2019 Textbook award-winning insight (Part 1): Deciding to write and getting the interest of a publisher

We recently reached out to winners of the 2019 TAA Textbook Awards and asked them to answer some questions about how they made the decision to write their textbook, how they interested a publisher, what they do to boost their writing confidence, how they fit writing time into their schedule, and more. We will be sharing their answers in a series of posts over the next few weeks.

This first installment of the five-part series focuses on why they decided to write their textbook, and how they got the interest of a publisher.

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My writing is an open book

The first time I thought about potentially authoring a textbook was in 2005.  I was teaching as an adjunct at four different colleges and was using a different textbook for each.  Each time I brought the correlating textbook for the correlating College Success class with the correlating handouts, assignments, quizzes, and other materials, it felt like a small victory.  As I started to create my own content, I decided that if I ever was hired full time, I would write my own text.  A few years later, I accepted a full-time tenure track faculty position at Grossmont College in San Diego and two years after that I began writing my first textbook.

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Podcasting for academic authors: A ‘brand’ new experience

Academic authors do what we can to take charge of defining the perception of ourselves and our own work among our professional circle and potential future associates. We know that just leaving it to others to define us may send the wrong message—or worse, it may go nowhere at all. This process of professional branding can involve a lot of different strategies, but the one I’ll focus on now is podcasting.

Podcasting is simply distributing digital audio files widely over the internet. It’s been around for decades, but only recently has caught a wind and is steadily becoming a mainstream source of news and entertainment. Podcasts are most often consumed on mobile devices, which allow listeners to enjoy their favorite episodes while they commute, walk the dog, or mow the lawn.

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To keep writing, use a time log

“What did I do today!” you wail. For the life of you, wiped out at the end of the day and ready for binge TV, you can’t remember anything you did except overeat for lunch. Maybe you recall writing for eight minutes midmorning and half-heartedly pecking at your journal article in progress, but otherwise the day’s a blank. And paradoxically, you feel you’re always so busy, dashing from one thing to the next and never getting it all done.

Sound familiar? Where does the time go? Especially for academic writers, with the responsibilities of teaching, mandatory committee meetings, office hours, reading endless memos, emailing responses, and comforting a colleague who just got her article rejected—again—it’s an ongoing challenge to take hold and wrestle our writing time to the ground, or desk.

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Online marketplace Bonanza.com takes key steps to prevent the sale of pirated e-textbooks on its platform

Several leading higher education publishers announced that online marketplace Bonanza.com will join them in efforts to stop the sale of pirated e-textbooks by implementing a series of steps designed to prevent their sale on its platform. These steps will help disrupt digital piracy while not impeding innovation and the lawful growth of marketplaces. The educational publishers, Cengage, Elsevier, Macmillan Learning, McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson, have worked hard in recent years in partnership with distributors and sellers to combat the sale of pirated ebooks and counterfeit textbooks, which hurts authors and readers and stifles innovation and the creation of the rich content that consumers want.

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