So you want to publish a book, Part 2: when should you seriously think about it?

I'd like to continue discussing the book publishing process (see my first post here) by saying a few things about one of the most common questions I have encountered: when should you think about publishing a book?

I have encountered a bunch of different answers to this question. On the one hand, I've heard some say that because you should aim to publish with a top press (OxfordUP, CUP, etc.) and top-presses tend to publish well-established people--people with a good publishing record in top-rate journals--you should wait until you're well-established. On the other hand, I've heard other people say that you should write a book whenever you think you have a really great book idea--an idea that would be best expressed over the course of an entire book, rather than a series of journal articles. And I've heard many things in between.

My feeling is this: there is no pat answer as to when you should write a book. There are simply so many potentially-relevant variables--your personal preferences, risk-tolerance, your project, your career situation, and so on--that you really have to decide on a case-by-case basis what is right for you. That being said, I think the important thing is to make an informed decision. You need to know, above all else, the likely costs that attempting to publish a book carry--for, as I will now explain, they are many.

First, as a group of book publishers report over at Daily Nous, you typically need to write an entire book before you shop proposals with publishers. Publishers, by and large, will want an entire manuscript from you (more or less immediately) if they like your proposal. As such, the entire process of attempting to publish a book is fraught with immense risk at the outset. You have to write an entire book manuscript without any promise that it will actually go anywhere. Now, of course, the same is true with journal articles, which you also have to write without any promise of publication--but there is a difference: it takes far more time to draft a book, and at much greater cost, than it takes to write journal articles. To illustrate, it typically takes me a few weeks (at most) to draft a journal article. While it used to take me months in my earlier years, I've simply written so many articles at this point that drafting doesn't take very long (revising, on the other hand, can still take quite a bit of time). This means, for me at least, that the sunk-costs of journal-article writing are quite low. Although not all of my drafts go anywhere (I cast quite a few paper projects to the dustbin after drafting and deciding they are no good), I can work on several articles at a time, and not lose too much time on any given draft if it doesn't work out in the end. Books, however, are very different. It took me several months to finish the first draft of my book manuscript. This is in part because of the nature of books. Oftentimes you make discoveries (or "breakthroughs") in later chapters that require you to go back and significantly change something in earlier chapters. Because books need to 'hang together' in ways that single articles do not, you cannot typically draft one chapter, then draft another, then draft another, and so on. It is a much less linear process. You draft one chapter, then another, then another, then discover in that chapter that you need to back and redraft the first few, and so on. Not only that: because drafting a book is in many ways like drafting a number of interrelated articles simultaneously, you typically have to put all of your other research projects on the back-burner. If you want to draft a full book manuscript in a reasonable amount of time, you need to dedicate most, if not all, of your research time to it, not to other things. This means, in other words, that the costs of initially drafting a book manuscript are many. They are far, far higher than other research project. You have to sink months and months of your energy into a project, ignoring other research projects along the way. Not only that, as I will explain below, this is only the initial draft. Later on, after you hear from reviewers (and let the book you have written percolate in your mind for a few months), you have to go through it all again. But I am getting ahead of myself. Before we talk about that, there is another issue to discuss: risk.

One other thing about books is that they tend to be based on a couple "Big Ideas." However, the entire drafting and publishing process takes a very long time (I have been at it for over two years now, compared to the several weeks I typically spend on journal articles). And here is the problem: often enough, if you have a Big Idea for a book, there are often other people who are working on similar Big Ideas. When I first started drafting my book, it came to my attention that a couple of pretty well-known names were working on what sounded like pretty similar ideas. Quite frankly, this scared the heck out of me. What if I spent all this time writing a book--to the detriment of all of my other projects--only to get beaten to the punch by more established people publishing a similar idea? This is of course also a risk in journal articles. I've been beaten to the punch a few times over the course of my career, and it's always a bit disappointing. By and large, though, it is not a disaster. There are always more articles you can write. Getting beaten to the punch on a book idea, however, is plausibly a much greater disaster. Fortunately for me, some of my Big Ideas changed dramatically over the course of rewriting and revising my manuscript, taking my arguments quite far away (or so I can tell) from what other people are working on. But this was pretty much happenstance. The relevant point is this: insofar as writing, revising, and publishing a book literally takes years (compared to, say, weeks or months for a journal article), it's not just the costs of writing a book that are far higher than for writing articles: the risks are greater too. Maybe no one will publish the book. Maybe someone will, but a bigger name will publish similar arguments first, and no one will read your book. And maybe, just maybe, none of this will happen and it will all be paranoia in your own mind--but that's the thing: when you're working on something so big, and so time-consuming, it is very hard not to worry about all of the risks involved. What if you spend years working on a manuscript that goes nowhere? It's a real possibility, and you need to know this before you begin.

Finally, if I haven't scared you enough (and I'll back off shortly!), I can't emphasize enough how much more time consuming the rest of the process is. If the only thing you have ever done is written articles, consider two of the more time-consuming parts of the article-publishing process: (1) revising your papers in light of feedback and rethinking, and (2) revise-and-resubmit verdicts from journals. In my experience, these two things take a great deal of time for just about everyone. Drafting an article isn't hard, once you have a lot of practice. It's the revising--the getting the arguments right--that is the hard part. I literally redrafted one of my publications over 60 times before getting it published, rewriting it from scratch a few dozen times. This isn't typical for me, but still, rewriting and revising takes time. It especially takes time in 'revise-and-resubmits.' You not only have to satisfy reviewers with your revisions. You have to write up a response explaining the revisions you made, and why they should satisfy your reviewers. Both elements occur with books, but on steroids (as it were). After I spent several months drafting my book, I got detailed reviewer comments--many of which were helpful. I then spent months rewriting half the manuscript in response, only coming to decide--in part because of their comments but also in part because of how ideas had percolated in my mind--that I needed to go about several chapters in a fundamentally different way. So, after redrafting half the book, I started all over a third time, redrafting the entire book again. And I'm not, as far as I can tell, a crazy anomaly. I've spoken to other people who have published books (including a few very well-known people), and they've told me this is just the way things go. Books have a way of taking on a life of their own, leading you to places you didn't expect--places that require you to rewrite and revise most of the book (a few times!) before you're satisfied.

Okay, so here's the deal. If I've learned anything over the past couple of years, it is that writing, revising, and publishing a book is nothing like writing, revising, or publishing articles. It's not incrementally more difficult, more time consuming, and risky. It's a different order of these things entirely (viz. take what it's like to publish an article and multiply that by 50). Okay, maybe it's just me. If there are people out there who have had a markedly different experience--the experience of it not being so different than article publishing--I'm all ears! In any case, I've found it that difficult. Many times throughout the process (including up to a few weeks ago), I have asked myself, "What in the world have I gotten myself into?" 

So much for trying to scare you away from writing a book. Seriously, it's not my intent. :) In many respects, writing a book has been an immensely rewarding experience. It's been a rollercoaster or highs and lows--often scary, infuriating, but also joyous, in roughly equal parts--and I've known other people, including not all that well-established people, who seem to have a good experience as well. For instance, I have a friend from early on in grad school who's working in an adjunct position, with a relatively light journal-publishing record, who went and wrote a book that has already gotten some good reviews in notable places (including NDPR). He took a big risk, and however many people read or do not read his book, I suspect he would say it was time well-spent. He managed to publish, after all, the book he always wanted to write. We should all be so lucky.

So, then, when should you decide to try to publish a book? Answer: I can't tell you (sorry!:P)--but these are some of the issues you might want to consider.

Comments

[Axel Gelfert]

Thanks for this excellent post, Marcus. Perhaps the most important take-home message is that it's incredibly difficult to arrive at general statements about what it's like to be writing a book. Some of your experiences mirror my own fairly closely, but in other respects my experience with book projects has been quite different. For example, I agree entirely that timing -- when to embark on a book project -- is an extremely important factor (and one that will vary considerably from one person to the other). I had been planning to write a book on testimony ever since I finished my PhD and had secured a (2-year) postdoc in 2006. However, other projects soon took over and I kept postponing work on the book time and again. It also became clear that the book I was planning really consisted of two projects that would best be pursued separately. In the end, I was happy to find that Bloomsbury was interested in one of the two projects -- an in-depth survey of the epistemology of testimony, which also develops my own positive theory of testimonial justification in more detail -- and based on my publications on the topic and a book plan they offered me a contract. (This, too, may be unusual, in that I did not have an entire manuscript before securing a contract.) In the end, I wrote the book only *after* having submitted my tenure application, over the course of about 9 months (not counting the work that went into journal articles, some of which I'm drawing on in some of the chapters -- though there is very little verbatim overlap). So, timing really is very important. It's much easier to take on a book project when one has tenure, or a reasonable prospect of gaining tenure; without it, it can be quite daunting.

Regarding the drafting/re-drafting process, however, my experience has been quite different. Sure, I've revised the book a number of times, and have gone over the full manuscript a few times to increase coherence and the way everything 'hangs together'. But I don't think I would have had the patience to revise everything 60 times! Perhaps this is just a matter of style: While I think it's important that a book has coherence and doesn't just consist of a series of 'stand-alone' article-style chapters, I do think it's sensible to aim for a 'modular' approach. This way, I think one can limit the extent to which changes in one chapter have a 'ripple effect' on other chapters. Sure, there may be a need for revisions, but ideally the structure of the argument would be such that it prevents changes from spreading uncontrollably. Of course, if one's views have fundamentally changed over the course of writing the book, things may be different. Perhaps, then, another important take-home message is that book projects are best pursued by taking the long view -- both by asking oneself what it is that one wants the book to achieve, and by being prepared to explore different bits of the argument via journal articles, conference preparations, etc., so that by the time one sits down and writes the book, one can be reasonably confident that one won't have to change one's mind (or at least not too much, or too often...).

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Axel: Thanks for your comment. I actually agree with most of what you say. First, there's only one paper I rewrote 60-odd times. That case is not at all typical for me. It was just a particular project that I cared *very* much about. My point was simply that however difficult revising papers is, revising book manuscripts isn't incrementally more difficult. It's a different kind of difficult. Anyway, I agree with you on modularity. It is important to try to make books as modular as they can be, so that changes to one chapter have fewer ripples to changes to others. Indeed, I think this is a very nice point, indicating a unique challenge to book writing: making the entire manuscript modular in that very way. But notice: even that it part of a broader challenge, the one I describe in my post. For although "more modular" is probably good, the basic point still stands: there is only *so* modular a book can be. They still have to hang together in ways that you never have to worry about at the level of individual journal articles--so the whole question of how modular a book can be, and revising it to the extent that it hangs together, are some of the unique challenges of book writing!

[Axel Gelfert]

Hi Marcus, thanks for the clarification; I'm glad the 60-odd revisions were an outlier! And I agree that striking the right balance between "too modular" (which would mean "chapters could have been published separately as journal articles without any great intellectual loss") and "too interdependent" ("any changes in the argument will automatically affect all the chapters") is a unique challenge of book-writing. In fact, it seems to me that publishing ambitious papers -- those that cover some ground, rather than break everything up into "least pulishable units" -- is a good way of practicing how to strike this balance. Looking back, having explored the major themes of my book in a number of longer papers was excellent practice and helped me figure out various aspects of the larger book project...

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Axel: Sorry for taking so long to respond. It's been a very hectic week! Anyway, I totally agree with you that publishing ambitious papers is a good way to practice these elements of book writing. I remember reading somewhere that a decade or two ago the average philosophy journal article was 30-40 pages of double-spaced type, whereas they are only somewhere between 20-20 pages today. I think this trend (if indeed it is one) sort of maps onto the trend of focusing on smaller, ambitious ideas and journal articles rather than books--two trends which I have raised concerns about in the past (I think philosophy should be ambitious, and that monographs are important for this reason!).

[Josh Mugg]

Marcus-

I am curious what a 'written draft' looks like. I can write rough drafts very quickly (I had a rough draft of my dissertation completed in a little over a year, while writing other articles as well). My revising takes (I think) longer than other folks though. I have an 'book length' idea (my diss was sort of the first half of it), but I am not sure I want to commit to having a nicely polished manuscript before I can do anything with it. So my question, to which I suspect there is only a vague answer, is 'how polished does the draft need to be before approaching a publisher'? When I send something off to a journal, I aim to send something that I think is publishable in its present form. Is that how polished a book draft should be?

[book boy]

Josh:
The more finished your manuscript is, the better. Certainly, the higher you aim with respect to publishers (Oxford and Cambridge on the high end ... etc. on the lower end) the more polished the manuscript should be. It also helps, certainly with the best publishers, to have a research record on the topic your book addresses. A research record is not only a few publications, but some response to your work (something that is not fully in your control).
I speak as one who has reviewed both proposals and manuscripts for book publishers.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Josh: I agree with 'book boy'. The more finished, the better. It also helps to have a research record or public profile in the discipline, as book publishers are interested in sales (this isn't to say that they won't consider proposals or manuscripts from early-career, but the more established you are, the easier--or so I understand it--publishing a book is). It's also worth noting that some publishers are resistant to publishing revised dissertations. Although it sounds like your envisioned project is much more than that, it is something to be aware of.