.

Daunting? Maybe.

Easy? Definitely not.

Doable? Eminently.

We publish independently because we get a much higher royalty share, we have complete control over our work, we interact directly with our readership, and so much more. The drawback is that you have to do it all yourself—creativity, production, marketing, and accounting. But indies are betting on themselves, just like any other small business. We stand up and shout, “I got this!” Then we knuckle down and do the hard work where we and we alone are responsible for our success.

Will this book guarantee that you’ll be the next seven-figure author? Absolutely not. But it will show you that if you work hard at the right things, it may not be as far away as you think. Make your hard work work for you.

This book is meant to show you what’s possible, and that you’re not alone on this journey. Arming yourself with information is the best way to win the battle known as “Indie Publishing.”

You can do it. It takes work, but the mountain is not insurmountable.

JK Rowling made over one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) in book sales alone and estimates suggest that she reached only nine percent of the book reading public. Only nine percent is worth a billion dollars. She didn’t get there because she was trying to get rich. She got there because she wrote great stories and then handled the business side of it.

What if you were able to tap 1/10,000th of what JK Rowling tapped?

Then you would be a $100,000 author, while the average author makes less than $10,000 a year. But we refuse to be average, because we learn from others with readily available information that will help us get to that next level.

No matter where you are on your author journey, there’s always a new level you can reach.

Roll up your sleeves, because it’s time to get to work.

– from Become a Successful Indie Author by Craig Martelle

The Interview

What’s the most important lesson readers should take away from Become a Successful Indie Author?

That if you work hard at the right things, your chances of success greatly improve.
 
 
Why do you believe newsletters are so important?

It is the direct link to my fans. It lets me have a conversation with them at regular intervals. They subscribed because they liked my books. It’s important to keep feeding them.
 
 
What helps you stay motivated?

My fans, the readers who buy my books and make the characters their own. I worked as a Fortune 500 business consultant and seeing the opportunity while applying sound business practices to the art of storytelling is doubly rewarding.
 

 
You’ve written nine books in your Free Trader series, and three books in the Cygnus Space Opera series, which is set in the same universe. What do you enjoy about writing in this universe?

It takes me back to my high school days when D&D was first rolled out. It was a great game of the imagination. The first science fiction role-playing game was Metamorphosis Alpha by James M. Ward. That is the game I loved the most for engagement of the imagination. With the success of the Free Trader series, I was able to connect with James and we have since written two books together and are currently working on our third.
 

 
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from collaborating with other authors?

You can learn something from everyone, whether it’s a turn of phrase, depth of character, or so many other things. Everyone you’ve ever met knows something that you don’t. Take a chance to learn what that is
 
 
What suggestions can you give to someone trying to improve their word count?

Practice helps immensely. Writing every day is the key to big word counts. The more you do it, the better you get at it.
 
 
You co-wrote The Human Experiment with Kevin McLaughlin. What was the most surprising thing to you about the experience of collaborating with another author on this project?

That a literary fiction style book takes a different kind of marketing and a different style of writing than either of us was used to.
 
 
Darklanding, a space opera/western series you’re writing with Scott Moon, is being released in a serial format with twelve releases in a season, then a break before the next season begins. Why did you and Scott choose to use this format, and what are your thoughts about it now that you’ve completed the first season?

We wrote Darklanding very specifically to woo the small screen. Each episode can be turned into a one-hour screenplay with minimal effort. We focused on different characters in each episode to make shooting them easier. After completing the first season, we learned that as a series of books in a niche genre, it needs more oomph. We marketed it a great deal before launch. It did well, even with the rapid release but fell off the charts after we stopped releasing.
 

 
You’re a key part of 20BooksTo50K, and a driving force behind the group’s conferences. What’s your favorite part about being involved with this group?

Changing lives. We have helped so many people to turn their lives around. The stories are amazing. I’ve had the pleasure to meet a number of incredible authors because of running the largest self-published author conference in the world.
 
 
What story (or stories) are you working on now, and what’s fun about what you’re writing?

I’m working on a number of stories right, building IP (intellectual property) through outlining and preparing three new series. I have co-writers working on three different military scifi/space operas, a space dragon trilogy, and an epic fantasy trilogy. The stuff that I personally write—my lawyer in space series is doing great and I love writing it (I’m a lawyer, too, my sordid past). The biggest new series is a Young Adult Cozy Mystery set of 24 books that we’ll publish next year—a new story every two weeks. These will be novellas, but they are going to be great fun. Look for Monster Case Files in a store near you. 🙂

About Craig

Craig retired from the Marine Corps, spending time both as enlisted and as an officer. Then he went to law school, took his law degree into business consulting where he became a business diagnostics specialist and leadership coach. He retired from that at age 52 because he was away from home way too much. That’s when he started writing full time, and he has not looked back since. This is a great ride! He have a variety of stories now since he’s been at this for a little while, lots of short stories so you can see if you like his style. He has a number of best selling novels in categories that matter to him—space opera, military scifi, Space Marine, colonization, and genetic engineering. As a serial daydreamer, it’s nice to finally get the stories on paper (virtual and digital paper, that is). And then since he runs the 20Booksto50k author group with over 25,000 members, he has taken what I’ve shared, put it into logical order, expounded on a few things, and then published it as a self-help book for indie authors.

Find Craig

Website | Facebook | Goodreads | BookBub

   

 
 
Story Pitch is in the NaNoWriMo Writing Tools bundle, a collection of a dozen books on writing. A portion of the proceeds goes directly to the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, a non-profit group created by the families of the crew of the Challenger shuttle. This bundle is only available through the end of November 2018.

Meet Scott!

Scott writes fiction, non-fiction, and is a game photographer. He produces an annual calendar that highlights board and other hobby games. He really, really likes coffee.

Story Pitch

Struggling to start your story or lost in the middle? You need a Story Pitch.

A standard pitch is meant for marketing and selling, but a Story Pitch is a powerful tool meant to be used when pre-writing and writing. It can help you jumpstart your novel, screenplay, comic, or whatever type of story you are trying to tell and it can be used as a corrective measure if you get off track during the writing process.

In this book, you’ll learn:

• The key elements to story
• How those elements are connected
• How to construct a Story Pitch
• How to use a Story Pitch for outlining
• How to use a Story Pitch to fix character problems
• How to use a Story Pitch when lost during writing
• How to use a Story Pitch for writing book blurbs

If you like honesty, no bull, a bunch of humor, and tons of examples in your writing guides, then you’ll love Scott King’s Story Pitch.

Excerpt

A pitch is a description of a story that a person uses to sell it. In Hollywood, it might be that a writer is pitching a screenplay to producers, hoping they buy it. In traditional publishing, it might be an author pitching a novel to an agent who would then pitch it to one of the big six publishers.

Anytime you meet someone and they ask you about what you’ve written, whether it’s a novella, short story, or full-blown three-hundred-thousand-word epic, what you say back to them is a pitch.

Pitching is part of a writer’s world. No matter how much you might hate giving one, you can’t escape it. Book blurbs that appear on the back of a novel or on a retailer website are also pitches. They are carefully crafted descriptions meant to sell the story to a potential reader.

You can use a Story Pitch to create all the pitches I described above, but the main goal of a Story Pitch isn’t to sell the idea of your story to someone else. A Story Pitch is meant to be a tool you can use when pre-writing, writing, and re-writing your story.

Whittled down, a Story Pitch is a synopsis that introduces the key elements of your story, serves as a guide post while writing, and creates enough interest to hook the listener so they’ll want more.

– from Story Pitch by Scott King

The Interview

You write both fiction and non-fiction; do you enjoy one over the other?

I enjoy them equally but for different reasons. Fiction is my way of having fun. It’s creating worlds and characters that readers care about. I use it to offer escape, fun, and to touch upon themes that I think are important. In a different time of my life I was a college professor and doing non-fiction scratches that teaching itch. It’s not working one on one with students, but I still get to feel like I’m helping people.
 
 
The books in your Writer to Author series are all connected to fiction books of yours. Why did you decided to link your fiction with your non-fiction?

One of the biggest advantage to taking a class in writing versus reading a book about writing is that you get to see the mistakes that other students make in their writing and how they go about fixing those mistakes. By tying my non-fiction books to my fiction books it allows the reader to go on a journey with me. When I screw something up they get to see first hand how I fix it. My book on outlining doesn’t just teach how to outline, but shows how I outlined an actual novel. Want to know how a Story Pitch can be used to fix a problem? I use it to solve a major problem I was having in the original draft of my dystopian thriller Resist Them.
 

 
Why make the the tone of your non-fiction books so non-traditional?

I like coffee and poop jokes. I’m not stuffy. That shows in my books. They aren’t written in an academic style. They are written as if me and the reader are hanging out in a cool coffee shop and just talking shop about publishing and the craft of writing. It allows me to write the books in my natural voice which means I get to focus more on content than presentation.
 
 
How did you come up with the idea for your book Story Pitch?

I had previously published Finish The Script! and The Five Day Novel. One of the most popular subjects covered in both books was how to write a pitch. Since the interest seemed to be there, I decided to flesh out the concept into a full book, with a focus not just on how to write a pitch, but how to use it as a tool for pre-writing and re-writing.
 
 
What are the basic building blocks when writing a Story Pitch?

The core of every pitch has four things: Character, the Character’s Want, an antagonistic force preventing them from achieving their want, and the stakes, which is what happens if the want isn’t achieved.

So looking at Avengers: Infinity War it would break down something like this:
Character: Thanos
Want: To put together the infinity gauntlet (so he can wipe out half of all life forms to prevent overpopulation and the lack of resources)
Conflict: The Avengers are trying to stop him from doing so.
Stakes: If he fails the universe is doomed.

Things like genre, voice, and themes can all impact a pitch too, but this should give you an idea of what basic elements are and how they might fit together.
 

 
 
How can an author use a Story Pitch?

If you talk to most authors, they think pitches are important for selling a book. You pitch to an agent via a query letter or you pitch to a publisher. Then you might pitch to a potential reader via the synopsis on the back cover or the description on an online store. A story pitch is great for those things but it can also serve as a guide when writing or as a test when pre-writing.

When I was a college professor, I needed some sort of gauge to measure a student’s story before they started writing it. I had them write pitches, just so I could make sure they had a clear goal with the story they wanted to tell and I realized in doing so that it helped them stay on track through the writing process.

That’s where I think a Story Pitch really shines, helping writers shape their idea before writing. It’s also a great test when rewriting because you can compare your current draft to your original pitch. Doing so allows you to see where an element might have gotten off track or gone wrong.
 
 
Why might an author choose to write a Story Pitch for each character in their story?

Story Pitches are centered on individual characters. If a story has multiple POVs or a writer is simply struggling to understand a supporting character, writing a Story Pitch can help clear things up.

Earlier I used the example of Thanos from Infinity War. Although he is the “villain” in many ways he is the main character of the movie. He has the biggest wants. He is the most proactive of all the characters. He even has a slight arc in weighing what he is willing to sacrifice to gain his deepest wants.

Writing a Story Pitch centering on him makes sense, but the movie was an ensemble piece. It has a huge cast. Going back and writing addition pitches for the other characters would aid in fleshing out those additional story lines and themes that a writer might want to touch upon.
 
 
In Wrath of Dragons, the first book in your Elderealm series, you do some interesting and unexpected things with your dragon characters—especially with Doug the dragon. What inspired you to write about a dragon turned into a human?

There are a lot of fantasy novels where dragons are shape shifters. That’s not a new trope. What I did that was a bit sneaky is play a bit with expectations at the start of Wrath of Dragons. I set the story up so that readers would think dragons were non-intelligent beasts, because that is the view one of the POV characters has. Within the first two chapters that changes and the readers along with the POV character realize that there is more going on than they realized.

Doug’s whole story in the not just the first novel, but the series as a whole is that he is someone trying to learn how to connect with others. He’s an outcast as a dragon. He is trapped in human form. He has no family. He is simply looking for his place in the world. Although this is a fantastical setting, I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to. It’s probably why he has become one of the fan favorite characters of the series.
 
 
With so much working having to go into all stages of publishing as an indie author, do you still have fun writing?

Heck yeah. I’m a story person first. Money is great, and I’m lucky enough to make a full time income doing what I’m doing, but as things are now I make enough and I don’t need to push to make more. In a way that gives me a bit of freedom with my writing. Instead of fast tracking the next book in a series to push for quick releases, I can take a break and write a novella, non-fiction book, or whatever I want. Writing what I feel I NEED to write next instead of what I SHOULD write next keeps things fun. It lets me feel like I am prioritizing story of business.

And to be clear, there is no right or wrong reason to write. I know a bunch of authors who write and it’s a job to them. Their main goal is providing for their family or they are trying to earn a hire Amazon rank. Those reasons to write are just as legit as my reasons.
 
 
In addition to being an author, you’re also a board game photographer! What do you enjoy most about this type of photography?

People are the worst when it comes to photography. People have things they don’t like about themselves… maybe an old scar, the shape of their jaw line, the thickness of their eyebrows, or whatever. In photos they want whatever that thing they dislike to be hidden or minimized. As a photographer I like to capture things as they are and sometimes if you are photographing a person that means photographing something they don’t want. This can lead to cranky humans because you took a real portrait showing who they really are instead of what they want to appear as.

Because people can be a pain to make happy, I gravitated toward non-people photography, mostly food and landscape. That eventually lead to board games and to be honest, board games are great because they don’t have opinions of themselves. Plus publishers and designers are happy when you take real photos of their games. It’s a win-win!
 
 
You co-wrote your newest non-fiction book, Learn How to Write a Novel by Reading Harry Potter with Clark Chamberlain. What led the two of you to write this book?

Clark had done a Harry Potter class and approached me about teaming up for additional courses. Courses are not my thing, but it gave me the idea of teaming up for a book, and this book is what we decided to do!

Basically the book breaks down as a 101 class in how to write a novel and it uses Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as the example for all the lessons. In a way it’s a layered so that someone who knows nothing about writing could come in and read it and leave with an understanding of what it takes to write a novel. On the other hand, if someone already has multiple books under their belt and knows what they are doing, Learn How to Write a Novel by Reading Harry Potter is a great re-read companion. The book is structured by chapter so you can read a chapter of The Sorcerer’s Stone and then read a chapter of Learn How to Write a Novel to see an analysis of that chapter!
 
 
What story (or stories) are you working on now?

Soooo much. It’s been a strange year.

I cranked out the first draft of Unchained Shadows, the next book in my Elderealm series. It was supposed to only be about 100k, but is pushing 200k. I’m super excited about it. It’s GOOD, but messy because my first drafts are always super messy so it needs a heavy polish and I will wrap it up by the end of the year.

I have half a dozen short stories I’m shopping around. I also have a sci-fi short story I’m turning into a novella. It’s strange and more literary than mainstream. It will probably be out sometime next spring.

Then this past summer our dog, Winchell passed away. He was raised and trained to be a seeing eye dog. It was very hard and still is for both myself and my wife, Lisa. Lisa raised him from a pup and only though a weird quirk was she able to get him back from The Seeing Eye. As part of the grieving process, I wrote a 40k sci-fi novella based on his story. The first draft is done and it needs a re-write. I’ll probably tie it into my next non-fiction book which will be about rewriting. That should also come out sometime next year!

About Scott

Scott King, an international best selling author, was born in Washington D.C. and raised in Ocean City, Maryland. He received his undergraduate degree in film from Towson University, and his M.F.A. in film from American University.

Until moving to follow his wife’s career, King worked as college professor teaching photography, digital arts, and writing related classes. He now works full time as an author.

Find Scott

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

   

 

Lance Bush is President and CEO of The Challenger Center for Space Science Education. Challenger Center and its global network of Challenger Learning Centers use space-themed simulated learning and role-playing strategies to help students bring their classroom studies to life and cultivate skills needed for future success, such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication and teamwork.

A portion of the proceeds from the NaNoWriMo Writing Tools bundle goes directly to benefit the Challenger Center. This bundle, put together by Kevin J. Anderson, is an impressive collection of a dozen books on writing that will be inspirational, helpful, maybe even provocative. You can get all of the books for as little as $15. This bundle is only available through the end of November 2018, but you can always donate directly to the Challenger Center!

Meet Lance!

Lance Bush started his career at NASA as one of the chief engineers designing the next generation space transportation. He managed the International Space Station Commercial Development program. He also co-founded and served as the Chairman of the International Space Station Multilateral Commercialization Group comprised of the five partner space agencies (Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States) and 16 countries. He has led the growth and expansion of Challenger Center, including the development of a simulation-based program that can be delivered in the classroom. Under Dr. Bush’s leadership, Challenger Center was recognized with the National Science Board’s Public Service Award for its work to promote a public understanding of science and engineering.

The Interview

While I see that you have programs for all ages, your focus has been on middle schoolers. Why did you choose to focus on that age group?

Middle school is a crucial moment in people’s lives. In middle school, approximately half of students decide not to pursue a math or science-related career path. We have success in engaging students in programs that bring science and math to life, igniting their potential and providing inspiration that helps students develop a love of learning and further pursue studies and careers in STEM subjects.

Why does the Challenger Center feel it’s important to have learning centers where kids can interact with hands-on equipment, especially since it would be less expensive not to install special equipment?

A Challenger Learning Center is a place where students from all backgrounds can come together and interact while learning important life skills. Our Centers are not only designed with hands-on simulators that provide an incredible STEM experience, but the Centers also create an environment where students practice critical 21^st century skills, like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Your organization has built Challenger Learning Centers not only across the U.S., but across the globe. How does that fit in with your mission?

Our mission is to ignite the potential within every student possible. We want to open their eyes to new skills and ideas that can prepare them for success in their careers and lives. Our Centers across the globe help us to reach these goals. We have already reached over 5 million students over the last 32 years and we look forward to reaching many more in the future.

You are developing a series of Classroom Adventures that use a “simulation-based” learning model. What does that mean when you are in a regular classroom rather than one of your fully equipped learning centers?

We understand that not every student can visit a Challenger Learning Center, that’s why we have developed Classroom Adventures. We want to bring the essence of a Center Mission to the classroom where teachers can deliver the program. Similar to a Mission at a Challenger Learning Center, Classroom Adventures use simulations that are delivered via a computer and include hands-on labs and activities. The program is designed to accomplish the same thing as a Mission — increase students STEM engagement, career awareness, and 21^st century skills. Classroom Adventures can be designed for any age group and any STEM topic.

What kind of feedback do you get from kids? Do they have a clear favorite?

We are currently piloting our first Classroom Adventure – Aquatic Investigators — and the students love it! They get to work together with their fellow classmates to help save the Hawaiian Monk Seals.

In a similar vein, what do teachers say about the programs?

We’ve worked with over 2,000 students and their teachers rated student engagement at 4.73 out of 5, and 87% of the teachers wanted the chance to continue using the program. Both Center Missions and Classroom Adventures are effective and provide options for students and teachers to experience engaging STEM subjects in the classroom. Challenger Center programs expose students to a variety of careers, real-world experiences, and skills — teachers love that!

Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space, was a high school Social Studies teacher. A more obvious choice might have been a science teacher, especially since she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants. How do you think she stood out from the crowd? What were her greatest strengths as a teacher?

I believe Christa stood out because she had a great passion for teaching and I believe that’s the greatest strength any teacher can have. Christa wanted to share her lessons with students around the world; she understood the importance of STEM subjects, discovery, and exploration. These too were characteristics shared with other applicants and her backup, Barbara Morgan, who later flew as the first Educator Astronaut. Barbara Morgan helped create Challenger Center and serves as our Chair of the Education Committee on our Board of Directors.

The Challenger Center is now sharing the “lost lessons” that she developed and had planned to teach while on the mission. How have those lessons been received?

The lessons have been well received not only by students and educators, but also by the public. This was a great tribute to Christa and the crew and it came to life when two NASA Educators Astronaut, Ricky Arnold and Joe Acaba, asked Challenger Center if they could complete Christa’s Lessons. It was tremendous teamwork and after nearly 33 years, we are fortunate to complete and share Christa’s lessons and to continue the legacy of the Challenger STS-51L crew.

There have always been those who argue that we need to focus on the problems we face here on earth first, before we pursue space exploration. How would you respond to that particular view?

Space exploration can help us solve some of the problems we face here on Earth. Thanks to space exploration, scientist and engineers have developed new technology and research. Most importantly, space exploration promotes science education. The Apollo Missions inspired my generation to grow up and become scientist and astronauts – the Apollo Effect. Not everyone ended up working in the space program, and many went on to solve other issues in areas like transportation, food development, energy production, and so much more. A Mars mission will inspire a whole new generation of STEM professionals.

Is there anything I haven’t asked about that you feel is important for folks to know about the Challenger Center and your mission?

Today’s students are tomorrow’s innovators and it’s crucial they don’t lose interest in STEM subjects. That’s why our Center Missions and Classroom Adventures are developed to build students’ confidence in their own abilities and demonstrate the power of teamwork. We want to spark a passion for learning that will last a lifetime.

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