New Sample by Jamie Pope, ‘Anatomy of An Author’s Email or Letter to Adopting Faculty or Committee’

TAA members can download this new sample from TAA’s Templates & Samples Resource Library, “Anatomy of An Author’s Email or Letter to Adopting Faculty or Committee,” developed by Jamie Pope, co-author of Nutrition for a Changing World. It walks authors through the essential elements of what to include in the letter to potential adopting faculty or a committee, with concrete examples based on what she does when she is reaching out to these groups for her own book.

Access to TAA’s Templates & Samples Resource Library is included with TAA membership. Not a member? Join TAA for only $30.

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A Short Conference Recap from a TAA Staff Member’s First-Time Perspective

By Sierra Pawlak

The 2024 TAA Conference in Nashville was my first conference as a new TAA staff member, and I was not alone. There were another 37 textbook and/or academic authors who attended for the first time.

The Thursday night TAA Council of Fellows networking reception felt so welcoming. You could walk up to any table, and you would be included into the conversation. I hope everyone else shared that experience. There was an overwhelming agreement that the food was delicious, and that the rooftop Pool Club Restaurant in which it was held was a beautiful space with expansive views of Nashville. I loved meeting everyone, and it made me excited to serve as a session moderator on Friday.

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Academese: Are You Narrowing Your Audience By Not Speaking Their Language?

By Sierra Pawlak

During TAA’s May 2024 Conversation Circle, several members shared their experiences with ‘academese’ and tips for how academic writers can avoid it in their writing. Academese is characterized by writing that is heavily filled with jargon, overcomplicated language, and/or convoluted sentence structure (Wikipedia).

“The biggest sin in academic writing is the passive voice,” said Barbara Nostrand, an Aquisitions Editor at Gakumon and Senior Fellow at the de Moivre Institute. “It makes it much more difficult for the reader to understand what’s been written, and it’s completely unnecessary.” She recommends using the active voice instead, for example, ‘I saw’, ‘I observed’: “A trick to doing that is to move the verb as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible.”

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Before You Start Writing: Identify the Journal You Want to Publish In

By Sierra Pawlak

Dave Harris, an editor and writing coach from Thought Clearing, says identifying the journal you want to publish in early helps you decide what goes into the paper you write.

“You want to identify what journal you’re writing to first, because every journal is different, and if you’re not doing a good job of targeting your article to a specific journal, you’re going to have a harder time getting accepted,” he said, during the April 2024 TAA Conversation Circle discussion on the topic of literature reviews. “At some point where you’ve got this research project that you’ve done and you’re trying to write it up, that’s when you say, ‘here’s the journal I want to go to,’ and you start there, thinking about how to frame your material to suit the journal.”

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Why You Shouldn’t Publish a Custom Textbook (And Why You Should)

By Sierra Pawlak

In her 2023 TAA webinar, “Is Custom Textbook Publishing Right for You?” Rebecca Paynter describes the journey of creating a custom textbook. Paynter is the associate director of the editorial team at the University of Arizona Global Campus, or UAGC. UAGC hosts online courses that are five weeks long, “which is not a lot of time for students to read a traditional textbook in full,” says Paynter. Because of this, her department creates custom textbooks for many of these courses, with the help of “faculty and other subject matter experts to better meet student needs… and potentially [create] books that can meet unmet needs out in the broader market,” she says.

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Launching a Consulting Business Part 2: Promoting Yourself

By Sierra Pawlak

In his 2023 TAA webinar,  “How to Leverage a Textbook or Academic Book to Launch a Consulting Career,” Bill Curry, a public procurement consultant and textbook author, details important steps you can take to promote yourself and your work, including creating your website, expanding your presence on LinkedIn, and writing your author page on Amazon and your publisher’s website. For resources on starting a new consulting business, read part one of this series here.

“I recommend that you not rely solely on your publisher’s marketing and sales efforts,” says Curry. “You will likely need to market your books and your consulting services yourself.”

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