{"id":547126,"date":"2026-08-27T04:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newjerseyheadlines.com\/news\/story\/547126\/at-upsi-ten-academics-skipped-the-twoyear-book-deal-and-published-in-48-hours-instead.html"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:00:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:00:20","slug":"at-upsi-ten-academics-skipped-the-twoyear-book-deal-and-published-in-48-hours-instead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.northcarolinaheadlines.com\/news\/story\/547126\/at-upsi-ten-academics-skipped-the-twoyear-book-deal-and-published-in-48-hours-instead.html","title":{"rendered":"At UPSI, Ten Academics Skipped the Two-Year Book Deal and Published in 48 Hours Instead"},"content":{"rendered":"
A senior English instructor turned her PhD thesis into a real book. A Nigerian student wrote about building a life in a country that wasn’t hers. A teenager wrote the guide she wished someone had handed her before she kept putting her life on hold. None of them had written a book before. All of them had one finished, and published, within 48 hours. <\/div>\n

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TANJONG MALIM, PERAK, MALAYSIA – August 26, 2026 –<\/strong> The occasion was “Write Your Book In A Weekend,” held 1–2 July at Sultan Idris Education University (UPSI). Ten participants completed and published full-length books through Lulu.com, an independent international publisher, by the close of the two-day workshop. Several more from the same cohort have finished their manuscripts in the weeks since.<\/p>\n

A Faculty Built on Innovation, Facing an Old Problem<\/strong><\/p>\n

UPSI’s Faculty of Computing & Meta-Technology trains people to build the systems of the future. But when it came to publishing — a requirement baked into most academic KPIs — even its own staff were stuck using a process that hadn’t changed in decades.<\/p>\n

“As part of maintaining their KPIs, academics are expected to write books,” said Associate Professor Dr. Suzani Mohamad Samuri<\/strong>, Deputy Dean of the faculty, who organized the workshop. “What I kept seeing among my own colleagues wasn’t a lack of ideas — it was people sitting on research and expertise for years because no one had ever shown them a process that fit around teaching, supervision, and family life. That gap is exactly what this workshop closed.”<\/p>\n

From Doctoral Thesis to Bookshelf<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr. Thilaga Ravinthar<\/strong>, a senior English language instructor, was the first participant to publish. She built her book, From Silent Classrooms to Employable Graduates<\/a>, directly from her PhD thesis on dialogic teaching.<\/p>\n

“My thesis sat in a repository where maybe a handful of people would ever read it,” Dr. Thilaga said. “Turning it into a real book, something instructors could actually pick up and use, felt like giving my own research a second life — and I didn’t think it was possible to do that in a weekend, let alone see it live and purchasable by Sunday night.”<\/p>\n

The Method: Structure, Content, Execution<\/strong><\/p>\n

The workshop was led by Dr. Izdihar Jamil, Ph.D.<\/strong>, a 21x bestselling author and founder of Diamond Queen LLC (USA), using her proprietary Author Accelerator Method<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The method runs on three stages, known as S-C-E<\/strong>: Structure<\/strong> — mapping the book’s framework, reader experience, and central theme before a single chapter is drafted; Content<\/strong> — writing toward one clear question: how does this solve the reader’s problem; and Execution<\/strong> — preparing the manuscript for publication and getting it live. Every UPSI participant moved through all three stages inside the same two days.<\/p>\n

“People don’t fail to write books because they lack ideas or expertise,” said Dr. Izdihar Jamil. “They fail because no one ever gave them a process built for how busy professionals actually think and work. What happened at UPSI wasn’t luck — it’s what happens every time someone finally gets a system instead of a blank page.”<\/p>\n

Ten Writers, Ten Reasons They’d Been Waiting<\/strong><\/p>\n