The Tutor’s Second Income: Publishing Your Own Course Book

The per-class rate is brutal and everyone teaching knows it. Class sizes are being pushed up, prep time isn’t paid, and a freelance tutor or adjunct instructor earns for the hour in the room and nothing else.

Meanwhile you’ve already written the materials. The exercises you refined over eleven cohorts, the explanations that actually work, the practice sets you photocopy every term because the assigned textbook doesn’t cover what you teach.

That material can be a book your students buy, and unlike your hourly rate, it earns every time a new cohort walks in. Here is how the economics work, why the workbook matters more than the textbook, and the one legal question to settle before anything else.

The number that changes: income per cohort, not per hour

Say you publish a course book and buy your own stock at unit cost plus our 20%, around €10.58 on a title retailing at €18.45. Each student’s copy earns you €7.87.

A class of twelve is €94 per cohort on top of your teaching fee. Six cohorts a year is around €570. Add a workbook at similar margins and a full class buying both clears €180 per group.

Not a fortune. But notice what kind of money it is: it repeats with every cohort, it scales with exactly the class-size inflation that’s squeezing your hourly rate, and it pays you for preparation work you already did. The larger the class they pack in, the more copies sell. For once the trend runs in your favour.

Why the workbook is the clever half

A textbook can be resold. The student finishes the course, sells it to next term’s intake, and your sale walks away with it. Every used copy in circulation is a new copy not bought.

A workbook the student writes in cannot be resold. Once the exercises are filled in, the answer lines used, the margins annotated, that copy is spent. Next cohort needs fresh ones, every term, every year, for as long as you teach the course.

This is not a trick; it’s how workbooks have always worked, and it’s why the pairing matters.

The course book carries the teaching and survives on the student’s shelf with your name on it. The workbook is consumable, and the consumable is the recurring revenue. Publish both, and structure the course so the workbook is where the practice happens.

We can also top-bind the workbook, spiral-free, lies flat, and left-handed students can write without dragging across the page. Small thing; students notice.

You set the price, and nobody undercuts you

Two structural points that matter more for course materials than for any other kind of book.

There is no competing supply. Your course book exists for your course. No online listing undercuts it, no used-book stall stocks it, no student finds it cheaper, there is nowhere else it exists. The usual price pressure on textbooks simply doesn’t apply.

And the price is legally yours to set. Published in English, the book sits outside the Dutch fixed book price law, which binds Dutch- and Frisian-language titles. You can price the bundle, discount for a full-course signup, or adjust between terms. If your subject genuinely requires Dutch-language materials, a largely-exercise workbook stays outside the law on the text-volume exemption regardless of language, and for prose-heavy Dutch material we’ll tell you plainly what the fixed-price registration means before you commit. Translation runs €100 per 20,000 words if you want both editions.

Settle the ownership question first

This is the one genuinely serious issue, and it splits cleanly by how you work.

If you’re a freelance tutor, trainer or private educator, ZZP, teaching on your own account, the copyright in your materials is yours. Article 7 of the Auteurswet, which hands an employer the copyright in work made in employment, applies to dienstverband and doesn’t reach you. Check your client contracts haven’t signed anything away; otherwise you’re clear, and you’re the clean case this whole post is aimed at.

If you’re an adjunct or instructor employed by an institution, materials made as part of the job likely belong to the institution, that’s Article 7 doing exactly what it says. The workable version: a book written substantially on your own time, outside your assigned duties, ideally with a short written confirmation from the institution that it makes no claim. One email. Institutions grant these routinely for textbooks; asking costs nothing and publishing without asking is how the problem version of this story goes.

We don’t publish material where ownership is unresolved, not for our protection but for yours, because a dispute surfaces after the book is selling, which is the worst possible moment.

One norm worth honouring either way: if you require students to buy your book, say so before they enrol, with the price. Freelancers answer to nobody on this, but transparency is what keeps “buy my book” from souring into a complaint, and a book good enough to assign is good enough to disclose.

Yes, this can be for younger students

Our trade catalogue is adult and stays that way. Course materials are the exception, and it’s a deliberate one.

A workbook commissioned by an educator for their own students, including school-age students in tutoring, bijles or huiswerkbegeleiding settings, is pedagogical material, produced to your brief, sold through you to your class. It doesn’t enter our catalogue, doesn’t go to shops or sellers, and isn’t marketed by us to anyone. You are the channel, the content is the curriculum, and the age of your students is a fact about your teaching practice, not about our list.

The content has to be genuinely educational, and we record the arrangement per title. That’s the whole umbrella.

What it costs

Print-ready files: ISBN, trade registry, proof copy	€30–90
Course book or workbook needing full preparation	€400
Longer prose works, to 50,000 words	€600
Translation into English, per 20,000 words or part	€100

A course book plus consumable workbook, both needing full preparation, is €800, recovered inside the first year by two or three ordinary-sized cohorts buying both. After that it’s margin on work you did once.

Each title carries a real ISBN through our Bowker registration and a trade directory listing, which also means a library or institution can order it properly if your course ever travels.

Getting started

Tell us the subject, the audience, roughly what exists already, a folder of handouts is a perfectly good starting point, and how many students pass through in a year. We’ll come back with format suggestions, production cost, and what you’d earn per cohort.

And if you’re employed anywhere the materials touch, tell us where the ownership question stands. If you haven’t asked yet, ask first.

Teaching your own material already? Tell us about the course. We’ll work out what the book earns you per class.

[Talk to us about your course book]

Also worth reading: publishing independent research and what production costs across all formats.

The market data behind all of this: the tutoring boom vs. the teaching rate.