The good:
- I'm caught up with grading in two of my four classes.
- I had a lovely 2-hour-long lunch with MC at Bob Evans. We both ordered breakfast. I think I was one of only three people there who were under the age of 65.
- $700+ later, the bumper of my car has been replaced with a shiny new bumper, after the accident earlier in the month. Did I mention it was a former student who hit me? Classic.
- The changes to our major passed without incident through the department.
- The kittens are having a little post-dinner bathtime wrestling match at my feet. I do believe that they missed me today.
- I bit the bullet and stayed at school until 7 to finish and submit applications for: release time in the spring (as if I'll get it - ha!), a summer fellowship (money without teaching! please, please please let me get it, though I'm not optimistic), an internal grant for money to travel and to hire a research assistant to do grunt work (also please, please, please, but unlikely), my sabbatical (if I don't get it, I will raise holy motherfucking hell).
- I've made tentative plans to have lunch with New Colleague, whom I like a ton.
- I'm way behind on grading in two of my four classes. Tomorrow is another day, I suppose.
- I'm booked solid tomorrow with meetings and teaching, and also I've got to get that grading done in the AM. Looks like I'll arrive at the office at 10 AM and be booked solid until my class ends at 9 PM.
- Now that the new major has passed through the department, I have to spend the weekend doing all of the curriculum forms to put the changes through the university curricular process. Because we've entirely restructured the major, this will involve doing a separate curriculum form for each and every course we have on the books. I want to die.
- The rest of my weekend will be consumed with minor revisions to two articles.
- I hate everything.
- I just got my "royalties" statement from my publisher. Of course, I don't actually get royalties until the book sells 500 copies, and thus really this is just a statement of how many copies my book has sold, and how much money the publisher has made off of my little book. So it's sold 144 copies in the 10 mos. or so that it's been out. Is that good? I don't think any reviews have actually appeared, though I've heard good things from people via word of mouth. But seriously: what would "good" sales figures look like? Because I have no fucking idea. I'm honestly pretty surprised that without reviews 144 copies have been sold. Also, the thing still isn't listed in the MLA bibliography. I suppose I need to do something about that. Right?
4 comments:
How wonderful about your book!! I am so excited for you. Too bad you can't advertise it on here - it would fly off the shelves!
I don't think 144 is bad for a serious academic book. Remember that it's likely targeting a narrow audience (not intro/undergrad students) and is expensive, so 144 is actually pretty good. No one gets rich off of academic publshing - sucks but true (unless you write a popular intro text in a big market area, that is ). Congrats!
Dr. C, want to join me in grading jail? It's not comfy but the company's amusing.
I honestly don't think I'll have a day where grading isn't hanging over my head until marks are submitted for the last of my classes. Which, depending on the vagaries of exam scheduling could be after Christmas (the larger the class, the greater chance it is to have an exam at the very end of the exam period).
I can't offer you any advice about the book sales for comparison but I agree that it'd be good to get it into the MLA listing for maximum exposure. Once the reviews come out, that will help, too, but in the meantime. . . back to marking.
(And regarding the curriculum revision? I only had to revise our graduate curriculum a few years back. That was hard enough. I tried to make everyone fill out their own curriculum change forms since ours requires a copy of a sample course outline. My colleagues, normally quite angelic, were unmotivated and mostly unhelpful.)
any books you sell as an academic is good!
My co-editor and I have gotten about $300 bucks worth of royalties in the 4 years our book has been out, but only because we get royalties from Copy #1 on the electronic copies. Otherwise, we wouldn't have seen a dime.
We figure it's about .000000001 per hour pay.
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