By John Bond
Video: Watch it. Love it. Ignore it. Hate it. Dread it. Sick of it. Fear it. Resent it. You have your choice.
I have been speaking and advocating for video content for over ten years. For this blog and at annual conference I have advocated for video, so if you have heard this tune before, please give me a moment. So much is happening, I need space to update you on several topics.
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 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.”
TAA was featured in an episode of The A&P Professor podcast on April 12, “Pulse of Progress, Looking Back, Moving Forward,” with host Kevin Patton, an award-winning anatomy and physiology textbook author. Kevin’s comments about the benefits of TAA membership and invitation to attend TAA’s 2024 Conference on Textbook & Academic Authoring come in at 50:22.
In the episode, Kevin says: “With a strongly supportive network of colleagues, TAA provides many resources and active, engaging opportunities for growth and network-forming. TAA meets the needs of those interested in creating textbooks, lab manuals, workbooks, and other learning resources, as well as those who focus on academic writing, such as journal articles, dissertations/theses, monographs, and scholarly or other nonfiction works.”
Long-time TAA Member Phil Wankat has dug back into his TAA print newsletter archive, this time into the black-and-white early issues published between 1994 and 2010, finding more gold to share with you along with his brief commentary of the value of each article.
We will be adding these articles to the web page, “Articles from TAA Report Archives (now The Academic Author) with Commentary,” along with the other articles he shared from the TAA Report, over the next few months. The articles are organized into 12 categories, including Authors Needed, Bios, Contracts and Legal Comments, Diversity, Managing and Planning, Money, Production, Publishing first book, Recognition and Rewards, Teaching, Textbook Scholarship and Textbooks in Promotion Cases, and Writing and Writer’s Block.
The first set of articles we are sharing, in the Authors Needed category, include:
“Co-authoring a book originally written by another,” by Frank Silverman. “Look for a book that has an author who is retired, or close to retirement or, well, deceased,” says Wankat.
“Authors uneasy over Pearson deal.” “Big mergers ‘reduce the opportunities for new authors and even close the door on experienced authors,'” says Wankat.
It finally happened! Your paper got accepted. Your hard work has paid off. You will need to review digital proofs and then a few weeks later your work will be available for the world to read. Congrats!
But do not pick up that novel yet. There are some other items that you should do. Here is a brief list:
