New edition of my chem text is published!

https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-e...ess-Card-Package-15th-Edition/PGM1988482.html

Unfortunately they have the attributions wrong; John Hill was at UWis River Falls, and I at Murray State University. Pearson may be a huge publishing house but they still have f***ups...

I was a contributing author on the 11th ed (name doesn't get on the cover) and a full co-author on 12th, 13th, and 14th. John Hill passed away in 2017, so I'm now the lead author on the number-one selling liberal-arts chemistry textbook worldwide! Been translated into French, Spanish, and Korean, possibly others, I haven't checked. Amazing; John came out with the first edition while I was still in high school (1972)!

Woohoo! -- Terry

Congratulations! Every book that I've ever contributed to was a royal pain in the butt. I can't imagine how much work goes into something like this.

Congratulations. A friend of mine wrote a book about a narrow field of study in psychology that is used in a few universities. I have some (small) idea of how much work he put into it. I think his royalties are enough to buy pizza occasionally. Hopefully, your efforts will pay somewhat better.

Love that you make it available as an ebook at a decent price. I still remember the sticker shock from my first chemistry book, and that was in the ‘70s. But that was nothing compared to the cost of books for law school. That’s a racket.

Congrats. I have never contributed to any book, though I have had the book thrown at me a few times.

Congratulations, Terry!

Thanks for the kind words, all of you. Actually Pearson sets the price, I have absolutely no say whatsoever.

Textbooks are indeed very expensive. Consider, though, the number of professors who are actually very good at teaching. A rather small number of those can communicate well to students by writing. Most profs prefer to write proposals (and frankly, if I'd been good at proposals I'd surely have made more summer salary from that than I make from the textbooks). And few of the ones who meet the other requirements are good at meeting absolute hard deadlines. (I was taken on originally partly because I told the senior editor "I meat deadlines. I don't like to, but I do it. )

Couple that with the fact that the authors/publisher only gets money from the sale of new books, and the average text is re-sold 4-6 times by the bookstore, so they almost have to come out with a new edition every 3-4 years, at least at the lower levels.

The royalties are fairly nice at the higher levels, but the only authors driving Ferraris are in business or law or medical publishing. It helped my two girls get through college, but I drive a 2010 RAV4 with 70K miles. Wife drives the last car we bought new, a 2013 Civic. I'm allowed to look at pictures of an Acura NSX now and then, though.

Best -- Terry

That's awesome. Having read numerous texts over the years I can't imagine the amount of work that goes into that.

A few years ago a publisher bought one of my photos for an ecology textbook. It wasn't much but I was kind of thrilled to make even a tiny contribution.

Congratulations, I love chemistry. I was a CHEM major for 2 years before I switched to CMSC. Less math and more jobs.

My favorite chemistry joke:
Helium walks into a bar, bar tender says "We don't serve noble gasses here."
Helium doesn't react.

I always heard it "He doesn't react".

An atom walks into a bar and ask the bartender for a double, the bartender looks at him an says "are you alright?"
The Atom replies "No I lost an electron today."
The bartender says "Are you sure?"
The atom says "I'm positive."

prfesser said:

https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-e...ess-Card-Package-15th-Edition/PGM1988482.html

Unfortunately they have the attributions wrong; John Hill was at UWis River Falls, and I at Murray State University. Pearson may be a huge publishing house but they still have f***ups...

I was a contributing author on the 11th ed (name doesn't get on the cover) and a full co-author on 12th, 13th, and 14th. John Hill passed away in 2017, so I'm now the lead author on the number-one selling liberal-arts chemistry textbook worldwide! Been translated into French, Spanish, and Korean, possibly others, I haven't checked. Amazing; John came out with the first edition while I was still in high school (1972)!

Woohoo! -- Terry

Click to expand...

Congratulations.

I got a weird visit a few months ago; a sales rep for a small publishing house called for an appointment, saying he was interested in getting me to write for an introductory astronomy textbook.

It turned out that he wanted to sell me a custom text compiled from my lecture notes, pasted together with passages of text, graphics, and other content published under various Cengage or Pearson imprints. He showed me some sample pages from texts prepared in this way, and explained that the graphics were "easy" because they were often available in high-res digital formats as part of the on-line editions or the lecture slides provided with texts from which he proposed to "borrow" content.

When I pointed out that what he was describing went WAY beyond Fair Use, he assured me that the the major publishers would never get around to suing his company, or my school, or me for such a small interruption of their revenue stream.

He seemed genuinely surprised by my lack of enthusiasm for this scheme.

jlabrasca said:

Congratulations.

When I pointed out that what he was describing went WAY beyond Fair Use, he assured me that the the major publishers would never get around to suing his company, or my school, or me for such a small interruption of their revenue stream.

He seemed genuinely surprised by my lack of enthusiasm for this scheme.

Click to expand...

Thanks, and you were quite wise not to dive into this scheme. My experience with Pearson over a 20 yr period has been that they are diligent about legalities. EVERY SINGLE PHOTO (including some I took!) in the textbook requires a written or electronic permission from the owner. More than once a chapter was held up because permission had not yet been obtained for a photo, and we had to select an alternative image. Credits for each image are printed in the book. Pearson didn't get to where they are without dotting each 'i' and crossing each 't'.

Best -- Terry