In this follow-up to our previous installment, the 2026 Textbook Award winners share even more insights into what inspired them to become authors. Go here to read the previous article on this topic.

Why did you decide to write your textbook?

A: Valerie Manusov, co-author of Interpersonal Communication: The Within and The Between (1e), and winner of the Most Promising New Textbook Award (co-authored with Jody Koenig Kellas):

Both Jody and I were not satisfied with existing textbooks on interpersonal communication. They tend to be structured by topic (e.g., self-disclosure, nonverbal communication) and/or context (e.g., relationships, workplaces). We felt that kept interpersonal processes separated from one another, which is not what real interpersonal communicating is like. We had both started teaching courses without a textbook, using instead academic and popular articles and book chapters. Both of us were using a different structure — one that had each section of the course oriented to a “big picture” or “what is most important for you to know about IPC.” Jody started thinking more about both orienting a book around this orientation and also reached out to colleagues via Facebook for what they thought was most important for our students to takeaway from a class on IPC. That led her to contact a publisher friend of ours (Todd Armstrong from Cognella), someone who is very active in the discipline and gets to know many of us personally (a great way to convince us to work with him). He loved the idea for the book, and Jody then reached out to me to see if I’d like to join her on the project. We met up for a writing retreat and talked a lot online, clarifying our perspective and what big ideas (which we call “takeaways”) we wanted to include. The specific material that was included in separate chapters is now woven across the book as it fits within certain takeaways.

A: Kristen Carioti, author of Introduction to Personal Finance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Financial Freedom (1e), and winner of the Most Promising New Textbook Award:

When I started teaching personal finance, I couldn’t find a textbook that would work for my students. I wanted something inclusive, accessible, and modern, and that just didn’t exist in the market so I decided to write it myself. While a huge project to write my first textbook, it’s rewarding to know the book will have a positive impact on students’ financial lives. 

 

A: James Foulds, co-author of Data Mining (5e), and winner of the Textbook Excellence Award (co-authored with Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank, Mark A. Hall, and Christopher J. Pal):

I wrote the new edition of the textbook because the book has always been dear to me, and I was uniquely positioned to help. The book was written by my undergraduate and master’s mentors, Eibe Frank, Ian Witten, and colleagues, and I “grew up” with it, then went on to teach using it.

 

A: Tom Leslie, co-author of Design-Tech: Building Science for Architects (3e), and winner of the Textbook Excellence Award (co-authored with Rob Whitehead and Jason Alread):

My co-author, Jason Alread, and I were asked to re-imagine the architectural technology sequence in our graduate program when we were teaching at Iowa State. We developed coursework that relied more on hands-on learning and less on math, since architects work with engineers and need to understand concepts as much as details. As we were putting the class notes together, we realized that this approach could be useful for other programs, and so we consciously started writing those as “chapters.”  The first edition of Design-Tech really developed on its own as we wrote and refined the classes.

A: Samantha Strong, author of Introduction to Visual Optics: A Light Approach (1e), and winner of the Textbook Excellence Award:

When I first started teaching, I was keen to find resources that were accessible whilst also inspiring fun and interest in my students, but I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted so I illustrated a whole series of handouts myself. These handouts were then positively reviewed by students and colleagues who helped me see the potential value of my approach.

 

A: David Tong, author of Lectures on Theoretical Physics (volume 1: Classical Mechanics, volume 2: Electromagnetism, volume 3: Quantum Mechanics, volume 4: Fluid Mechanics) (1e), and winner of the Textbook Excellence Award:

I’ve been writing lecture notes for twenty years and making them freely available on my website. These notes now cover a large swathe of theoretical physics, from first year courses to advanced graduate level. I thought it was about time that they grew up and became proper books.

 

A: Jeffrey Brodd, co-author of Invitation to World Religions (5e), and winner of the Textbook Excellence Award (co-authored with Bradley Nystrom, Robert Platzner, Richard Shek, and Erin Stiles):

The members of our author team were not satisfied with textbook options to assign for their world religions classes. The mutually enhancing enterprises of teaching the subject matter in the classroom and writing about it in a textbook made for an ideal opportunity to produce our own. This allowed for us to invent our own organizational structure that seemed pedagogically optimal, and to provide appropriate content, for example, accessible explanations of difficult but fundamental issues, such as how Buddhist meditation alleviates suffering.

A: Robert Platzner, co-author of Invitation to World Religions (5e), and winner of the Textbook Excellence Award (co-authored with Jeffrey Brodd, Bradley Nystrom, Richard Shek, and Erin Stiles):

Like the rest of my colleagues I found many of the comparable textbooks in World Religions wanting in those areas that I chose to stress in my classes: the philosophical underpinnings of dogmatic systems of religious thought, and the historical development of confessional communities. I felt that what was needed was greater specificity in the description of thought patterns and historical movements that determine both the beliefs and practices of the world’s great religions, and I set out to supply that need. Oxford has a reputation for publishing textbooks of the highest quality and the greatest sophistication, and it was with that thought in mind that I began writing my chapters (on Judaism and New Religious Movements) in the hope that Oxford would agree to adopt our text.