This week Tim Rutherford-Johnson is looking at writing outside the comfort zone. Tim is an  academic copy-editor and proofreader with a plan to help writers feel more comfortable. (It starts with cake.)

It’s sad but true: even if the central chapters of a PhD thesis – the home of the research itself – are strong, things like the literature review, the introduction, the historical background and the conclusion are often written to a noticeably lower standard. When I’m proofreading, these framing chapters are often where I spend most of my time. Read more

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

This week we explore something very close to my heart, grammar. Grammatical errors were something my PhD Supervisor constantly berated me for. Here Maria Rainier discusses what you should think about before pressing ‘enter’. Maria is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education where she writes about education, online degrees, and what it takes to succeed as a student taking a bachelors degree program remotely from home. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

There’s little more embarrassing or discrediting than being caught with a grammatical error in an otherwise pristine paper being considered for—or has already undergone—publication.  The green squiggly lines in Microsoft Word are no help, and Spell Check can’t correct the misuse of words like affect versus effect (which will be discussed below).  Instead, you’re better off knowing in advance what some common problem areas are and how to tackle these grammatical mishaps. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #38 Adjust your writing style for your new audience (the one that isn’t examining your PhD)!

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.

Weekly Wisdom #34

If you haven’t before start taking an interest in grammar.

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 #33

Learn to love writing.

I must confess (and I do hang my feminist head in shame) that when I started out researching publishing processes, gender bias wasn’t on my mind. I hadn’t considered whether I was more or less likely to get published than my male academic counter-parts. But then two things happened:

First, I heard a really interesting edition of Great Lives, on Radio 4, on the life of journalist Mary Stott. She was the first editor of the Guardian’s women’s page and discussion centred a lot about the all-too-recent notion that if women were going to read information in a newspaper they wouldn’t want to read the same information as men. And it really got me thinking about very recent shifts in the publishing industry that give women readers and writers more freedom.  Second, I was sent a link to an article in Bitch magazine about the disproportionately small number of women writers being written about in literary journals. 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