Considering a journal’s publishing model for your manuscript

When you are deciding where to submit your next journal article manuscript, considering the journal’s publishing model is very important.

Disruption has been the norm in many areas of life. Scholarly publishing is no exception. In the 1980s, scholarly publishing seemed monolithic. Journals fell into two categories: first was traditional subscription publications. The accessibility of the content in these journals was limited to subscribers. Second, were journals published by learned societies or associations.

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Confronting the anxiety of academic writing: Tackling the intellectual and practical difficulties

The first article in this series, based on Rachael Cayley’s October 19, 2022 TAA webinar, “Confronting the Anxiety of Academic Writing”, covered the concerns of writing product and writing process and how they are so deeply rooted that they start to feel inevitable.

In this second article, we discuss some of the ways that Cayley suggests tackling the intellectual and practical difficulties associated with writing. To tackle the intellectual difficulties, she says, you need to reconceptualize writing: “Writing is not a simple matter of writing up something that has already been created. Prior to writing, for most of us, there’s not much there. And that creative process—the process of getting words out of our inchoate minds and on to the page—is an intensely difficult one. No matter how much underlying research, or note taking, or outlining, or thinking you may have done.”

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Check the Authors Coalition of America’s author list: You could be owed royalties

Authors Coalition of America, LLC, has identified a number of American authors who may be due royalty payments from non-U.S. sources. These royalties have been received to compensate authors for the foreign reprographic use of U.S. copyrighted materials.

While the majority of reprographic royalties distributed to ACA are the result of surveys and samplings in foreign countries done on a non-title specific basis, and therefore are remitted to organizations representing the categories of authors for whom the funds were collected (like TAA), ACA also receives royalties due individual authors from select countries that collect by title-specific methods.

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Why start a writing journal?

If you’re having trouble getting serious about writing in the new year after all the holiday time away, consider a writing journal. It’s an almost painless way to sneak back into writing and a longstanding writer’s tool to record and develop ideas, work out projects and plots, and save meaningful aphorisms and perfect overheard phrases. Whether you’ve kept a journal for decades, or have never started one, a journal not only can help you write more but also make your writing more effective.

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Getting unstuck when your writing stalls out

Let’s acknowledge immediately that there are innumerable reasons why a writing project can get stalled: Maybe you took a break and lost momentum? Got irrevocably bored with the topic? Received critical feedback that you can’t get out of your mind? Therefore, we aren’t going to focus on the “why” part. Instead, regardless of why a project got cold, there are some common steps that help us get any project moving again. Today we will focus on steps addressing the underlying emotional and motivational issues. If we can clear those up, the rest will likely go smoothly.

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How to write a confident-sounding CV

It’s important to present your academic self to the world with a confident-sounding CV, but CVs often don’t show all the effort and work that went into those achievements, just the end result, says Mary Beth Averill, academic writing coach, editor, and co-author of The Confident Academic: Overcoming the small fish, big pond experience… and other difficult matters.

“When you look at one person’s CV compared to another person’s CV, you really have no idea what those CVs are resting on,” she says. “What they’re resting on is probably a lot of tries, even a lot of failure.”

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