Before we set down our pens on the year that has past and turn the page in our journals to the new one ahead, we offer a final post for 2019. 

It’s been a busy year for us here at the Textbook & Academic Authors Association. Nearly 600 new textbook and academic authors have joined us, 11 webinars were hosted, 31 textbook awards were given, about 150 members convened in Philadelphia for our annual conference, 29 TweetChat events were held, and more than 200 new articles were published on the blog.

As we look forward to the exciting things on the horizon for 2020 and beyond, we want to take a moment to reflect on some of the things that made 2019 great at TAA.

2019 Webinar Series  

This year TAA hosted eleven original webinar presentations on topics of interest to textbook and academic authors, including: royalties, time management, visualization, project management, collaboration, marketing, rights reversion, writing your first book, and responding to reviewer comments. All of these session recordings can be found in the TAA Presentations on Demand library.

Looking ahead to 2020, five new topics are already scheduled:

• February 6 – Clear Academic Writing Across the Disciplines
• February 20 – An Editor’s View From Journal Article Submission to Publication
• March 5 – Drafting Scholarly Manuscripts—Quickly and Well
• March 12 – Revising Scholarly Manuscripts—Quickly and Well
• April 6 – A Crash Course in Creative Commons Licensing

Registration is now open for all spring webinars. We hope to see you there!

2019 Textbook Award Winners  

Thirty-one textbooks were awarded 2019 Textbook Awards by TAA. Four textbooks received William Holmes McGuffey Longevity Awards, 17 textbooks received Textbook Excellence Awards, and ten textbooks received Most Promising New Textbook Awards.
Award winners shared their insight on what makes a textbook successful in the following series of articles:

• 2019 Textbook award-winning insight (Part 1): Deciding to write and getting the interest of a publisher
• 2019 Textbook award-winning insight (Part 2): Boosting writing confidence, scheduling writing time, software
• 2019 Textbook award-winning insight (Part 3): Pedagogy and marketing involvement
• 2019 Textbook award-winning insight (Part 4): What they wish they had known before they started, writing advice
• 2019 Textbook award-winning insight (Part 5): Key to textbook longevity, preparing for the next edition

We look forward to announcing the 2020 Textbook Award winners in late February.

Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference  

The 2019 conference held in June at the Wyndham Philadelphia Historic District Hotel included more than 30 presentation and roundtable topics on industry trends, writing practices, and other topics of interest to textbook and academic authors. As always, the conference was a treasured opportunity to network with other authors from a variety of disciplines, to learn ways to improve our writing practice, and to celebrate with the 2019 award winners in the “City of Firsts”.

Early bird registration is open now for the 33rd Annual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference to be held June 12-13, 2020 in San Diego, CA. 

AcWriChat Events

Throughout 2019, we continued our bi-weekly schedule of #AcWriChat TweetChat events on Twitter, hosting a total of 29 hour-long chats on topics of interest to academic authors including:

• a special session for Academic-Led Publishing Day in February,
• a four-part series on academic writing styles (descriptive, analytical, persuasive, and critical),
• a Peer Review Week session on quality in peer review,
• an Open Access Week session on equity in open knowledge, and
• weekly sessions during Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) in November on five distinguishing features of academic writing.

Our next event is scheduled for 11am ET on Friday, January 10th. Join us on Twitter at that time to participate.

TAA’s blog, Abstract

Finally, for the second straight year, the TAA blog, Abstract, closes 2019 as the #1 ranked Academic Blog on Feedspot’s Top 10 Academic Blogs list. We are extremely thankful to all of our members who contribute to the knowledge shared within these pages that has earned us this recognition.

In particular, however, we’d like to thank our 2019 guest bloggers: John Bond, Dave Dillon, Caroline Eisner, Dave Harris, Kathleen King and Lauren Remenick, Meggin McIntosh, Lorraine Papazian-Boyce, and Noelle Sterne. Their insight and contributions have added true value to what we are able to offer to our readers throughout the year.

As we prepare to enter a new decade, we look forward to continuing our growth with you and fulfilling our mission of helping you navigate your path to writing success. Happy New Year!

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Eric Schmieder is the Membership Marketing Manager for TAA. He has taught computer technology concepts to curriculum, continuing education, and corporate training students since 2001. A lifelong learner, teacher, and textbook author, Eric seeks to use technology in ways that improve results in his daily processes and in the lives of those he serves. His latest textbook, Web, Database, and Programming: A foundational approach to data-driven application development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, and PHP, First Edition, is available now through Sentia Publishing.