Weekly Wisdom #46 Meet everyone you can in your field, and make an effort to understand their research before assuming yours is relevant!

This weeks guest post is one for the creative writers and arts scholars amongst us and comes from author Isabel Ashdown. Isabel  has a first class degree in English & Creative Writing, and is the winner of the Hugo Donnelly Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement. In 2010 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, passing with distinction.  Her first novel Glasshopper (Observer ‘Best Debut Novels of the Year’, London Evening Standard ‘Best Books of the Year’) was published to critical acclaim in 2009 and an extract from the novel won the Mail on Sunday Novel Competition. Isabel Ashdown’s second novel Hurry Up and Wait is due out in June 2011. You can follow Isabel on Twitter @IsabelAshdown

One of the most valuable pieces of advice I received early in my writing career was from a tutor during my time at the University of Chichester.  It was this: if you are to stand any chance of getting your writing published, you must work hard to get examples in print.  This means entering competitions, sending your poetry and short stories off to magazines and journals, and sticking at it until you have a portfolio of successes to show to prospective agents and publishers. Read more

I hope from this week’s posts you can now see the different ways that social media applications can be used for your research and researcher development. Different applications and strategies will be applicable to different disciplines and research methodologies however, what will apply to everyone are digital research ethics. In this post I discuss the three major ethical implications raised in my PhD research – Informed Consent, Access & Data Protection: Read more

As part of our week devoted to social networking here we present the second in the two part guest post by our intern Lucy Wickens on how to use Facebook for networking and research, you can see her previous post here.

Welcome back!

So hopefully by now you have successfully set up an account and are eager to become avid Face- bookers! Read more

This is the second of our social media week posts. Here Eloise Zoppos examines how postgraduate students can manage their professional social media use. Eloise Zoppos is now embracing the virtual for the professional and you can find out more about her on her website http://eloisezoppos.com or follow her on Twitter @eloise_z.

Lately it seems like everything virtual is now normal: using Facebook to contact friends, reading the news online, calling people through Skype, online banking. Over the last few years, this rise in online activities has slowly begun to seep into the academic world with online conferences, virtual internships and online resumes (hosted on both LinkedIn and personal websites) just to name a few. This got me thinking about whether as a postgraduate student interested in getting published I should be investing more time into using social media for professional purposes. Read more

This week we are running a series of posts on different aspects of social media use in relation to conducting research and for researcher development. It appears to be particularly relevant as the Wall Street Journal Health published an article yesterday (25^th April 2011) that illustrated the value of social media in research:

A new clinical trial found that lithium didn’t slow the progression of Lou Gehrig’s disease, but the findings released Sunday also showed that the use of a social network to enrol patients and report and collect data may deliver dividends for future studies. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #40 Don’t give your ideas away and let someone publish before you; publicise the outline of your book, not the details!

Isn’t that what we all want to hear? Well yes and no as it depends who wants to publish it. Most PhD students I know have received at least one email with the exciting title ‘We want to publish you thesis’ or words to that effect and the follows this kind of line …

Dear ….

I am Joe Bloggs and I work for (insert name of random company here). We would like to offer you the possibility of making your academic paper / thesis available as printed book.

I would appreciate if you could confirm your interest in our publishing house and I will be glad to provide you with detailed information about our services.

I am looking forward to receiving a positive response from you

Read more

On Saturday 12th March I’ll be representing PhD2Publsihed and Arts Future Book at UCL’s Spring ReSkIN event. ReSkIN is a compulstory  seminar and support scheme for PhD students working in the field of Art History and Visual Culture. This means it unites students from  six different colleges within the university who all work across the same discipline so that they can meet each other and find out more about the issues they face going forwards. The spring event looks closely at writing and publishing in the arts and I’m delighted to be on a panel with a diverse range of expertise.

I’m going to do two things in my talk that reflect aspects of my  projects. One is that I’ll look at how you can use the web and social media in particular to build your platform as a researcher and author. The other is that I’ll provide a quick tour though some inovative uses of technology in academic publishing. Anything from Open Humanities Press to Gamer Theory. I’m really looking forward to this event and hope to see you there!

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. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #31

Look to writers / academics you admire for inspiration!

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.

Weekly Wisdom #29

Use twitter to network & research your subject area.

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. Read more

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: Read more