Week 6 Famous Last Words: Book Contract WHOO-HOO!!!

I should still do some Week 7 work this weekend, but I'm done with Week 6 stuff (I'll use some of these Ravana tales for my Portfolio too!), so I am writing Famous Last Words, and this is the first time I've announced it to the world: I signed a book contract with Johns Hopkins University Press yesterday (after a loooooooong) review process; it's a book about teaching online! Tentative title: How to Teach Online, A Practical and Provocative Guide.

It's going to be part of a "how-to" series called "Higher Ed Leadership Essentials," which focuses on very specific, short books (just around 60,000 words). I am really glad about that! This book will be a kind of oddball in the series because it is about teaching rather than administration, and I'm excited about that: teaching is at the heart of what universities do, and there should be good books for a general higher ed audience, including administrators, about teaching. I'm especially excited to write about teaching online because I pitched the book as a kind of "alternatives to the LMS" approach, so if I can convince both instructors and administrators about the value of looking beyond the LMS for ways to design and deliver online classes, then I will be really happy!

Because the review process took a long time before the contract got finalized, I already made summer plans, so I'll be writing the book during the 2020-21 school year; my goal is to finish on May 1, 2021. That means I get to do lots of reading and thinking before I actually start writing, and that is good too. I always figure that some of the most important work any author does is to read a ton of stuff, and that is part of the "service" we provide in writing the actual book, integrating all the work of all those other authors into what we write.

I didn't think I would ever do another book for a commercial publisher given all the great opportunities for self-publishing these days, but the publisher from JHU who invited me to submit the proposal is such a great guy, and he was the editor on two really excellent books by online friends of mine, so I think this is going to be a positive and productive experience. 

Writing that 50K novel for NaNoWriMo last year really encouraged me also. I am glad that this book is supposed to be short to fit in this series (60K is not all that much more than 50K). So, yes, somehow I will manage to do this, and I really want to do a good job too. Having it be short will also help with that: that will allow me to prune down to what is the very best stuff, and I am sure I can come up with 60K of good stuff to say about teaching online.

Yay books! The ungrading book (in which I have a chapter) is coming out in December 2020, and maybe this book will even come out in December 2021. Not likely, but a possibility... anyway, by December 2022 at the latest I'm sure. So that will make for two very Merry Christmases for me. :-)