TAA Members Weigh In On the Value of Association Benefits

To help guide planning for the association’s future, TAA recently surveyed members about their primary reasons for joining, what their most valuable member benefits are, and what benefits they think the association should begin offering. Of the 1,953 members surveyed (representing those who have agreed to receive emails), 77 responded.

Thirty-one percent of respondents said that their primary reason for joining TAA was to receive member benefits and services, and 30% said it was ”to network with other textbook and/or academic authors.” Seventeen percent of respondents said they joined for another reason.

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Jean Murphy Receives $1,000 TAA Publication Grant

TAA member Jean Murphy has been awarded a $1,000 Publication Grant from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association to cover manuscript editing costs for her academic book, A View From The Balcony: Opera Through Womanist Eyes Praxis for Developing a Balcony Hermeneutic of Restorative Resistance, which will be published by Cascade in early 2024.

“Being a member of TAA gave me access to resources and authors who gave pointers, encouragement, and the incentive to bring this book to completion,” said Murphy. “This grant validates all the time and effort spent to bring it to fruition and certainly assists with the cost of being an author. Please extend my thanks to the selection committee.”

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Textbook and Academic Authors Share How They Use Generative AI

In a recent survey of Textbook & Academic Authors Association members about their use of Generative AI, several shared specific ways they use AI in authoring and promoting their textbooks, academic articles, and books.

Textbook Author Stephanie Lenox has used ChatGPT to write a first draft and an outline, to make the writing process more efficient, to improve the quality of her writing, and to create marketing pieces to promote her work. She has also used it for brainstorming, generating titles, summarizing, refining conference proposals, and editing.

“AI helps me take the emotion out of my writing process in order to overcome anxiety and just get started,” she says. “AI helps me move faster on functional writing, such as emails, so that I can concentrate my creative energy on writing that matters. I use AI like I use Wikipedia to get a sense of what is already out there. I’ve used it to generate learning objectives based on a chapter summary or to come up with 10 possible titles for a textbook based on a description I provided. I’ve also used it to identify grammatical issues or logical fallacies in texts and explain what’s wrong and how to fix it. I rarely use it for purely generative reasons because AI tends to be overly enthusiastic in its responses.”

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More Archival Topics From TAA’s Print Newsletter with Commentary From Long-Time Member Phil Wankat

Long-time TAA Member Phil Wankat has dug back into his TAA print newsletter archive, this time into the black-and-white early issues published between 1994 and 2010, finding more gold to share with you along with his brief commentary of the value of each article.

We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” along with the other articles he shared from the TAA Report, over the next few months. The articles are organized into 12 categories, including Authors Needed, Bios, Contracts and Legal Comments, Diversity, Managing and Planning, Money, Production, Publishing first book, Recognition and Rewards, Teaching, Textbook Scholarship and Textbooks in Promotion Cases, and Writing and Writer’s Block.
The first set of articles we are sharing, in the Authors Needed category, include:

“Co-authoring a book originally written by another,” by Frank Silverman. “Look for a book that has an author who is retired, or close to retirement or, well, deceased,” says Wankat.

“Authors uneasy over Pearson deal.” “Big mergers ‘reduce the opportunities for new authors and even close the door on experienced authors,'” says Wankat.

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Majority of Members Surveyed Report Using Generative AI To Make Writing Process More Efficient

TAA surveyed 1,900 members between September 24 and October 8, 2023 to determine how they’re utilizing Generative AI in authoring and promoting their textbooks, academic articles, and books, and to share that information with other members who have yet to begin using it. Just over 54% of respondents reported being primarily academic authors and almost 46% reported being primarily textbook authors.

Of the 82 members that responded to the survey, 40 percent said they have used generative AI. Of that 40 percent, almost half said they’re using it to make their writing process more efficient, including helping them brainstorm, generate titles, summarize articles, generate discussion and reading questions for teaching, and altogether reduce time spent on early tasks in the writing process. Multiple respondents stated that AI helps them write emails, with one member saying, “it helps me move faster on functional writing… so I can concentrate my creative energy on writing that matters.”

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TAA Member Phil Wankat: Evergreen Advice on Textbook Contracts From the ‘TAA Report’

The third installment of TAA Member Phil Wankat’s curation and commentary of the archival issues of the TAA Report (now The Academic Author), Contracts, is now available.

Wankat selected articles that have information that is still valid today, and included commentary on each. We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” over the next few months. The articles are organized into 10 categories, including Authors Needed, Cartoons, Contracts, Ethics, Money, Production, Recognition and Rewards, Software, Textbooks as Scholarship, and Writer’s Block. 

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