Ancillary Materials Case Study

A large publisher of K–12 science textbooks brought its already-published book to PPS to take advantage of its publishing outsourcing services. The client hired PPS to create ancillary materials to accompany the main text: PowerPoint lectures and instructor’s guides for the classroom, interactive questions for students, practice quizzes and test banks to formally assess the students, and instructor resource material with all of the elements combined on one electronic media.

For this project, PPS took an enormous chunk of work off the client’s hands. PPS started at the very beginning, hiring authors for the PowerPoint lecture, instructor’s guide, and test bank. Because PPS was directed to follow the design of the main textbook, all the client had to do was approve the author’s work; another easy task, since the author had the main textbook to follow on style purposes as well.

While PPS was busily seeing rounds of art, manuscript, and test banks, through scrutinizing editorial and accuracy checks, the client enjoyed weekly updates from its PPS project manager, who ensured timely deadlines. In the end, the client received instructor resource material, in this case more than 20 chapters worth of lecture material, instructor lessons, study guides, questions, practice quizzes, test banks, all complete with art straight from the main textbook. For little fuss, the client had a complete product in which its clients could customize their textbook experience for their own classrooms. PPS works on many instructor resource material projects for this client.

Here are a couple of quotes from our satisfied customers:
“I love working with them! . . . They were so detail-oriented that they found a couple of clinical errors [the author] had missed.”

“I [author] have several books on the market and have been through multiple editions, but I have never had such a thorough edit of an index, and I really appreciate it. I feel better about the book knowing that someone was so careful.”