TAA offers two forms of grants – publication grants and contract review grants – to assist members and non-members with some of the expenses related to publishing their academic works and textbooks.
As the April 30th grant application deadline approaches, we asked several 2017 publication grant recipients for feedback on how a TAA grant has helped them.
Cengage’s royalty calculation model for its new subscription service Cengage Unlimited has raised a few questions that remain unanswered, primarily, will their model account for the range of existing publishing agreements—which have a variety of different provisions for accounting for royalties?
“Here’s the key problem,” said Stephen E. Gillen, a partner with Wood, Herron & Evans. “Cengage has a wide variety of different contracts that were entered over time. Some of their longer lasting titles, those in their 10th edition and up, are the subjects of original contracts still in place that were entered 40 or more years ago. Many of their contracts were not done on Cengage forms but were acquired from other publishers, all of which have different provisions for accounting for royalties. Some of them were done before the days of bundling, custom publishing, digital publishing, and publishing through interactive/adaptive learning platforms and so do not provide expressly for those then unanticipated media or channels of distribution. But Cengage has thousands of authors and almost certainly a greater number of contracts (no author will have less than one contract, and many will have multiple contracts). It’s hard for me to imagine that they are going to have lawyers go back over every single contract to determine if and how it should be treated in the current scheme.”
Gerald Olson once said, “Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing…
TAA member John Bond is a Publishing Consultant with Riverwinds Consulting and an author in the communication writing discipline.
His most recent publication is Scholarly Publishing: A Primer – his fourth book. See www.booksbyjohnbond.com for more information about the books.
TAA member Michael Greer is a Lecturer at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Editor for Research in Online Literacy Education, and both a textbook and academic author in the English writing discipline.
His most recent publications include The Little, Brown Handbook, 14th ed. and The Little, Brown Compact Handbook, 10th ed. Michael has published four other books on literacy, technology, and digital publishing.
May I suggest using spiritual principles or practices in your important academic project? “What!” you cry, “Academics and religion/spirituality don’t mix, like ice cream and boiled kidney!”
But . . . as you wrestle with your Major Work, do you crave less anxiety, more confidence, better work flow, even real answers to all those knotty quandaries?
