2009 TAA Conference to be held in San Antonio
The 2009 TAA Conference will be held at the El Tropicano Riverwalk Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, June 25-27.
Conference room rates are $114 per night. The El Tropicano Riverwalk Hotel is located on the banks of the San Antonio River and offers a state of the art fitness facility, pool, sundeck, and a lounge that overlooks the River.
The Hotel is six blocks from the Alamo, and nine blocks from Hemisfair Plaza and the Rivercenter Mall. It is 30 minutes away from Sea World, Six Flags Fiesta Texas, and Schlitterbahn Waterpark.
Trolleys to downtown attractions leave approximately every 10 minutes outside the hotel. River taxis leave from the Hotel every 40 minutes.
Visit the El Tropicano Riverwalk Hotel website
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View video testimonials from 2008 TAA Conference
2008 TAA Conference attendees tell what they gained from the conference and encourage others to attend.
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View video of 2008 TAA Conference
New video of 2008 TAA Conference shows conference highlights, encourages authors to attend 2009 TAA Conference in San Antonio June 25-27.
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2008 TAA Conference
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TAA thanks Sustaining Members Jane E. Aaron and Tara Gray.
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Please take a minute to fill out the 2008 TAA Member Survey
Your answers will help us shape future member benefits!
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Greetings!
TAA's Textbook Authoring Listserv and Academic Authoring Listserv discussions are now being archived. All discussions that have taken place since the launch of the new Listservs can now be accessed through the TAA Listservs page on the TAA website.
If you haven't already subscribed to one or both Listservs, the instructions for doing so can be found in this News Alert as well as on the TAA Listservs page.
I encourage you to use the Textbook Authoring Listserv or Academic Authoring Listserv to ask authoring and publishing related questions and network with your fellow authors.
Sincerely,
Kim Pawlak
Associate Executive Director
Text and Academic Authors Association
Send me an email
(608) 687-3106
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Featured Member Mike Arnzen:
Horror writer does his best work 'having fun'
By Kim Seidel
Horror writer Mike Arnzen credits "an enormous amount of luck" for the success that has earned him three Bram Stoker Awards and other accolades. Yet he has had to have an incredible amount of talent and courage, mixed in with a lot of humor, to succeed in this challenging genre of horror writing.
Arnzen started writing little horror tales by hand when he was in the Army in the mid-1980s. "I used to pass them around to my buddies for a lark when we were all camping out in the field for exercises without much entertainment," he said.
While attending Colorado State University-Pueblo in 1989, he seriously started to wonder how writers got published. The English literature classes he was taking weren't addressing those practical matters, he said. He would later "remedy" this problem for others in the same shoes by one day teaching in Seton Hill University's Writing Popular Fiction program.
During college, he had sold a few short stories to a magazine, when he found an idea that he believed would sustain a novel - Grave Markings. "I wrote in a blur, and then didn't have a clue what to do next," he said. "I decided to try the horror novel publisher -Dell Books - who I thought had the neatest covers. I just put it in a box with a cover letter."
To his surprise, he received a call from the publisher two months later when he was still a junior at CSU. "I feel like it was pure luck," he said. "But maybe instinctively I knew that the publisher was the right one for me, because I already was a fan of their line."
He learned a lot about writing and publishing from that experience. Although it took him about three weeks to draft his first novel, he spent two more years revising it with the help from an editor. "And then luck struck again: I won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel from the Horror Writers Association in 1994", he said.
From there, Arnzen's career took off. The award helped him get into good graduate schools. He wrote another horror novel, Play Dead, at the University of Idaho, where he earned his master's degree in 1994. Next, he studied the uncanny in literature and film for his doctorate degree, which he earned from the University of Oregon in 1999. During this time, he was dedicated to consistently producing and publishing his work.
Read the entire profile
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Evaluating college textbooks for course adoption requires careful thought
Former college instructor turned textbook publisher shares her insight on selecting a college textbook
By Mary Ellen Lepionka
As you know, choosing the right texts for your courses is often not as clear and straightforward as you hoped or assumed. Depending on your or your students' degree of reliance on the textbook to acquire course content, the wrong one can confound learning, eat away class time, skew information, pauperize students (or provide inadequate return on investment), and even sabotage your instructional goals. What to do, then?
Perennial discontent with commercial textbooks has led some instructors to favor primary source material instead, or customized compilations, or interactive text-web delivery of course content. The future is here in the form of modularized digitized text, learning objects, and images, delivered online. Distance learning without necessarily the distance. In some colleges across the country, institutions license textbooks that students access chapter by chapter via the intranet. It's easy to go wrong with electronically delivered content too, but for now I will talk about print textbooks, which remain the norm.
In retrospect, as a college instructor in anthropology, sociology, and world history, I often chose the wrong textbooks. For a time the introductory cultural anthropology students were forced to construct an understanding of that field entirely through ethnographies alone. The physical anthropology students had to buy a lab manual in lieu of labs. The sociology students got a text that the department head later pointed out to me was written by a well-known Marxist (I had simply liked the flowing "man-in-the-street" narrative). And the undergraduate world history students got 2,400 pages of heavily documented text in two volumes and had to buy an atlas besides. I even taught a semester or two using a text I created with what today would be regarded as illegal photocopies. (Fair use definitions for academe were more liberal in the past, mainly through ignorance of copyright law.)
My subsequent career in higher education publishing gave me another perspective on textbook selection. I became enlightened on matters high and low regarding textbook acquisition, development, marketing, and sales. Much of what I have to say here reflects my twin backgrounds as textbook adopter and textbook developer, augmented by memories of textbooks I used as a student in the now distant past. I still remember my Magruder, Dobzhansky, and Harris, for example. What ones do you remember, and what made them stick with you? I keep a shelf of what I call heirloom textbooks, once great titles long out of print. My guidelines for choosing a textbook for your course refer also to these heirlooms. I also will have something to say about when to consider not using a textbook.
Read the entire article
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Three-day international course looks at what makes a textbook effective
By Kim Seidel
A three-day course on textbook writing and design held for the first time last February in The Netherlands, brought together 16 participants from 11 different countries to discuss what makes an effective textbook. It was such a success that the course will be offered again from Sept. 3-5 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
"We saw a market for a course which combined pedagogical and publishing-related issues," said McCall, deputy director of the Centre for Publishing Studies, at Stirling University, Scotland. He and Arno Reints, director of the Centre for Educational Studies and Consultancy at the University of Utrecht, founded the course. "We believe the course holds a universal appeal, so we opened it up to an international audience."
The course has a particular relevance for countries which have made the move from state centralism to the private sector recently, said McCall. Participants came from Malaysia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Hungary, Netherlands, Finland and Slovenia.
There are many benefits for students and teachers to share an international perspective on textbook writing and design. "It allows different countries with very diverse publishing industries to compare and contrast their practices and learn from each other," said McCall.
Read the entire article
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How publishers are dealing with NIH 'open access' policy
A July 28 article on ars technica (http://arstechnica.com), "NIH 'open access' policy causing publishing companies angst", discusses the various problems caused for publishers following a policy change by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this spring that requires researchers whose publications are produced through public funding to make those papers available through open access sites, and how some publishers, including Nature Publishing Group (NIG) "seem to have embraced the change."
Read the entire article
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Pearson reports 17 percent increase in education sales
Pearson announced its interim financial results on July 28. The company reported a 17 percent increase in education sales, with rapid growth in digital learning services and continued international expansion. Pearson Education, which accounted for 63 percent of all of the company's sales and operating profit in 2007, is in line with the company's expectations.
"Our momentum is strong, even in these tough economic conditions," said Pearson's Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino. "We have leadership positions in good markets and an effective growth strategy based on quality content, digital innovation and international expansion. That strategy makes us confident that 2008 will be another record year, and that we will continue to grow."
In North American Education, Pearson reported a strong market leadership position and said that demand for its products remains healthy. They expect their North American Education business to increase sales by around 10 percent at constant exchange rates (or by 2-4 percent in underlying terms).
In International Education, Pearson said they are well placed to benefit from the growing demand for materials, assessment, technology and related services at all stages of learning. They expect their International Education business to grow sales by around 10 percent at constant exchange rates (or in the low single digits in underlying terms). These growth rates include the impact of the completion
of the UK key stage testing contract in 2007.
In Professional Education they continue to expect sales to increase in the low single digits at constant exchange rates.
For Education as a whole, Pearson said they expect 2008 margins to be similar to the 2007 level of approximately 15 percent, in spite of significant integration costs relating to the Harcourt businesses (which are included in their operating results). In 2009, they said they expect to increase Education margins by around one percentage point as they begin to realize the financial benefit of the acquisitions. Beyond 2009, they said they see further opportunities to increase margins in Education as they continue to consolidate their businesses.
Read the full report
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Microsoft Research unveils free software tools for scholars, researchers
At the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit held July 28 in Redmond, Washington, leaders from Microsoft Research outlined their vision for how Microsoft Corp. and academics can collaborate on research projects to develop technological breakthroughs that will define computing and scientific research in the years ahead.
Speaking to more than 400 faculty members from leading research institutions worldwide, Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's External Research Division, emphasized the role his group plays not only in supporting specific collaborative research projects, but also in improving the process of research and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology and interoperability. Toward that end, Hey announced a set of free software tools aimed at allowing researchers to seamlessly publish, preserve and share data throughout the entire scholarly communication life cycle. He also discussed collaborative initiatives intended to unlock the potential of multicore computing.
In the area of scholarly communication, Hey said, "Collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers - with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. We're supporting that scholarly communication life cycle with free software tools to improve interoperability with existing tools used commonly by academics and scholars to better meet their research needs."
Read the entire article
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Subscribe to TAA Listservs
Subscribe to one or both of TAA's Listservs, one on textbook authoring and one on academic authoring.
Subscribe to the Textbook Authoring Listserv by sending an email to TAATextbookAuthoring-on@mail-list.com
Subscribe to the Academic Authoring Listserv by sending an email to TAAAcademicAuthoring-on@mail-list.com
You can switch to the Digest version of the Textbook Authoring Listserv, in which you receive only one email message per week with all that week's posts contained within it, by sending an email to TAATextbookAuthoring-switch@mail-list.com
once you have been subscribed.
To switch to the Digest version of the Academic Authoring Listserv, send an email to TAAAcademicAuthoring-switch@mail-list.com once you have been subscribed.
After you are subscribed to the Textbook Authoring Listserv, send messages to TAATextbookAuthoring@mail-list.com
After you are subscribed to the Academic Authoring Listserv, send messages to TAAAcademicAuthoring@mail-list.com
Read the archives for both Listservs here
If you have any questions, please email Kim Pawlak
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TAA Teleconference Series
Listen to the recordings from TAA's Spring Teleconference series in the members-only section of the TAA website.
"Tips & Tricks for the Do-It-Yourself Indexer" moderated by Seth Maislin: Listen Now
"Don't Settle For a Publisher's Standard Contract: Terms You Can & Should Negotiate" moderated by Authoring Attorney Stephen Gillen: Listen Now
"A Coach's Perspective on Finishing a Dissertation" Teleconference moderated by Dave Harris: Listen Now
"Royalty Q&A" Teleconference moderated by Paul Rosenzweig, former president of Royalty Review Service: Listen Now
"Publish & Flourish: Become a Prolific Scholar" Teleconference moderated by Tara Gray: Listen Now
Suggest Topics for the Fall TAA Teleconference Series
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