STP E-Books

E-book Proposal Submission Policy

Although the editor-in-chief invites some of the Society’s e-books, most e-books develop from proposals submitted by Society members and other teachers of psychology. All proposals must be submitted electronically to the editor-in-chief. Proposals should include the following information:

• A working title
• An overview of the e-book, including its purpose and scope
• A rationale for why this e-book would be a valuable contribution to the teaching of psychology literature
• A working table of contents
• An estimated length of the e-book, both in terms of number of chapters and overall page length
• A proposed timeline for completing the book
• If the book is an edited volume, a list of prospective contributors

The editor-in-chief and at least three associate editors will review all proposals, including invited proposals. If the proposal is accepted, the editor-in-chief will assign the project to an associate editor who will serve as the action editor for it. For some projects, the editor-in-chief will also serve as action editor.

Please direct any and all inquires about the Society’s e-book publishing program to the e-book editor - e-books@teachpsych.org.

Instructions for Authors

Writing style (bias-free language), in-text citations, and references should follow the guidelines in the most recent edition of the Publication Manual of the APA (see http://www.apastyle.org/)

Because your published document will most likely be a PDF file created from your word processing document, the format for manuscript preparation departs somewhat from APA style in the following ways:

1. The title page for the entire book should be designed to include the title, authors, and an image relevant to the content of the book.
2. On the first page of each chapter, place the chapter title at the top of the page, the author(s) on the next line (do not list degrees), and the affiliation on the next line.  
3. Do not use a running head in the document header.
4. Use single spacing in the body of your text, with no indentation of the first line of the paragraph.
   
5. You may single or double space between paragraphs. (Final formatting will include a 6 pt spacing between paragraphs).
6. Use Microsoft Word’s default styles.  All of the text (other than headings or specially formatted text) should have the "Normal" style applied. Apply the "Heading 1" style to the chapter title and the "Subtitle" style to the author and affiliation lines.  Apply "Heading 2" to any main headings within a chapter and "Heading 3" to any sub-headings within a chapter. Word's default styles will not look like proper APA format headings, but once the styles have been applied to the headings, the editor can change all instances of the headings in the whole book at once by changing one style.  Using styles on the headings also makes it easy to generate an automated table of contents with page numbers.
7. Tables and figures should be included in the appropriate location within the body of the text (not separately at the end).
   
8. Hyperlinks in the text and in the references should be live (i.e., clicking on the link will open the URL in a web browser).
9. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) should be included in the reference, where possible.

Additional Instructions for Editors

1. Confirm that chapter authors have followed the guidelines for authors.
2. Combine all separate chapters into one Microsoft Word file, with pages consecutively numbered.
3. The title page of the complete e-book should include some cover art, with the title and name of editor(s) integrated into the picture, or placed immediately beneath the picture.  The first page will be used as the thumbnail image on the ebook web site so the text on the title page should be as large as it can. (See the TIA2011 ebook thumbnail at: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/tia.php)