By John Bond
If you’re an academic venturing into the world of publishing, your author bio is a small but important tool. It travels with your work, shapes how readers see you, and often determines whether media, conference organizers, or potential collaborators take a second look. But too many scholars undersell themselves here. Let me be blunt: humility has no place in your author bio. This is not your departmental webpage. It’s your moment to shine.
By John Bond
If you’ve ever stared at a blank screen and wondered how wide or narrow you should write, you’re in good company. The tension between writing narrow versus broad lives at the heart of scholarly publishing. It’s a classic dilemma: go deep and speak to a specialized very knowledgeable audience that truly gets it or go broad and frame your knowledge for readers across multiple disciplines. Let’s look at both approaches, because each has its own virtues, risks, and rewards.
By John Bond
To many people, the blank screen or page is daunting. It blinks at you. Or calls to you. Or it might even laugh at you, daring you to commit to a thought or an idea. It may seem as if you are etching something in stone that can’t be sandblasted out. Not true. Typing or writing that first line can be a challenge, though it need not be.
I’m not a big believer in “Writer’s Block.” It is not to say I don’t have real empathy for people that feel that they’re at a creative impasse or are paralyzed by the process or where their work is going. But I do think that the most common way to address this condition is tried and true. It all just comes down to writing something. Anything.
By John Bond
Integrity underlies so many aspects of academia, but it is rarely front and center in discussion. Perhaps it is a given and therefore need not be brought to center stage. But with the changes to the world in the past year, five years, or twenty years, a closer look might be worthwhile.
Integrity is the very foundation of academia. The word itself can be quixotic. In my mind it means, acting honestly and ethically in all aspects of academic endeavors and, more specifically, in scholarly work. This includes everything from conducting research and presenting results to collaborating with others and critiquing their ideas. The fundamentals of academic integrity are honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility.
By John Bond
Early in one’s career, academics and researchers focus on individual wins (read: getting published). Long term, however, they are better served by developing a personalized Publishing Strategy. This may sound highfalutin, but it is simpler than it sounds and easier to develop and curate over time than most people think.
First, what is a Publishing Strategy? A Publishing Strategy is a long-term, intentional plan for when, where, and how you publish your research, aligned with your academic goals, research agenda, and career stage. Most people only start to think about this after achieving their first position in academia. They’re anxious to get their first publication under their belt. It is gratifying, invalidating. This first publication might enable them to fulfill a requirement for employment or for a research grant. These first few wins are important, but I suggest you quickly move past them to develop a wider plan.
By John Bond
Self-publishing has been through quite an evolution in my lifetime. From decades being thought of as “vanity publishing,” to an emerging option for both print and then digital in the Nineties, to complete acceptance and preference in many genres of fiction, self-publishing has transformed how authors think about getting their ideas and thoughts out to the world.
