Revenue Streams 2010 « Whatever "In my continuing quest to demystify things related to the business of writing, at least inasmuch as they relate to me, today I am going to talk revenue streams. As many of you know, I am a huge proponent of writers having multiple revenue streams, so that when one of them cuts out on you -- and it will cut out on you -- you still have money coming in while you look for something to replace the income you've lost. I am also a huge proponent of recognizing that even within an individual stream of income, there can and will be substantial variation from year…

I'm deep in editing mode at the moment, and faintly depressed at the number of words I have managed to remove by changes like turning "was [verb]ing " to "[verb]ed." It's a tedious and labor-intensive process that is weirdly exhausting-- all I'm doing is sitting in a cafe somewhere reading text with a red pen in hand, and yet I'm completely drained at the end of the day. And, of course, this process is interrupted periodically by the need to go to meetings. One of the great frustrations of my job is the number of meetings in academia. It's gotten slightly better in the last couple of years,…

The Blog : How to Get Your Book Published in 6 (Painful) Steps : Sam Harris "The process of getting a nonfiction book published by a mainstream publisher--as distinct from an academic press, or a smaller, independent publisher--is quite straightforward. This is not to say that most people understand this process, or that success is likely, but there is very little uncertainty about how an aspiring author must engage the machinery of publishing. Here is the process in 6 steps:" (tags: publishing writing business blogs advice)

Surviving the World - Lesson 921 - Offense I'm offended. (tags: comics surviving-world pictures culture silly) The birth of electromagnetism (1820) | Skulls in the Stars "It is oddly fitting that the birth of electromagnetism, and an entirely new direction in physics, started with the tiniest twitch of a compass needle.  In the year 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) observed the twitch of said compass needle in the presence of an electric current, providing the first definite evidence of a link between electricity and magnetism that would set the tone for much of…

This past weekend, I ended up hearing sports-radio pinheads holding forth proudly about their ignorance of college basketball. The justification for this is that "the regular season doesn't matter," since the NCAA tournament is single-elimination, and lesser-known teams keep ending up making big runs in the tournament. Since there's apparently no way in their world to keep tabs on anything outside the AP Top 25, they couldn't possibly know anything about the teams that end up being important, so there's no reason to pay any attention until the conference tournaments start. Of course, by that…

Jonah Lehrer on Problems With SATs, GREs, the NFL Combine and Other Performance Tests | Head Case - WSJ.com "We live in a society obsessed with maximum performance. Think of exams like the SAT and the GRE. Though these tests take only a few hours, they're supposed to give schools and companies a snapshot of an individual's abiding talents. Or consider the NFL Scouting Combine, in which players entering the draft perform short physical and mental tasks, such as the 40-yard dash. The Combine is meant to measure physical ability; that's why teams take the results so seriously. It's easy to…

Thursday's post about the troubles of biomedical scientists drew a response from Mad Mike saying that, no, biomedical science Ph.D.'s really don't have any career options outside of academia, and pointing to Jessica Palmer's post on the same subject for corroboration. Jessica writes: This is something I've tried to explain many times to nonscientists: most of the esoteric techniques I mastered during my thesis aren't useful outside a Drosophila lab. They're not transferable to any other field of biology, let alone any other scientific or nonscientific profession. Those skills I picked up on…

I've got draft versions of all the chapters of the book-in-progress now, which is great. Of course, when you add up all the words in those chapters, it comes to 92,000, when the contract calls for 70,000. Which means I've entered the part of the writing process where progress is measured not by how many new words I type, but how many old ones I can make disappear. I always find this faintly depressing, but it's a nearly inevitable part of serious writing for me. There have been a few cases where I've had open-ended writing assignments-- one of the papers I published in grad school, and my Ph.…

Another day, another snowfall. Sigh. Thus, a poll: Snow on April 1 is:online survey Snow, even in springtime, is depressingly, boringly, classical, so you may choose one and only one option, not a quantum superposition of multiple answers.

How to Get Tenure at Almost Every Other Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine A useful counterpoint to Sean's post about tenure at top-tier research universities. (tags: academia jobs blogs science physics cosmic-variance) A Lament for Diana Wynne Jones « Bookselling with Granger "One of the pillars of bookselling is to answer this question: If you like X, you will probably enjoy reading Y or Z too. Hence the first, though not actualized in-store yet (that would come at the turn of the millennium) thought of If you like Harry Potter, try these fantasies. And the one…

SteelyKid has extremely fine hair that doesn't grow very quickly. While this leads many people to mistake her for a boy (that, and the fact that a lot of her play clothes are from the boys' section at Target, because lots of girl-toddler outfits are ridiculously impractical), it does lend itself to spectacular bedhead: She's actually admiring her own crazy hair in a mirror (out of frame to the right) in this shot. She liked it enough that she insisted on keeping it that way, so that her friends at day care could admire it. And, of course, it wouldn't be Thursday without the traditional Appa-…

Via Mad Mike, a discussion of why it sucks to be a biomedical scientist: 87% of my blog-related e-mail is from unhappy, bitter, troubled, distraught biomed grad students, postdocs, technicians, and early-career faculty. Others write to me with problems, but these tend to be of the "I'm frustrated with my advisor" sort rather than the "I'm being tortured, abused, deported, sued, and I fear my academic career is over" sort that I routinely get from biomed people. I specify biomedical rather than the life science in general because, as far as I can tell, the ecologists and botanists and…

COLUMN -- American workers got what they deserved - Holland, MI - The Holland Sentinel "So you're an American employee. Maybe you make car parts. Maybe you're an engineer or designer. Maybe you're an accountant, store clerk or tradesman. Whatever you do, you're probably stupid or lazy. Yes, I wrote it, and I mean it. You are either stupid or lazy. Maybe both. Now, I'm not referring to your work ethic or job performance. No, most of you are competent and devoted to your profession or vocation. I'm addressing the way you view economics and employment. I'm challenging your gumption to advocate…

I got my student comments from last term's intro mechanics course yesterday, which is always a stressful moment. As tends to happen, they were all over the map, with some students really liking me and others absolutely hating me. It struck me while I was reading through the written comments that the experience is a lot like reading Amazon reviews of my book. I think there's actually a decent analogy between the response of authors to reviews and the response of faculty to student evaluations: -- Really good comments can make you feel great, but the negative ones make you feel worse. I've got…

No Cox please, we're British... « In the Dark "The problem with Wonders of the Universe is betrayed by its title. The word "wonders" suggests that the Universe is wonder-ful, or even, in a word which has cropped up in the series a few times, "awesome". No authentic British person would ever use the word "awesome" without being paid a lot of money to do so. It just doesn't ring true. I reckon it doesn't do to be too impressed by anything as a matter of fact (especially if its accompanied by awful music), but there is a particularly good reason for not being taken in by all this talk about "…

Nascence at Tobias Buckell Online "New York Times Bestseller Tobias S. Buckell has published 45 short stories in various magazines and anthologies. But in the process of learning how to sell those 45, he wrote over 100 short stories that failed in a variety of ways while learning the craft. In Nascence, he reprints 17 failed stories written from 1996-2004 and details some of the major failings of the stories that led him to abandon them, and what he learned from those failures moving forward." (tags: writing books stories education buckell publishing) the adventure begins... | burgers…

Crankitude: A Quick Glossary. In the Pipeline: "I get probably more than my share of come-ons for various wonder-healing potions. For some reason, people see that I talk about drug discovery and think that I'm sure to be interested in homeopathic wonder water, magnetic healotronic belt buckles, or what have you. I am not. Well, at least not in the usual way that they're presented, as Great New Discoveries that I can order right now, first month's supply is free, and so on." (tags: science medicine kooks in-the-pipeline chemistry blogs) The fraudulent invention debunkifier "Debunking…

Occasional commenter Evan Murphy emailed to bring my attention to Siege Toys, a new venture that aims to make desktop snap-together wooden trebuchets. Why? Because medieval siege warfare engines are awesome. They're looking for funding via Kickstarter, so if you've ever wanted your very own trebuchet, go place a pre-order. And lest you think this is a complete lark, their web page includes this design note: We spent a solid month and a half adjusting the prototype after figuring out the rough dimensions on a 4th-order runge-kutta simulator that I wrote a year and a half ago. So, you know,…

I'm old enough to remember when the three-point shot was a new addition to college basketball, and it was not without controversy. It's been part of the game for better than twenty years now, and you'll still hear people talking about how it's revolutionized the game, generally in a positive way. The case for this is usually based on the idea that a great three-point shooting team can hang with and even beat teams that would trounce them if they only shot twos. Another common argument is that it adds drama, giving teams that are trailing a way to claw back in the final minute. Overall, I tend…

little chief honeybee.: Life's Too Short for the Wrong Job One of the cleverest ad campaigns ever. (tags: advertising world pictures culture blogs)