Jobs.ac.uk tells you about contributing to an academic journal

New blogpost from the helpful folk at jobs.ac.uk:-

Academic writing: contributing to a journal

True imaginary friends: a history of Scottish song collectors

The story of a book: Karen's blog, True Imaginary Friends.

What happens when you get a book contract?  Here's one woman's story.  (Of course, our stories are all different.  What's yours?)

CHASE Leeds conference on authenticity in editions

CHASE: Collecting Historical Annotated String Music Editions

Authorship and 'Authenticity' in Composition, Editing and PerformanceCONFERENCE April 4-5 2012

University of Leeds (UK) School of Music

Interested in questions of authenticity in performance?

The conference programme and abstracts are now available.  Bursaries are available for postgraduate students who wish to attend.

How do I publish a book (part 2)

Pat Thomson suggests this self-publishing guide: 25 Things You Need To Know, by David Carnoy (on the CNET Reviews website). 

This link has been added to Whittaker Live's first self-publishing blogpost, How do I publish a book?

How do I publish a book?

Subject librarians learn to expect the unexpected.  Today's question is: How do I get a book published?

1. Are you looking for a publisher, or self-publishing?
2. Here's a self-publishing guide, on Tom Andry's blog.  Our thanks to Pat Thomson for her advice here.  We bloggers stick together!
3. Pat also suggests this self-publishing guide: 25 Things You Need To Know, by David Carnoy (on the CNET Reviews website)
4. You need an ISBN;  this will make it easier to sell and promote your book. Here's a useful link: http://isbn-information.com/get-isbn.html
5. So, to get an ISBN, where do you go? In the UK, it's Neilson Book Services.
6. You need to have publisher status.

NB: we don't claim to be experts! Any useful info that comes our way will be added here in due course.

And a Happy New Year!

2012

Whittaker wishes all 'his' followers a happy, healthy and productive New Year.  And may we all be solvent if not wealthy.  May the Whittaker Library be a buzzing hive of activity, with patrons aided and assisted by your enthusiastic Library & IT staff.

Extra-murally, 2012 is going to be the Year of the Deadline.  'Whittaker' has a contract to deliver a book by 30th April 2012.  All solicitous enquiries, encouragements and otherwise supportive comments will be very welcome indeed. 

But enough of this pseudonym stuff - to get myself in the right frame of mind for the task ahead - no, this is not procrastination! - I'm looking for a new mug to add to the collection.  I like, 'When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.'  But it's big, which in Cafepress terms is huge.  I want a Cafepress small (everyone else's medium) mug.

'Working on a bestseller' is a good slogan, but - oh, I'm so fussy - I don't like the art-work.  And 'Writers hate deadlines' is another apt one, but it's not positive enough!

The winner is: 'Writer's block is when your imaginary friends refuse to talk to you'.  Very nice.  (As regular visitors will have realised, there are a number of Victorian Scottish song-collectors who are very real to me. I know far more people in 19th century Edinburgh than I do today!   Alexander Campbell, R. A. Smith, George Farquhar Graham and Finlay Dun are like close friends; In London, William Chappell and his successors are a source of endless interest; and in the Hebrides, the Maclean-Clephane sisters were fascinating women.  So, too, was Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser.)

But deadlines are about more than mugs.  Here are David Seah's Productivity Tools, as recommended by The Thesis Whisperer.

Meanwhile, my own all-time favourites are Diigo, Mendeley, and Evernote, with Copac always in the wings to back up my evidence.  Where would I be without them?

What are your most useful productivity/ time management aids?

Wish me luck!