Shannon Olsen is a second-grade teacher, wife, and mom of two. She’s also an entrepreneur and self-published author. Her first book, Our Class is a Family, became a #1 New Release and #1 Best Seller, and earned a spot on Amazon’s Top 20 chart. The book is also currently listed at #3 on Publisher’s Weekly for Top Children’s Picture Books.
In August of 2020, Amazon selected her title to be featured on an 83-foot billboard in front of Penn Station in New York City. Shannon distributes copies of the book independently as well. You can find them on her website where she offers bulk sets of books at a discounted rate.
Prior to becoming an author, Shannon earned her B.A. in English and M.A. in Teaching from the University of California Irvine. She’s taught in the classroom for 15 years. In the past 3 years, she’s become what has been coined as a “teacherpreneur.” She creates and sells downloadable resources for elementary teachers to use in their classrooms. She does this through her self-started business brand, Life Between Summers. Her resources are available through the website Teachers Pay Teachers, as well as her own site. With the help of blogging and social media marketing, she was able to expand her brand.
Tell us about who you are and what you do.
The most important roles in my life are being a wife, mom, and teacher. I’m also passionate about being an entrepreneur and author.
Life Between Summers is a business where I create and sell resources for educators. When coming up with ideas, I’m often inspired by my students and what I need for my own classroom. I’ve been making things to use in my own classroom and shared them with co-workers since I first started teaching. It wasn’t until recently that I started selling them commercially.
From a young age, I’ve dreamt of becoming an author. This is a little silly, but on the inside cover of my freshman high school yearbook, there was a big fill in the blank where it said: “Your dream is ______.” My dreams at fourteen years old included traveling the world, having kids one day, and being an author.
The interest in writing books probably first stemmed from my love of reading as a kid. My dad once visited my class as a guest visitor to read a story. He told my students that I used to carry a book with me everywhere I went. That love of reading led to a love of writing too. As I child, I used to write my own stories just for fun.
Inspired to write my first book, Our Class is a Family, it felt like the perfect opportunity to realize my dream. More importantly, it was a way to help serve fellow educators at the same time.
It was the type of book I wanted to read aloud to my students. It’s important to build a positive sense of community within my classroom. Teachers and students spend more time together on average than they do with their actual families. I know many educators who work hard to make their classrooms a home away from home for their kids.
One of the things I convey to my class at the beginning of the school year is that we’re like a family. We talk about how they have their own families at home, of course, but that at school we’re another special type of family. Families care about each other, support one another, and have fun together. They also make mistakes together and help each other grow. I tell them that even though we’re not related, we do get to spend a lot of time together. This means we want to make our classroom a place where everyone is safe to be themselves.
As I was sharing back to school stories with my class during the first week of school, I wished there was a picture book that expressed the idea that our class is like a family. It didn’t exist, so I decided to go for it and create one.
The primary aim of my book is to help teachers strengthen the bond they have with their students, and that their students have with each other. My hope is that it helps kids feel a sense of belonging at school. Children’s mental health is arguably more important than it’s ever been. I believe that feeling accepted and loved in a school community can make a very positive difference.
How did you create your brand? What was the idea behind it?
When I was thinking of what to name my business, I realized my target demographic was teachers. So, I asked myself…what’s something that all teachers like? The first thing that popped in my head was summer vacation (coffee, finished report cards, and kids also came to mind…those are in no particular order, by the way). Summer vacation, though, made me think of teaching as “life between summers.”
My objective was to create resources that are useful for teachers and beneficial to kids, and that fills a need in the classroom, whether academic, social, or emotional. Many teacherpreneurs have a specific subject matter focus. Most of my resources are for teachers in the primary range (kindergarten-3rd grade), but I have a wide variety that extends to the upper grade as well. I make everything ranging from Common Core aligned lesson plans to seasonal crafts to teacher postcards. I especially enjoy creating hands-on games for math and literacy centers, as well as engaging activities and student projects that provide an opportunity for kids to practice writing skills.
Other than my blog, where I provide insight and ideas about how to utilize these products in the classroom, my favorite platform for sharing my content has been Instagram. I prefer it over other platforms because there is a strong sense of community among educators there. There’s a lot of sharing, collaboration, and opportunities to make connections with other people who work in our field. I also like that the focus is on pictures. Most teachers are visual by nature, and I’m able to share pictures of my resources being used in action.
I started my business account on Instagram almost three years ago, and through that time I’ve been able to build meaningful, positive connections with educators all across the country, and even internationally. On my Instagram page, I advertise resources for sale that I’ve created, but I also share things like teaching ideas and tips, quotes about teacher life, recommendations for books, along with classroom materials.
Travel is one of my biggest interests outside of teaching, so I started a hashtag called #teachertraveltuesday where teachers can share past and present travel photos on Tuesdays. It’s been a fun way for teachers who love to travel to connect with one another and share travel tips and recommendations. It’s also given the people who follow my page a little more personal insight into who I am outside of being a teacher.
Do you have something you’d like to share with our readers?
I have several free teaching resources available on my blog/website and in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. The ebook version of Our Class is a Family, is also free on Kindle Unlimited.
Explain the challenges you went through while you were working on brand creation. What are the challenges you go through on an everyday basis?
Like many people who run a business, in addition to having a day job and/or being a parent, my main challenge is finding time to dedicate to it. I’m often asked by friends and co-workers, “How do you have the time?”
My number one priority is being a mom and a wife. It takes some creativity to juggle teaching second grade, running a business, and publishing/marketing a book. But something I hope to instill in my daughters as they start to get older is that if something is truly important to you, you find a way to make time instead of excuses.
I find ways to squeeze in work wherever possible, like during my kids’ naptime or late at night after my family’s gone to sleep. On days where my mom generously offers to watch my kids, I don’t use it as an opportunity to take a nap or browse around Target (although don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy those things). Instead, nearly ten times out of ten, I use that time to work on my business. Making time has also sometimes meant choosing to write a blog post over watching a movie at night or doing research about book publishing instead of mindlessly scrolling on the phone.
Self-care is a popular topic as of late, and I don’t discredit the importance of making time for leisurely things you enjoy or taking care of yourself. I love to unwind and be a couch potato as much as the next person. I do make it a point to recharge my batteries regularly. At the same time, the work that I do for my book and my business offers me a creative outlet that I genuinely enjoy. That’s a form of self-care for me.
The other big challenge I faced was the sheer learning curve in getting started. I’ve had many people ask where to begin as a seller on Teachers Pay Teachers or getting a book published. The truth is, there’s not a one-size-fits-all fast track for either. You have to be willing to do the initial research and then continue to put in the work, troubleshoot mistakes along the way, and have a desire to carve out space for it in your regular everyday life.
Tell us about your future vision of your brand. What is your dream about taking it to the next level?
I would like to scale my business and continue to create resources for teachers as education changes and evolves. I hope to grow it by expanding my knowledge in various marketing platforms. I’ve created resources that can also be used as extension activities with my book which are often referred to by teachers as “book companions” and would like to create more for future books that I write.
This means I plan to write and publish more books. I’m currently working on versions of Our Class is a Family in Spanish and French and have written a manuscript for a second book. As a teacher myself, I feel it gives me a unique insight into the types of books and resources that other educators want and need for their students. It’s my hope that my resources and books continue to have a place in classrooms all over the world, serving teachers and making a positive impact in the lives of kids.
What message would you like to give to anybody who has a plan of creating something of their own and making a living through it?
It can be hard to come up with a truly original idea when creating anything because we know that chances are, it’s been done before. But whatever that idea may be, it’s important to create something that fills a need for people. Not only because it’s something they can use, but it might fill an emotional need as well. People like to feel a personal connection to something. Many teachers have told me they love Our Class is a Family because they’ve always referred to their class as a family. It’s what they’ve thought and felt for years. The idea of a class being like a family was not my original concept, but it was a concept that had just never been encapsulated in the physical form of a book, complete with rhyming words and visual illustrations.
You also have to be prepared for it to be a slow burn. In a Facebook Group for people who sell on Teachers Pay Teachers, I remember someone saying that there are Microwave sellers, and Slow Cooker sellers. The Microwave ones are people who try to take shortcuts to reach what they define as success. They just want to get there fast, sometimes at the expense of having a less quality product. Slow Cookers are the ones who don’t rush through it and pay attention to the smaller details and fine-tuning their craft. It may take them a lot longer to get there, but the result is better in the end. That person in the group advised others to “Be a Slow Cooker.” The comment I wrote in response to that thread was, “It’d be nice if I could be an Instant Pot!” All joking aside, while I am all about efficiency and working smarter, not harder, I do have to say that it’s truly been a matter of slowly growing my business over my time. It’s the small tasks you do each day that eventually start to add up to the bigger results we hope for. Another teacherpreneur named Erin Waters shared a phrase in her School of Sellers podcast, and it has become one of my favorite sayings in business and in other aspects of my life: “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
On account of COVID-19, a lot changed from the time the book was written (October 2019) to the time it was published (May 2020). The 2019-2020 school year was a unique one in that teachers weren’t physically in the classroom with students during the final duration of it. I read the book with my own students over Zoom video conferencing at the end of our school year. It brought new meaning to the words home and family. There is a line from the book that says, “So if our classroom is the place where we spend our days, why wouldn’t we want to make it like a home in many ways?” I paused with my kids and had a discussion about how a home (and a classroom) is not just a place, but a feeling. Even when you are not actually in the same room as your family, you’re still a family and you stick together.
An unexpected outcome from publishing the book has also been the overwhelmingly positive response from not only teachers but also parents of young children. Many parents have ordered a copy of the book to read to their own kids prior to the beginning of the new school year. In their reviews, they have shared that it has helped ease fears their child might have had about starting school. Parents have also been purchasing copies of the book to give as gifts to their children’s teachers.
My book has earned the most revenue through Amazon, but I also distribute it through my own website at lifebetweensummers.com/shop. My husband is very supportive of the work I do as an author and helps me handle the packing and shipping of books.
I chose to start distributing independently because many teachers had reached out to me expressing interest in purchasing class sets of books for their students. I’ve also had principals and other administrators interested in ordering copies for their whole staff. They inquired about discounts for ordering in bulk, and by selling through my own site, I am able to keep costs lower and make those discounts available to them. Even though processing orders and storing/shipping books from home is considerably more work than the distribution I do through Amazon, it has been worthwhile. It helped get the book into the hands of more teachers, and the way I see it, this means that the book’s positive message will reach more kids.
Life Between Summers
Website URL : lifebetweensummers.com
Instagram URL : www.instagram.com/lifebetweensummers