Supporting and Working With Your Textbook Marketing Team
Speaker: Jamie Pope, Co-author of Nutrition for a Changing World (2e), the recipient of a 2020 TAA Textbook Excellence Award
Textbook authors play an important role in supporting their publisher's marketing efforts - and by being an active member of the marketing team. The expertise and reputation of authors certainly underpin marketing and textbook success. Authors can support their marketing team in a wide variety of ways to increase market reach and awareness of the uniqueness, content, and target audience of their textbooks. Professional and personal networking via conferences, social media, active involvement in professional associations, and speaking engagements all can promote not only authors, but their work and publications.
Authors can use podcasts, blogs, and videos to inform and motivate the sales force as well as potential adopters. As a representative of their discipline, authors provide input on marketing materials including cover design, book descriptions, and other promotional items to ensure that they accurately represent the content and appeal to the target audience. In this Author’s Talk presentation, Jamie Pope will share some of the ways she has been involved in marketing as well as some cautions about how to support marketing efforts while trusting their expertise and promotional plans.
Jamie Pope currently serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor in Nutritional Sciences in the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of Practice in Medicine, Health and Society in the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University. She is the co-author of Nutrition for a Changing World, the recipient of a 2020 TAA Textbook Excellence Award. In 2020, she developed and produced an audio course for Learn25.com (Nutrition 101: Understanding the Science and Practice of Eating Well) designed for the NPR type lifelong learner. She is also co-author of The T-Factor Fat Gram Counter, which enjoyed over three years on the New York Times bestseller list. She has also authored or contributed to numerous scientific and popular press publications.
Top 10 Tips for Publishing Contract Negotiations
Speaker: Brenda Ulrich, Intellectual Property Attorney, Archstone Law Group, PC
No matter if you are looking at your very first textbook publishing contract or are re-negotiating for the 10th edition or your best seller, there are things every author can do, and steps they should take, to set themselves up for success with their publishing contract. In this Author’s Talk, Brenda will share some of her tips for best practices on negotiating with a publisher.
Brenda Ulrich is an intellectual property lawyer with a focus on copyright, trademark, publishing and higher education. Brenda works with numerous authors, including several TAA members, as well as a small number of publishers. She represents authors in textbook publishing contract negotiations and disputes, helps authors in reviewing and interpreting publishing contracts, and advises clients on negotiating and drafting author collaboration agreements. Brenda is currently serving as the secretary of the TAA Council and on its executive and governance committees.
New Developments in Authors’ Rights Litigation
Speaker: Rohit Nath, Partner, Susman Godfrey L.L.P.
Over the last several years, there have been a number of major lawsuits addressing the intersection of technological change and the rights of authors and creators. These include the recent surge in cases against AI platforms related to the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models, as well as class actions brought by textbook authors against major publishers. Join attorney Rohit Nath, partner at Susman Godfrey, for a one-hour webinar about the state of play of these cases, among others, and how they will shape authors’ rights going forward.
Rohit Nath represents plaintiffs and defendants in high-stakes litigation across a variety of complex practice areas. He has faced-off against industry leaders including the country’s biggest insurers, major media and technology companies, and international wireless carriers in courts across the nation. Nath joined Susman Godfrey after working as a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and a law clerk on the Ninth Circuit. Nath graduated with high honors from The University of Chicago Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of The University of Chicago Law Review.