John Soares, author of Writing College Textbook Supplements
I spent two days this week updating my curriculum vitae with most of the college textbook supplements I’ve written since 2000, when I last updated the document.
Why did I take nine years to update it? Well, I basically had all the work I could handle at good pay, so I haven’t felt a need to market myself beyond Pearson Education/Prentice Hall and Cengage Learning.
Why did I update it? I say both here on the blog and on the sales page for Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market that I’ve written over 200 textbook supplements, so I felt I needed to show the proof. (I had one person e-mail and ask if I was for real; I told her she can google my name and Prentice Hall or Wadsworth to see links to a lot of my work. She soon bought the book.)
What did I learn?
1. I’ve written a lot of supplements. It was a trip back through time and sparked wonderful memories of all the great textbooks I so enjoyed working with. I also thought of the places I lived when I wrote certain supplements, like Kaua’i in the Hawaiian Islands, Crescent City and rural Del Norte county in northern California, and the Mount Shasta area, where I’ve lived for the last four years.
2. I need to keep better records. I primarily did the update from a six-inch stack of contracts. However, for many older projects I don’t have contracts; I sent off the signed copies and editors never returned them. I do have a list of all the projects I’ve done since about 1998, but I frequently didn’t put the full title or author name in the list, so these I left off.
Over the last few years I’ve been making a copy of every contract and keeping records with the full textbook title and edition number, the author name, the editor, the amount owed and when I received all payments. I strongly suggest you do the same. (I’ll do a future blog post about this.)
So please have a look at my vitae. In addition to all the supplements, you’ll see the details of my education and teaching career, plus the biochemistry research papers I co-authored when I worked at Cornell University and Lund University in Sweden.
Note: the link to the vitae is always in the right column of the blog and on the main sales page for Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market.
(John Soares is the author of Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market. You can download the Detailed Table of Contents and first two chapters for free.)
