TAA member Jamie Pope is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University and is a textbook author in the nutrition writing discipline.
Her most recent publication is the second edition of Nutrition for a Changing World (Scientific American and Macmillan Learning) published January 2019. Earlier in her career, she was author or co-author of several popular press books in the weight management arena.Â
With membership in TAA, you are not alone. You become part of a diverse community of textbook and academic authors with similar interests and goals. We are pleased to announce the addition of 57 new TAA members who joined us in December 2019.Â
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.Â
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 wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the things that made 2019 great at TAA.
Recently, we’ve seen shifts from print to digital, the rise of open educational resources and open-access journals, the consolidation of large publishers into mega-publishers, fundamental changes in how authors are compensated, and other significant changes to the nature of authoring. As we wait to see which of the ripples coming over the horizon dissipate and which become large—perhaps overwhelming—waves, what can we authors do to remain afloat?
Three main strategies can help academic and textbook authors continue to succeed as changes in textbooks, journals, or scholarly publications come along: vigilance, honing core skills, and agility.
TAA member Joseph M. Godlewski is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University and is both a textbook and academic author in the architecture writing discipline.
His most recent publication is Introduction to Architecture: Global Disciplinary Knowledge, published by Cognella in 2019.
TAA member Braja Das is the Dean Emeritus, College of Engineering & Computer Science, CSU, Sacramento and is both a textbook and academic author in the engineering writing discipline.
He has authored/co-authored 16 text and academic reference books in the area of geotechnical (civil) engineering. His most recent publication is Principles of Foundation Engineering, 9th edition (Cengage), which was released in October 2017 with a 2019 copyright. For the first through eighth editions, he was the only author. The ninth edition has a co-author (N. Sivakugan, James Cook University, Australia).
