From the site:

The Writer’s Technology Companion is a guide through the world of technology as it directly impacts the life of a writer. From backing up your files and using your word processor to putting up a website and publishing electronically, The Writer’s Technology Companion covers it all.

If you’re a writer, I do hope you’ll check it out, subscribe to the feed, tell your friends, link to stories, and name your children “Writer’s Technology Companion”. (Hey, in this day and age, you need all the promotion you can get!)

Here’s that link again, in case you don’t feel like scrolling up: The Writer’s Technology Companion

Order your copy today!

I’ve been anxiously waiting for University of Michigan Press, the American distributor of Pluto Press’ books, to send me my contributor’s copies, and they finally arrived today. The envelope is sitting downstairs; I’ve decided to open it at dinner so I can (finally!) share the acknowledgments page with my family, who I dedicate the book to. I think the kids, especially, will be excited to see their names in an honest-to-goodness published book.

I decided to go ahead with that project, and am well into getting the site up and running. The site is called The Writer’s Technology Companion and will be launching sometime in March at www.writerstechnology.com. There’s a launch page there now, where you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe to the RSS feed so you’ll be informed when the site officially goes live.

The Writer’s Technology Companion is going to cover the tools of the writing trade, including computer hardware and software, blogging tools, ways to promote and sell material on the Web, self-publishing tools, and more. The focus is on writing in general — everyone from romance novelists to screenwriters to freelance technical writers should find something useful.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. “Does it have to be typed?” “What size margins should I use?” “What style do you want the references in?”

I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas — which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.

I’ve never once, in 5 years of teaching, been asked a question about ideas.

Ideas are not more important than content, any more than respiration is more important than circulation — formatting is part of the expression of ideas. A reference is a piece of data — it helps answer the question, “how does the author know what s/he claims to know?” A section heading or a footnote is part of the process by which an argument is structured and developed — they aren’t extras.

At the same time, students’ (and teachers’?) emphasis on form seems to miss the point that good presentation without ideas isn’t any better than good ideas badly presented. Is it any wonder that much of what we read is a vapid rehashing not of the course materials but of Wikipedia entries. I mean, if the quality of ideas doesn’t matter, what does it matter where they came from – as long as it’s nicely formatted and search-engine friendly?

Here’s my advice for students: consider formatting not as something separate from your ideas, but as a part of them. Your entire paper is a presentation of ideas — and your design choices are one of the ideas being presented. Every reference, every footnote, even the margins and line-spacing should serve that end.

That doesn’t mean to ignore the standards — APA for a psych paper, MLA for a lit paper, etc. Those standards exist because they are tried-and-tested ways for ideas to be expressed well. But learn them as ideas, not as meaningless frills.

And ask a professor how to write a persuasive argument in your discipline once in a while. That matters, too.

My argument is this: academic writers have a higher obligation than just to make royalties, and that’s to disseminate knowledge. We are incredibly generous in sharing our work with each other — most academic journals pay nothing at all, most academic publishers pay little or no royalties — and need I add that I wasn’t paid anything by the TAA, nor would I have been in just about any other academic association’s newsletter.

When it comes to sharing information with students, though, we demand they pony up. Top dollar, even — it’s not at all unusual for an intro-level textbook to top $100 US. I blame the publishers — especially the practice of including essentially useless test banks, CD-ROMs, supplements, etc., as well as insisting on full-color printing, flashy covers, particularly useless online extensions, and so on. Many fellow TAA members, however, blame students, for supporting the massive trade in used text books. The availability of used books, they argue, forces textbook publishers to step up the revision cycle and add more and more useless junk to the texbook package to differentiate their offerings.

I call BS. If the used book market ceased to exist tomorrow, I very much doubt the price of textbooks would change one whit. Used book sales have been a part of the book trade since there was a book trade. The sale of used books is one of the best established exceptions to an author’s rights under US copyright law. There’s always been a trade in used books, and as long as there’s books, there always will be.

More importantly, the cost of textbooks is a huge barrier to education for our poorest students I’ve had dozens of students in my 5 years as a teacher that simply would not be able to remain in school if not for the ability to buy the books they needed used and sell them back at the end of the semester.

And why shouldn’t they? What do most textbooks offer students? Some TAA members believe we should encourage students to think of their books as lifelong resources. That’s a laugh! First off, most students don’t read their textbooks when they’re in the class, let alone once the class is over. The average textbook is ponderous, boring, dry, and sucked clean of any vestige of human warmth.

And no wonder! The link is to an article about high school textbooks, and will scare you senseless. The same four companies mentioned in the article publish most of the college textbooks, too, and while they don’t have to go through he big state selection committees that are responsible for the dumbing down and blanding out of high school texts, I’d bet the mindset is more or less the same.

I think we owe it to our students and to society as a whole to make sure we offer quality textbooks that students can afford. There’s no reason textbooks can’t be made the same way trade paperbacks are made — to be sold for $18.00, or even $30.00 to subsidize an instructor’s manual. Just the ANTH 101 classes in a year at my community college would use more books than most literary fiction sells — it’s absolutely not a question of making up suitable volume. Strip away the flashy production values and the useless extras, and give students book they’ll not only be able to afford, but one they might even think about keeping.

The question is, am I better off starting a new blog devoted solely to that niche or to start integrating that content into this site?

The advantage to posting it here is that I already have a decent amount of traffic, I have a good position in Google, and I wouldn’t be splitting my attention and time off to yet another project.

The advantage of doing it as its own site is that all the material on the site would be focused on the same topic, so readers interested in the latest writing software wouldn’t have to read about my research interests or political positions or random musings on what goes on in Amazon boardroom when they name e-readers. Also, the tone of the new content is much more straight-forward and serious than here (which isn’t to say it’s not personal — it’s the same voice, but different tone and focus) so their wouldn’t be any dissonance as I jump from practical advice to joking around. Also, any ads or sponsorships could be much more tightly focused.

Any advice?

But I’m stalled in teaching. I’ve made some great big financial mistakes that mean I’m probably never going to get my PhD; nobody at my university even knows who I am anymore. I’ve chugged along at my dissertation for years, but for the last year or so it’s gotten harder and harder to motivate myself to work on it because, to be honest, neither my heart nor my soul is in it any more.

That should be sad, but it’s not, because I don’t think I ever really wanted to be a professor; I think I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, a professor does research, writes books, gives presentations — and occasionally, when everything else is done, teaches a class. A teacher, on the other hand, teaches — whether in a classroom, on a website, in a book, whatever.

The reality of the academic market is, I’m not going to be a professor at a “top school”, even with a PhD, because I care too much about teaching. Which is fine, except I have a family to feed and a life to live, and I can’t do that on an adjunct’s salary.

In my other career, I’m a writer. I’m pretty good at it, I think — I’ve gotten my fair share of diggs and trackbacks and thankful comments on my writing on the web, and my off-line writing gets a pretty good response. At lifehack.org alone, I have upwards of a million readers a month. And I have a good understanding of the marketing and relationship-building strategies that matter for writers in the new media. More and more I think this is where I should be focusing my efforts.

Especially since BlogWorld Expo in November. There I saw an entire professional world unfolding before my eyes, and a little glimpse of what the future holds. I mean, I’ve been blogging since 2000, but it wasn’t until BlogWorld that I really saw that one could build a career on the Internet without being a coder or a designer.

So now Affiliate Summit West is heading to town. That’s one of the nice things about living in Las Vegas — conferences come right to your doorstep! Of course, the downside is, you need a lot of money to go to them — Affiliate Summit is $1449 for the whole conference, and a couple hundred just to have a look around.

But John Chow is giving away a free full pass and a couple of free floor passes, so all of a sudden it’s worth thinking about going. I have to admit, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around affiliate marketing. Not the concept itself, which is pretty straightforward — you link to products your audience would enjoy, and if they click through and spend money, you get a piece. But few sites do this well, and from the outside, doing it well seems to be such a large job that it would eclipse the actual writing that’s supposed to be the star of the show.

I’ve made a goal for this year: By the fall semester, I plan to cut my teaching load in half. And I plan to do that not just by replacing the pay those classes bring in but by doubling it. That means, effectively, I have to hit $25000 in non-teaching income by September, which is very doable. (I’ve already accounted for about 1/3 of that with existing work, actually).

Which means that the time is now to figure out how this stuff all works — affiliate marketing, social networking, contextual advertising, all of it. If I want to write for a living, I have to figure out how to live by writing. BlogWorld was a step in the right direction — it gave me a real big push towards bringing this all together. Something like Affiliate Summit West would be a great next step!

It’s as if suddenly we’ve returned to the days of Pilgrim’s Progress, where Words are capitalized to show that they represent Important Concepts — except the words That are capitalized are often not All that important. Or it’s like we suddenly adopted German Grammar, where all the Nouns are capitalized — except it’s not Just nouns. In fact, I’ve searched in vain for a pattern, and can’t find one.

All I know is that I’m seeing words capitalized where no capital is needed, and that it seems to be becoming more and more common. I’m reading applications for a job opening right now, and 4 out of 14 were disqualified for mysterious capitalization — I don’t reckon with that sort of nonsense!

But am I alone? Am I the only one that’s seeing this? Am I some kind of magnet for awkward capitalization? And what oes it mean? Is this simply the outcome of poor schooling, or is it the first sign of the impending breakdown of all civilization as we know it? Or both?

The book is already available for order on Amazon UK, although in the us you can only pre-order it. The cover on Amazon is not the final cover (the image to the right is), but I assume they’ll change that when the book is fully available.