REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!
Full member registration is $200.
|
Please thank your 2010 TAA Conference Sponsors
sponsor of the Roundtable Discussions Luncheon
sponsor of the Awards Ceremony Luncheon
donated 30 copies of Frank Silverman's Self-Publishing Textbooks and Instructional Materials
donated 30 copies of Writing Your Way to Success: Finding Your Own Voice in Academic Publishing, by Susan M. Drake and Glen A. Jones
|
Update your contact information
If your mailing address, email address, or phone number has changed recently, please fill out a Member Update Form online or contact TAA headquarters at 727-563-0020 or TextandAcademicAuthors@taaonline.net
|
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
|
TAA Gift Memberships
You can give a TAA Gift Membership for only $15.
Providing a gift membership to a family member, friend, student or colleague is a great way to assist them with their writing and show your support for TAA's mission.
Learn more
|
|
|
Greetings!
If you have published a book, scholarly journal article, or textbook, and have not completed an Authors Coalition Survey, please do so now:
Fill out survey
TAA receives funds from the Authors Coalition of America LLC each year based on its
total number of published academic and textbook author members. The more
published members we have, the more money we receive.
More funding for TAA means more
benefits and services for you as a member. Authors Coalition funds cover the
costs associated with our workshop program, which sponsors workshops on
textbook authoring, scholarly journal authoring, and grant writing at campuses
across the U.S. They also cover the cost of our teleconference program,
allowing us to provide them free to members.
Sincerely,
Kim
Kim Pawlak
Associate Executive Director
kim.pawlak@taaonline.net
(608) 687-3106
(507) 459-1363 cell
www.TAAonline.net
|
Member E-mail/Username, Password
TAA members need their e-mail address/username and password to access the members-only areas of the website.
Here are yours:
E-mail/Username:
Password:
|
Six candidates running for seats on TAA Council
Six candidates are running for four open positions on the TAA Council. Former TAA Council Secretary Mary Kay Switzer, and former TAA Council member Christopher R. Harris, are running for the Vice-President/President-Elect position. TAA Council Member Nancy Volkman is running for the Treasurer position. TAA members Scott Boyd, Janet Belsky and Michelle Latour are running for two open seats on the TAA Council.
A resignation has created an opening in the Vice President/President-Elect position. Therefore, in keeping with the association's bylaws, the winner of the current election for Vice President/President-Elect will immediately become President on July 1st. The resulting Vice President vacancy will be filled at a later date.
Terms begin July 1, 2010. Officers serve two-year terms and Council members serve three-year terms. Ballots will be mailed to members next week. They must be postmarked by April 15 to ensure counting.
Read position statements and bios for each candidate: click here
|
TAA announces 2010 Texty, McGuffey Awards
TAA has selected seven textbooks to receive a 2010 Textbook Excellence Award ("Texty"), and three textbooks to receive a 2010 William Holmes McGuffey Longevity Award ("McGuffey").
Two books tied for a Texty in the College Humanities/Social Sciences category: Criminal Investigation, 9th ed., by Kären M. Hess and Christine Hess Orthmann (Delmar Cengage Learning), and Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, by H.J. deBlij and Peter O. Muller (John Wiley & Sons).
The awards will be presented during a luncheon at the 2010 TAA Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 26.
View the full list of winners: click here
|
Tennessee bill would ban textbook authors from earning royalties on books sold to own students
Tennessee State Representative Stacey Campfield has introduced a bill that would ban professors from collecting a royalty on books sold to students in their classes.
TAA member Janet Belsky, author of Experiencing the Lifespan, which won a TAA Textbook Excellence Award in 2008, was quoted in a March 17, 2010 article in The Tennessean, blasting the bill: "The idea that somehow I am ripping off my students is crazy."
Belsky, who spent 10 years researching and writing her book and another two years on revisions, said she will earn a 15 percent royalty on each book sale--about $13.50 of the $90 list price. She will collect a royalty only on the first sale and earn nothing from the resale of the textbook as a used book.
According to The Tennessean, University of Tennessee Board of Trustees government liaison Anthony Hayes "scoffed at the legislation, saying professors who have written textbooks should be prized, not punished...it doesn't make sense to recruit the nation's top academics and tell them that students won't have to buy their published research for class work."
Read the full article in The Tennessean: click here
|
Five myths to overcome when writing your first book
by Dr. Kathleen P. King
Many people live exciting lives, have great vision or imagination and are compelled to seek the long road of writing a book. Writing your first book is an especially daunting task. Where to start? How do you proceed? What if writer's block hits? And will I ever find a publisher? These are just a few of the myriad of questions that keep would-be authors away from the keyboard and awake at night as they wrestle with conquering the page.
Let's begin from the rejection pile as it were: Things Not To Do. If you can eliminate some lethal, bad habits, maybe you can free your fingers so they can dance joyfully over the keyboard once again. Are you game?
Click here to read the five myths you will need to overcome when writing your first book.
|
BOOK REVIEW:
Philip Yaffe Gettysburg Approach to Writing and Speaking Like a Professional
Reviewed by Dr. Janet Belsky
I'm assuming that "no one will want to read what I'm writing" (Gettysburg Approach to Writing and Speaking like a Professional, principle #1). So how can I hook your interest in this review? As I ju st learned: 1) Give you, the reader, what YOU want to know not what I want you to know. 2) Make this review as long as necessary and short as possible. And 3) offer information, that is precise, specific, detailed or, in the author's words, logically dense. So here goes:
Are you passionate to pep up your expository writing? How can you rouse that recalcitrant segment of students who regularly dose off as each semester proceeds? For answers, consider reading Philip Yaffe's informative guide to speaking and writing well. Yaffe - a self confessed, "poor writer", who went on to become, a journalism professor, Wall Street Journal correspondent, and the director of a marketing communication company in Belgium - has distilled 30+ years of business writing and speaking seminar insights in this three part book named for the Gettysburg Address, that model of world-class oration and compelling prose. (This sentence, by the way, was logically dense, or filled with precise information.)
Read more: Click here |
TAA TELECONFERENCES
Free Publicity: How to Create Podcasts & Digital Audio to Promote Your Book
Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 1-2 p.m. EST
Presented by Dr. Kathleen P. King, International Keynote Speaker, Professor of Education at Fordham University's Graduate School of Education in New York City, and President of Transformation Education, LLC
Part of what draws people to textbook and academic publications is what they know about the authors: What makes them an expert in the area about which they write? Are they down to earth? Do they understand my needs, and how I need to use the information? Do they write accessibly? Do they understand my teaching needs, so they have incorporated those into the textbook design and ancillary materials?
As illustrated in these questions, today educators, professors and other readers are constantly looking for added-value. This session is designed for TAA and led by Dr. Kathleen P. King, an award-winning educational podcasting expert and co-author of Podcasting for Teachers. Participants will learn how easy and no-cost it can be to create a podcast to promote, or support your publications and professional career.
This session includes a non-technical explanation of the steps to develop a podcast, free and low-cost resource options for recording and hosting your series, as well as introduction to the many different genres which could be used as your platform (solo, historical re-enactments, news show style, interviews, etc). Dr. King and her co-hosts have had over 6.4 million downloads of their podcast series since 2005.
Register
How to Seek Funding from State Humanities, Arts Councils
Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 1-2 p.m. EST
Presented by Richard Hull, Former Executive Director of the Texas Council and Current Executive Director of the Text and Academic Authors Association
An often-overlooked source of funding for smaller projects is the state humanities council and the state arts council. Each state has an affiliate to the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a separate affiliate to the National Endowment for the Arts. Arts and Humanities are treated separately by federal funders, but it is possible that an academic author can access funds from both state sources. Roughly, the distinction between the arts and the humanities is this: if you talk about it, that's the humanities; if you do it, that's the arts!
In this presentation, Richard Hull, former executive director for the Texas Council for the Humanities, will discuss state humanities and arts council funding sources. He will try to make his discussion of the funding initiatives of various state councils specific to the interests of the participants, so when you sign up for this teleconference, please provide (a) your state, and (b) a brief description of your potential project, and (c) your email address that you will use for the teleconference. Richard will try to address each project with respect to its own state councils' priorities, grant-making schedule, requirements, and priorities.
Register
Writing, Procrastination and Resistance: How to Identify Your Funk and Move Through It
Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 12-1 p.m. EST
Presented by Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a speaker in the field of faculty development and leadership, and author of The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure Without Losing Your Soul
This one-hour teleconference is for faculty, post-docs and/or advanced graduate students who: - Feel stuck and aren't making progress toward finishing your article, dissertation, or book
- Can't seem to produce unless a deadline is looming
- Feel like everyone else in your environment is moving forward while you're standing still
- Are experiencing a sense of dread because your third year review is around the corner and you know you haven't met your department's publication expectations
- Have recently had a critical third year review, promised yourself you would start writing more but haven't quite lived up to that promise
- Wonder regularly if you really want to be an academic
- Find yourself in a writing funk, but don't know why or how to get out of it
- Feel paralyzed because you haven't written in so long you don't know where to start
- Still can't figure out how your semesters fly by without progress on your research, writing, and publication
This teleconference will also help you:
Learn the behaviors that lead to writing productivity, Understand the factors underlying persistent patterns of procrastination, Identify individual forms of writing resistance, Implement concrete strategies for moving around resistance, Develop a community of support for difficult times
Participants of Rockquemore's teleconference will receive a subscription to her weekly Monday Motivator e-mail to reinforce the concepts they learned in the teleconference and to encourage application and implementation. They will also receive access to a professional development discussion forum; a bibliography of professional development books, articles, and online resources; and access to online writing support and accountability groups.
Register
|
Missed a TAA Teleconference? Recordings are available online
If you missed a TAA Teleconference, you can listen to it online.
|
McGraw-Hill, Cengage plan to expand textbook rental programs
By Ellie Ashford
McGraw-Hill and Cengage Learning said their textbook rental programs, launched in fall 2009, have been successful so far and will be expanded.
McGraw-Hill and online textbook renter Chegg.com expect to finalize a deal to extend their revenue-sharing pilot program before August 2010, the start of the textbook-buying season, said Nathan Schultz, vice president of supply chain at Chegg.com. No decisions have yet been made about which titles will be added nor how many, he said.
McGraw-Hill's textbook rental pilot with Chegg.com began in late 2009 and included 35 of McGraw-Hill's textbooks. While Schultz would not divulge the financial details of the arrangement, he did say that for each of the titles in the revenue-sharing pilot, Chegg pays the publisher an up-front fee for each title, plus a percentage of the rental revenue each time the book is rented. McGraw-Hill pays a royalty to its authors for each rental based on each author's contract with the publisher.
McGraw-Hill's pilot program with Chegg.com is the first direct working relationship between a publisher and textbook rental company, but it is just a small part of Chegg's rental program. Chegg has about 200 to 300 titles available for rent, said Schultz. In general, Chegg buys titles from various publishers or from Amazon.com-just like a college bookstore-then lists them on its website as available for purchase or rent. Under this model, authors get royalties from the publisher, regardless of whether the book is sold or rented, but only on the initial sale, not the subsequent rentals.
"We are still evaluating other rental business models and how we can best participate in them," said Tom Stanton, McGraw-Hill's director of communication. "In the meantime, Chegg and all of our distribution partners are free to rent textbooks that they purchase from us or our distributors. The partnership with Chegg helps strengthen our commitment to providing students with a variety of options to obtain high-quality educational materials."
Read more: click here
|
|
DISCLAIMER: TAA has not tested and neither endorses nor opposes any product or procedure recommended or referenced in any TAA publications, teleconferences, or workshops.
|
|
|
