Tips & tricks for negotiating your first textbook contract

The most important things to negotiate in a first contract are the amount of the advance, the royalty rate and who will control which rights, said Jeff Herman, owner of the Herman Literary Agency in New York.

Keep in mind when negotiating the advance how the publisher calculates it, Herman said: “It will tell you how far they’re willing to go.” To calculate how much of an advance it will offer, the publisher looks at the number of books it will sell during the first year and the dollar amount the author will receive per copy. For example, if the author will receive $2 per copy, and the publisher will sell 10,000 copies the first year, the author will earn $20,000 in royalties. That $20,000, he said, is the highest the publisher will be willing to go in negotiating the advance.

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Treat textbook authoring like a business: Create a home office just for authoring

Treating your authoring like a business means creating a home office just for authoring, said Robert Christopherson, author of the best-selling U.S. and Canadian geography textbook, Geosystems.

“Prepare your home office and writing studio as if it were a formal business,” he said.

Christopherson had a cabinet maker build a full desk, elevated bookcases, and lateral filing cabinets for storing his preparation files, into his home office. The desk takes up three walls, and in the corner — so no space is lost — there’s a 36-inch lazy susan for storing supplies. The bookcases are elevated to allow room for a 14-foot long cork board for tagging items on. “Around the computer, the cabinet maker built a large theater-organ like console so that the computer screen is surrounded by a workspace where things can be posted and set,” he said. “I work on big broadsheets a lot of

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Manage your writing goals with ‘Pyramid of Power’

To help her clients focus on important tasks instead of wandering from task to task, Susan Robison, a psychologist and faculty development consultant with Professor DeStressor, created the “Pyramid of Power” — a pyramid-shaped goal-setting model.

“I chose the pyramid for the design of my model because that is the most stable structure you can construct,” she said. “It has a wide base and a narrow top, with your goals at the top. The model can work top down and bottom up.”

Many people operate with their goals as a huge top, with a very narrow bottom or no bottom at all, says Robison. “The goals are floating around up in the air and they aren’t anchored to anything,” she said. “The Pyramid of Power reverses that, anchoring your goals.”

The Pyramid of Power has four elements. They are, from the bottom up, said Robison:

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Don’t manage time, manage goals

While you can’t actually manage time – because it operates independently of you — you can manage your goals, said Susan Robison, a psychologist and faculty development consultant with Professor DeStressor, during her 2009 TAA Conference session, “Time Management: Why You Don’t Need It, Can’t Do It Anyway – And What To Do Instead.”

“One of the things that the research on time management workshops show, is that they don’t work,” she said. “What happens to people emotionally is they come out of the workshops feeling absolutely overwhelmed by a thousand techniques they’re not going to do, and so they’re not going to manage their time any better.”

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How to maintain a good relationship with your editor

If you develop a good business and personal relationship with your editor, you can get a better feel for how they can provide you with support, said Marilyn “Winkie” Fordney, the author of insurance billing and medical assisting books.

“Find out where the person came from and whether they have been in business for a long time,” she said. “Find out about their personal life. Do they have children? If they do, you’ll know that if sometimes they are unavailable, it might be because their children are sick. When you visit with them, bring toys for their kids. This shows that you remembered about their children.”

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Marketing strategies: Reinforce textbook adoptions with promotional calendar

Physical geography author Robert Christopherson recently published a calendar to promote the seventh edition of his award-winning textbook, Geosystems.

The calendar’s two opening pages describe the strengths and new features of the new edition, and list the accompanying student and instructor supplements. The calendar itself features factoids that match physical geography and Earth systems science events, as well as photos for each month depicting physical geography subjects, such as the rapeseed crop in full bloom in northern Scottland; frost-shattered rock in Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean; and a birch forest in south-central Norway.

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