As a text and academic author, you want to convey information as clearly as possible. Sometimes it helps to augment words with drawings. If your project is not an introductory course textbook, your contract probably requires you to provide illustrations suitable for publication. Many authors pay someone to create drawings rather than doing them themselves. One reason is having a "certainty" that they lack the time or ability needed to prepare them. If you have this "certainty," you may find it worthwhile to question it.

While a graphic artist may be able to create more "artistic" figures than you can, he or she is unlikely to be able to do so in a way that conveys the information you are attempting to communicate more clearly. Clarity of communication in academic publications is, of course, more important than artistic excellence. You know the message you want a drawing to convey and can visualize how it should be conveyed. Consequently, you are more likely to end up with a drawing that conveys your message if you create it yourself than if you attempt to communicate your vision to someone else.

While you may agree that you are more likely to get the drawings you want if you prepare them yourself, you may not regard this as being something you can do. Perhaps you believe you lack the technical knowledge and ability. This is unlikely to be true for at least some of the kinds of drawings you use in academic publications. There is software that will automatically create almost any type of graph imaginable from a set of numbers in a spreadsheet. If a graph created in this manner is printed with a laser or inkjet printer, it will be of the same quality as one created by a graphic artist. The reason is that most graphic artists now draw graphs this way. Furthermore, a "user friendly" drawing program, clip art, and a scanner plus a weekend's worth of technical knowledge and experience can enable you to prepare some of the other types of drawings you need for your books and other academic publications.

Another "certainty" you may have is that you lack the artistic ability to produce acceptable drawings. Consider this: Some of your colleagues may not give serious consideration to authoring an academic book because they believe that the lack the ability to write as artistically as a trade book author like James Mitchener. You, of course, know that the goal of academic writing is clarity, not art. The same is true for the drawings used in academic publications. If they communicate what you want them to communicate, then they do what they are intended.

You may also avoid preparing your own drawings because of the "certainty" that it's too time-consuming. While you may view it as acceptable to spend several thousand hours at your computer writing a book-length manuscript, you may not regard it as acceptable to spend fewer than 50 hours at your computer preparing figures for It. If you have this "certainty," try thinking of a book as being a multimedia entity rather than merely writing supplemented by illustrations.

A final thought. You may actually enjoy preparing your own drawings. I do.