Browsing the blog archives for February, 2011

28Feb11 Weekly Wisdom #32
Posted by Charlotte Frost

Weekly Wisdom #32

Dare to ask collegues about the contracts they’ve accepted and what worked or didn’t!

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24Feb11 How I went from PhD to Published: Part II
Posted by Charlotte Frost

As I said in my last post, I’ve signed a book deal and am walking you through the steps that got me there. Where were we up to? Oh yes, I’d set up this website but lost valuable book-pitching time to handling it alone.

With an intern to help me with PhD2Published and bit of time back, I decided to think strategically again. I looked at the topic of my book and what its significance would be at a broader level and realised that that it would gel with a project on the future of academic publishing in the arts. In fact, I noticed what had been staring me in the face from the start, both PhD2Published and my book were yet more examples of my fascination with broadcast tools in the arts. And then I noticed something even more important, my book could become the test case for the project! This meant the book and project could support and lend weight to each other – not to mention reciprocally nurturing PhD2Published.

With this academic alchemy in mind, I researched the people best able to support my vision for the project and, impressed by the work I’d already done with PhD2Published they all came on board. Continue Reading »

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23Feb11 PhD2Published will be at InterFace 2011
Posted by Sarah-Louise Quinnell

InterFace is a new international forum to learn, share and network between the fields of Humanities and Technology.

Below is an outline for the conference and the call for participants the conference will be held at University College London between 27th – 29th July 2011:

The symposium aims to foster collaboration and shared understanding between scholars in the humanities and in computer science, especially where their efforts converge on exchange of subject matter and method. With a focus on the interests and concerns of Ph.D students and early career researchers, the programme will include networking activities, opportunities for research exposition, and various training and workshop activities. Continue Reading »

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21Feb11 Weekly Wisdom #31
Posted by Charlotte Frost

Weekly Wisdom #31

Look to writers / academics you admire for inspiration!

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17Feb11 How I went from PhD to Published: Part I
Posted by Charlotte Frost

I’ve signed a book deal and my first academic book is due to come out mid 2012! But how did this happen? Well, I’ll tell you one thing, it wasn’t down to magic! Nope, it’s pretty simple when you look back over the last few months. I’ll walk you through it.

I decided that I wanted to try more of the writing I’d learnt how to do with my PhD and figured that with the job market looking so bleak; it was a really good time to focus on getting my first book published.

I talked to everyone I knew who knew something about academic publishing and after one particularly useful bit of advice, I decided not to try and publish the content of my thesis now, but take a section that was of standalone interest and work it up into a book.

I read submission guidelines on a range of academic press websites and wrote a proposal. I made a list of courses I that might use my book and added it to the proposal.

I sent the proposal out and got rejected. Continue Reading »

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15Feb11 Author Tips: Verina Gfader
Posted by Sarah-Louise Quinnell

This weeks authors tips come from Verina Gfader, author of ADVENTURE-LANDING a compendium of animation, Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2011

Top 5 Tips for Getting Published:

1.    Don’t wait too long to approach publishers after completion. If you consider a later publication choose one which also includes post-doc research.

2.    What’s your preferred publisher? Try them first.

3.    Before that, identify what the book will be about? What kind of publication? Who is the reader/audience?

4.    Think about funding! (essential), identify possible funding bodies, sponsors

5.    Do you “need” the publication? It takes a lot of time. Think about what you want to do, career-wise

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14Feb11 Weekly Wisdom #30
Posted by Charlotte Frost

Weekly Wisdom #30

Build a potential market for the book before it even exists by marketing your area of research on social media sites & at conferences.

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10Feb11 A Couple of Rules for Getting a Book Deal
Posted by Charlotte Frost

stumbled across this great post: The Five Rules of Getting a Book Deal by writer Jean Hannah Edelstein and really liked it. It’s not primarily for academic writers, but rules two and three really got me thinking…

Rule two, according to Edelstein, is ‘Research the Business of Publishing’. She notes: “Yes, you should research your book, but you also need to research the business of publishing.” This is something that PhD2Published was specifically set up to help with. It’s all very well being told by your supervisor or other academic chums that you need to publish a book, but unless you wrote your thesis on academic publishing for the early-career academic (which now I think about it might have been a better idea), what on earth do you know about publishing? Edelstein goes on:

“What books have been published that are similar to yours, with which your book will compete? Who published them? How were they published? What market are they aimed at? Some aspiring writers think that they should just submit their work to everyone under the sun, until someone bites, but that’s a waste of your time (and theirs) – you want to identify the people who may be genuinely interested in your project and target them carefully.” Continue Reading »

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9Feb11 PhD2Published Contributes to Digital Researcher 11
Posted by Sarah-Louise Quinnell

Digital Researcher is an interactive event run by Vitae and the British Library for postgraduate researchers and research staff to help researchers make the most of new technologies in their research.

The interactive event, which will be held at the British Library, is for postgraduate researchers and research staff. It will include presentations and interactive sessions on subjects such as microblogging, RSS feeds, social networking and social citation sharing.  Participants will explore and develop the skills needed for research in an increasingly digital world and gain ideas for managing information (DR11 site)

Phd2Published will be attending this event ‘virtually’ , contributing to the discussions and the DR 11 blog, see our first post here. We will also be tweeting using the hashtag #DR11

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8Feb11 Please allow me to introduce myself …
Posted by Sarah-Louise Quinnell

Hello and welcome to my first post as Managing Editor of phd2published. Now that Charlotte has secured her book contract she has, partially, passed the baton on to me, so I can document my progress toward and my experiences with getting my book published. Charlotte will still be documenting her experiences of writing her first book as well as contributing other relevant posts here and there.

I thought I would use this first post to introduce myself and my plans and ideas for what I want to bring to this site:

Who am I and why am I here?

I am a social scientist, more specifically a Development Geographer and my research interests lie in the areas of international environmental governance and development planning and financing, particularly in relation to sub-Saharan African countries. I completed my PhD in the Geography Department of King’s College London in 2010 and I am now working toward securing a post-doctoral research position and, as my examiners keep reminding me, publishing!

I came to this site through twitter, I love to tweet, as you meet so many new people and find invaluable pieces of information like this site. I looked through the pages and thought while I know how to approach post-doc research through a mass of grant and job applications, how do I address the issue of publishing? I suddenly thought that I really don’t know how to go about developing a publishing strategy, this worried me. Continue Reading »

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7Feb11 Weekly Wisdom #29
Posted by Charlotte Frost

Weekly Wisdom #29

Use twitter to network & research your subject area.

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2Feb11 Is your PhD sending you GaGa?!
Posted by Sarah-Louise Quinnell

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2Feb11 Author Tips: Kelli Fuery
Posted by Charlotte Frost

This week, Dr Kelli Fuery, author of New Media: Culture and Image, has given us her top tips for getting published organized around the theme of interdisciplinarity:

1. Interdisciplinarity: on Publishing

Previous tips in PhD2Published have emphasized the importance of learning the process of academic publishing. In my experience, I have divorced the world of academic publishing and Academia. Publishers, all publishers, have one main goal – to make money. So in very dry terms, you need to present them with a product that they can sell and the more people that they can sell that product to, the better. Academics rarely think about their research in that way but it is a great start when you begin to write monograph proposals. A PhD uncut needs reworking in order to become a product that can be sold.

Identifying the core claims of your Doctoral dissertation and connecting them to specific fields of publishers will also help you identify target market which publishers can pitch to. Learning which publishers sell textbooks and which don’t is a great asset.

Interdisciplinarity in publishing means presenting your product and making it appealing for more than one target audience. The subject, the methodology, the level of writing – all these things can be presented in such a way that offer variety, diversity and depth to publishers so that they become aware of how your research can be ‘sold’ to more than one market. How you present that and persuade them is up to you. Continue Reading »

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1Feb11 It’s Official: PhD2Published Works!
Posted by Charlotte Frost

ell, it’s official: the PhD2Published method works!

We’ve had our first success story: me (Charlotte Frost PhD2Published’s founder)!

Yes, that’s right, I’m writing this blog post as someone who has signed a contract to get their first academic book published! You may have already seen me get excited about this!

Around the time I set up this resource, I wrote my first book proposal and had an instant rejection. I licked my wounds and set about learning how to make a successful pitch (which led me to establish this site – why not pass on my research?!). I then wrote draft two, which did get sent out to another publisher, but before they had the chance to reply I made a third even sharper draft (after receiving some excellent advice from Gary Smailes of BubbleCow). It was this third version that received the following response from Gylphi editor Anthony Levings: Continue Reading »

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