TAA’s virtual conference kicks off tomorrow!

Are you excited to be part of TAA’s Virtual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference this year? The conference will kick off with a half day of programming on June 18, and presentations continuing June 21-24 and will feature a variety of session formats as well as networking opportunities.

All presentations will be hosted on Zoom, with 30- and 50-minute session formats welcome. Our Zoom formatting will allow for audience voice and video participation, chat features, break out rooms, question and answer formats, panel presentations, and more.

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Goal setting vs. plan making – what matters more?

Let me ask you a question – do you have publishing goals or do you have a plan for writing? Perhaps a trick question, as you may very well think to yourself, don’t I need both?!? However, what I want to clarify in this post is that goals are different than plans and one should hold greater weight than the other in your daily writing efforts.

So let’s start with identifying the difference between goal setting and plan making.

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Taxes and authors: What you should know in 2021

In his TAA webinar presentation, “Taxes & Authors: What You Should Know in 2021“, Robert Pesce, a partner with Marcum LLP, provided guidance on when it is beneficial for authors to form a business entity, strategies for managing business income and expenses, and how the qualified business income deduction (QBI) applies to authors.

As soon as your authoring efforts produce income in excess of $400, you are officially running a business – whether you define a business entity or not. According to Pesce, any income in excess of $400 must be reported on a Schedule C filed with your tax return and is subject to self-employment tax.

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Ask the Expert: What to look for in publisher-driven ‘new’ textbook contracts

Q: I’m a published author. I signed a textbook contract with a publisher 32 years ago and the first edition of my text was published 30 years ago. It’s since been revised 9 times, all under the original contract, and is due to be revised again soon. Recently, my publisher wrote and said they wanted to sign a new contract for the new edition because the industry had changed, their business model had changed, and the old contract was no longer in step with their current practices. Should I go along with this and sign the new contract?

A: Maybe. . . but not without doing a little homework first. Your original contract almost certainly contemplated that your text, if successful, would need periodically to be revised. What it probably said about this was that “if and when” the publisher thought a revision was warranted, the publisher would call upon you to prepare it. And if you were willing and able to do that, the revision would be prepared and published under the terms of your then existing agreement as if it were the work being published for the first time.

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