This weeks Top Tips are from Sarah Cook co-author of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media

Publishing can be a waiting game, while you wait to hear if a publisher is going to accept a proposal or not, and then, hopefully, while your manuscript is being peer-reviewed.. Here are some tips (noted with the benefit of hindsight) for how to manage that waiting game.

1. When your dissertation is finished, don’t immediately publish all the best bits in the first invitation you get to contribute a chapter to another book, in case you later get the chance to write your own book! You don’t want to have contractually signed away the first-publishing-rights to that researched material and then have your own book proposal accepted at another publisher. This happened to me. If you do get asked to contribute a chapter to someone else’s edited anthology or journal of course do it, but pick a single idea from your thesis, or a single chapter (not the conclusion!) and rework it accordingly. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #41 Remember that few publishers will be interested in publishing a thesis and that (possibly major) redrafting should be planned well before you pitch!

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

Weekly Wisdom #39 Assess the extent to which publishing a book now will support your career plans over all!

An article on The Chronicle of Higher Education called: The Road From Dissertation to Book Has a New Pothole: the Internet raises some important points about whether a thesis that exists online can still be published.

The important thing to consider is  that most publishing has to function as a viable business model. If a thesis has been freely available online, why would anyone buy it? And you need to bear in mind that when your book is sold, it’s likely to be funding not it’s own production, but that of the next book in line, so you’ve got more weight on your shoulders than just your career.

That said, as Gary Hall elegantly argues in Digitize This Book, these business models are being rapidly redeveloped by forms of online content sharing. So for example, your work might reach a bigger audience by being freely available online and this might become a surer route to career success.

Also, remember that presses seldom publish a thesis as is. We have a series coming up by Sarah Caro, author of How to Publish Your PhD, that explains how much redrafting must go on before your average thesis is even remotely book-shaped.

Or you can take my route and work on a book that expands one element of your thesis and maybe come back to tackling the whole thing later (losing that element if need be). Or just have done with your thesis altogether, see it as a ladder you climbed to get this far and then kick it away and start on the next one…

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

This weeks advice on how to finish your book on schedule comes from Lauren Bailey. Lauren is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about online colleges. Questions and comments can be sent to: blauren99 @gmail.com.

Submitting a proposal and getting it accepted can be difficult enough, but the real work comes along when you must deliver on your promise and complete the book on schedule. Whether you are publishing your dissertation or are writing a different work related to your research and expertise, it pays to nip procrastination in the bud and have a plan for finishing your book on schedule. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #37 Don’t set up a resource to help other people get published while working on your own first book. There isn’t time for both!

Weekly Wisdom #35

If the jobs aren’t out there, pour your energies into getting your book pitched & written.

This weeks guest post comes from Dr Inger Mewburn who is a Research Fellow at RMIT University in Australia.  Inger does research on research education and writes about it.  Follow her on twitter and don’t forget to visit her blog The Thesis Whisperer.

I’ve been working in the research education field for some six years and continue to be surprised by the passive attitude of many students to publishing. Some seem actively scared of the process, or set their sights on lower ranked journals and conferences, perhaps because they are afraid of rejection. I think part of the problem is that students are not coached on developing a publishing strategy. A clear publishing strategy will help you get the most out of your study time and kick start your post doctoral career.
There’s three main reasons that you should publish while you are doing your research degree. All of these reasons will inform the outline of your publishing strategy

1) One of the ways in which examiners determine the quality of PhD is the extent to which it is publishable. If parts of the PhD have already been published this will give you some confidence about the outcome of the examination process.

Read more

Weekly Wisdom #32

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

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. Read more

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

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. Read more

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