In 2007, Erica Meltzer was one of hundreds of recent college graduates in New York City eking out a living from short-term tutoring gigs. Just over a decade later, she’s the author of the most popular SAT Reading and Writing book on Amazon.
For decades, the test-prep market was dominated by a handful of big-name companies. Now, tutors-turned-writers like Meltzer are publicizing the kinds of specialized, in-depth materials that were once only available to students whose families could afford high-priced private tutoring. With sales of more than 150,000 copies, her books now outsell guides by established big-name companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review.
Meltzer sees her role as making the SAT test as painless as possible, and reflects on her teenage years: “There wasn’t the level of stress surrounding the exam that you see today,” she says. “You bought a prep book and maybe took a class for some strategies, but no one hired a private tutor or set aside four hours on Saturday mornings to take proctored practice exams. That was unheard of.” Meltzer admits that she did take a Kaplan class, though, primarily for the Math section, “I was the epitome of a lopsided test-taker: my Math score was 200 points lower than my Verbal, but I was an absolute know-it-all about the Verbal,” she recounts.
“I remember lecturing my instructor about the definition of ‘magnanimous’. I think he sincerely had no idea what to make of me.”
Managing to earn a perfect 800 Verbal, Meltzer promptly put the exam out of her mind—for the next eight years, at least, during which she earned a degree in French and began tutoring both French to English-speakers as well as English to ESL students. It was only after she answered a Craigslist ad for a gig writing practice questions for a test-prep company that she looked at the SAT again. A few additional years passed before she took a trip to the bookstore to look for extra practice material for a student and was, she says, appalled “at the inaccuracies in the existing books”.
Meltzer started writing her own questions and, eventually, explanations to accompany them. “I was doing a lot of tutoring,” she explains, “and with each new student, I’d have to write out the same lessons. It got old pretty quickly—not to mention the fact that my hand was starting to hurt!—and so I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could just type up a packet and hand it to the kids?’” After a while, it occurred to her that she could put everything together and publish it as a book.
The timing was right. Although she enjoyed teaching, she was beginning to grow concerned about the socioeconomic implications of her work. Most of her students came from well-off families and attended private schools and Manhattan, but she was acutely aware that the vast majority of high schoolers preparing for the SAT did not share their privileges, and the prospect of giving an additional leg up to students who already had so many advantages made her increasingly uncomfortable. So, she turned to the logical twenty-first-century solution and started a blog. She decided that she would post every tip, strategy, piece of information publicly online. Soon, her blog was getting upwards of 15,000 views a month. And although she didn’t originally conceive of it as a marketing tool, that’s exactly what it became. Her blog readers became the first people to buy The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar, which she published in 2011.
Detail vs. the “tips and tricks” approach
Initially, she considered shopping the manuscript around to traditional publishers. However, she was concerned about the amount of time it would take to bring the book to market and the prospect of losing editorial control. Having witnessed the effectiveness of the exercises for her own students, Meltzer did not want to risk having them altered. The initial results confirmed that she had made the right decision: one student saw his score rise by 100 points in only a month and was so elated that he wrote a long, enthusiastic review that he posted on both Amazon and a popular test-prep forum. She attributes the book’s effectiveness to her rejection of the standard “tips and tricks” approach. Instead, Meltzer’s approach is much more detailed and systematic.
The test-prep industry has been very effective at advancing the narrative that doing well on the SAT or ACT is just a matter of learning the right “tricks,” Meltzer explains. “And while it’s certainly true that certain strategies can help students leverage their skills very effectively, that perspective also takes for granted that students already possess a lot of skills that they may not have truly mastered.” As a tutor, she had observed that many of her students—including ones who attended highly ranked schools—had surprisingly little exposure to basic grammatical principles. Therefore, in her books, she drew on her experience teaching foreign languages to explain challenging principles in simple, easy-to-apply ways.
The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar performed so well that Meltzer soon followed it up with an SAT reading guide; today, she is the author of verbal guides for the ACT, the GRE, the GMAT, and the English Language AP exam. Although she has experienced an uncommon degree of success for a first-time self-published author, Meltzer cautions that there was a real learning curve. Self-publishing a book isn’t just about being an author, she stresses. It’s a business, and you have to treat it like one. The cover of her first guide was “striking but not terribly professional”. When she received feedback suggesting that it might dissuade prospective buyers, she got serious and hired a cover designer. She also does extensive market research in order to ensure that her books are meeting a genuine need.
Where to from here?
With college admissions so competitive, Meltzer needs to stay on top of her game. Her readers are under intense pressure. Plus, many of them aren’t even native English speakers—even a misplaced comma can cause inordinate amounts of confusion. Nevertheless, she enjoys the challenge. “There’s always something new to learn,” she says. “And some of the questions readers ask—they make me look at things from fresh perspectives.”
Bio:
A native of Brookline, Massachusetts, Erica Meltzer graduated from Brookline High School and earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from Wellesley College. Before becoming involved in test prep, she worked in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, where she helped coordinate graduate admissions. From 2006 until 2015, she tutored privately in Manhattan as well as online, helping students around the world achieve their SAT/ACT goals and gain admission to a number of top colleges, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and Duke. With over 100,000 copies sold, Meltzer’s SAT and ACT Reading and Writing guides consistently rank at the top of their respective categories on Amazon, outperforming comparable guides produced by Kaplan, Princeton Review, and Barron’s. She has been featured in Teen Vogue, The College Solution, and CBS Moneywatch, and her books are currently used by students and tutors worldwide.
