In a recent post to the TAA LinkedIn group, Dr. Anna Bucy, a humanities instructor with over 20 years of teaching experience asked the question, “How can I get started working on textbooks?” A simple question to which several group members shared their professional advice.
12 Ways to use creativity to separate your book project from the competition
You’ve determined to dive in and write that monograph or textbook. You know it will be countless hours of work, but it will be worth it. Right?
No one wants to spend time on a “me too” project; going over ground already covered in other books. By spending time up front using creative thinking, you can increase your project’s chance of success.
The most useful textbook & academic posts of the week: November 10, 2017
This week, November 6-11, 2017, was not only the first full week of Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) 2017, but it also marked the sixth annual #UPWeek event in celebration of University Press Week. Throughout the week, there were a lot of great resources being shared throughout the academic community, no doubt inspired by these events. Our collection this week has something for everyone beginning with some humor illustrating the life of a grad student and tips about academic writing; exploring the scholarly process involving university presses, scholars, and reviewers; taking new perspectives on the publishing process, idea development, and resulting impact; increasing accessibility of scholarly resources; and sharing ideas with a broader audience. As stated by Oliver Markus, “The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.” Now go, write, and share your big ideas!
4 Key requirements for building an author website
In part 2 of her webinar series, “Designing a Web Presence for Your Book (Beyond the Publisher Website)”, Dr. Katie Linder, creator of The Academic Book Promotion Toolkit shared detailed insight into technical requirements to consider when designing a web presence for your book. Among these requirements were domain names, hosting providers, content management systems, and themes, widgets & plug-ins.
In this article, we summarize key aspects of these four technical requirements as presented by Dr. Linder.
Tech Tip: Managing academic reference sources in Microsoft Word
Although a number of software tools are now available for managing citations and references for research papers and journal articles, I have found that using the tools built into the latest versions of Microsoft Word provide a single tool for document creation and reference source management. The reference features of Word support a variety of manuscript styles, allow for quick and accurate citations, automate the development of bibliography or works cited pages, and support the reuse of sources across multiple documents with ease.
In this article, I will discuss the basic steps for implementing the tools to manage your academic reference sources in Microsoft Word.
TweetChat Recap: #AcWriChat 11/3 – Get Organized
On November 3rd, TAA co-hosted its first TweetChat event with SAGE Methodspace as part of Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). The focus on this event was getting organized with your academic writing projects.
Six questions were presented during the hour-long event on type of project, inspiration, organization steps, audience influence, desired impact, and next steps. The full conversation is available in the Storify record below.
Mark your calendar and join the discussion this Friday, November 17th at 11am ET as we discuss writing productivity. Simply log in to your Twitter account and search for #AcWriChat. As questions are posted, tag your responses with the #AcWriChat hashtag. See you there!