Are you curious what royalty rates other textbook authors are receiving for print and digital books? What about what they’ve…
eBook Download – Can My Textbook Publisher Really Do That?
First-time and novice textbook authors may ask themselves throughout the publishing process – “can my publisher really do that?” And the answer is “yes”. And “no”. And “it depends”. Your answer will be determined by the initial negotiation of contract terms and your willingness to invest time in marketing the work after it’s published. TAA’s newest e-book is full of advice on both.
2020 Call for nominations to the TAA Council
As a member-driven organization, TAA relies on members’ willingness to get involved in governance and other activities of the association. The TAA Governance Committee announces a call for nominations for two open Council positions. Any member of TAA is eligible to serve on the Council. Nominations can be submitted online and must be received by March 1.
TAA Council Awards Restructured for 2020
Council Awards are established by TAA’s governing body and administered by the Council of Fellows and Awards Committee (referred to as the ‘Awards Committee’ for short). Beginning in 2019, the Awards Committee undertook an effort to rethink most of the awards, to develop clearer distinctions among them, and to rewrite the criteria used for determining winners. Council Awards are intended to recognize individual achievements in writing or in service to TAA or fellow authors. Unlike the Textbook Award program, they do not aim to judge the quality of a single work, but rather to recognize the accomplishments of authors and industry professionals, in different stages and aspects of their careers.
Distinguishing features of academic writing #2: Complexity
Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” If this is true, why does it seem that academic writing is distinguished by complexity?
In this second discussion on the distinguishing features of academic writing, we aimed to understand why complexity is not only present, but acceptable in academic writing, and the challenges and benefits of reducing complexity while maintaining academic rigor.
Distinguishing features of academic writing #1: Precision
During the course of Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) in November 2019, we explored five distinguishing features of academic writing – the first of which being precision.
What does it mean to write with academic precision? In this article, we recap the event where we sought the answer to this question. During the discussion, we also explored the importance of academic precision and the effects of word choice, active voice, redundancy, and organization on the goal of precision in our manuscripts.