A while back, Marcus addressed a question from Big Dawg about how to turn one’s dissertation into a book. I finished a project similar to that during the last semester, so I can provide some timely input on the subject. I’ll start with a short summary of how I got the book contract, and then I’ll say a bit about how to approach a project of this sort.
Background
I got my book contract in a somewhat unusual way. When I was midway through graduate school, my dissertation advisor published an environmental ethics textbook with Routledge. Sometime afterward, Routledge sent him an email asking him to provide some feedback on their editorial process and his experience. Evidently, one of the survey questions was about in-progress work in the field of environmental ethics that he thought might be of interest to the editors who work on their series of books in environmental studies. One of the things he mentioned was that I was working on a dissertation at the intersection of the ethics of procreation and environmental ethics.
Months after this happened, I was contacted by one of the editors from Routledge asking about my dissertation. That was in Summer 2015, and I was only getting started on the project. Even so, I sent her a copy of my prospectus and promised to follow up with her when things were further along. Down the road, after the dissertation was finished, I made good on that promise, and she requested to see some chapters. So I provided them. A while later, I was invited to submit a formal proposal for review. The proposal was essentially a 4000-5000 word pitch for the project. Beyond providing a summary of my main arguments and a sketch of the book’s layout, I needed to explain how it compared to similar books and who the audience for the book would be.
My proposal was eventually submitted to three peer reviewers, and the process from that point proceeded similarly to a revise-and-resubmit verdict from a journal. I got a bunch of comments from each reviewer, and in several cases, the reviewers disagreed about what features of the book should be changed. Even so, I did the best I could to accommodate each of the reviewers and improve the proposal in light of their feedback. All three reviewers thought the book addressed a significant issue and had a clear audience among the academic community, so there wasn’t much to address on that front.
All of that work was basically preparation for a meeting between the supervising editor and the marketing department at Routledge. As I understood it, that meeting is what would determine whether the book actually got green-lighted. Although I wasn’t there, I was told it went well, and then we discussed terms of a book contract. I am not sure how Routledge’s process compares with other publishers, but I know that with some publishers, you have to submit the whole manuscript before you can even get a contract. That wasn’t how things worked in this case.
Dissertation, Part 2
One of the good things about working on a big project connected to your dissertation is that you already have a lot of material that you can use. Your dissertation is your intellectual property, and ordinarily, you are free to use anything from it in future work. But dissertations are also written primarily to appease the idiosyncratic concerns of your committee and get a degree. A published book will need to reach a broader audience. Additionally, publishers are generally not as keen to publish material that is freely available for people to read, so there’s an expectation in most cases that a big chunk of your book will be meaningfully different from what was in your dissertation.
Now if you’re writing a book that derives from your dissertation, some of the big questions are already answered. You know your topic, you know your view, and you know the background literature. The hard work will come from answering questions like these:
- How does this material need to be reorganized to make for a better presentation?
- How does this material need to be rewritten so that it is accessible to an audience beyond my dissertation committee?
- What material needs to be cut from my dissertation to meet the publisher’s length requirements and eliminate material not relevant to my target audience?
- Have any of the nuanced aspects of my position changed since I finished the dissertation? If so, what needs to be changed in the old material?
- Has any new work been published that is relevant to this project? If so, how do I incorporate it into the new manuscript?
One of the first things I’d recommend with a dissertation-based project is getting a handle on what specifically will be different in the new manuscript compared to the dissertation. A few chapters from my book are essentially light revisions of dissertation chapters. Some started out as reworkings of dissertation chapters but were so heavily altered that they no longer bear all that much resemblance to their source material. A few chapters even had to be written from scratch. Pinning down where your prior material will be the most heavily altered is important because it helps you identify where the most difficult work will have to be done. In my own case, I started working on the other end of the spectrum – with the material that would be most similar to what was in my dissertation. Revising work that already exists is generally much easier than creating new work, so adopting this strategy helped me get some momentum going before I moved onto the sections that would be more challenging.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that there could be significant difference between the target length of your book and the length of your dissertation. My dissertation was about 70,000 words, and my finished book manuscript was supposed to be in the range of 75,0000–90,000 words. (Index excluded, it clocks in at 78,000 words.) In this case, there isn’t a huge difference between the dissertation length and book manuscript length, but given the variability of both publishers’ length preferences and the length of dissertations, it’s possible that these two standards could be more deeply out of alignment. You might be forced to make more difficult choices about what to cut or might need to add more new material than I did.
Regarding new content, I viewed my second crack at the dissertation as an opportunity to address a few objections that had only gotten short shrift in the original manuscript, better clarify and explain my position in a few areas, and integrate new material to bolster some of my central claims. You should approach this project as a chance to improve upon your original ideas. This is one way to keep the interest in your project alive: if you’re writing a book based on your dissertation, then you are probably entering (at least) year 3 or 4 on that project. For some – myself included – it’s hard to sustain interest in a single project for that long, but framing your project this way can help with motivation. Here’s your chance to resolve all those nagging objections that plagued you years ago!
Beyond these things, most of the work involved is not much different than the kind of work you already did in getting your dissertation done. We all have different writing schedules and ways of getting things done. Stick to your preferred strategy and try to make steady progress while you’re under contract so you’re in position to deliver the goods when the deadline arrives. If something comes up that impedes your progress (as it did in my case), inform your editor early and see if an extension of the deadline is possible. I imagine presses and editors vary in the extent to which they’ll make these kinds of accommodations, but don’t hesitate to ask if you have a good reason for needing a little extra time. (By the same token, don’t ask for a ridiculous amount of time – like another year. Keep in mind that the publisher has a production schedule they are aiming to stick to.)
There will be some sort of review of the final manuscript before it is typeset, but the extent of this review will vary depending on the press. After that’s complete and any additional revisions are made, you’ll eventually need to review proofs of your entire manuscript. You’ll usually only have a few days to do this, and it can be a fair amount of work given the volume of content you have to proofread. You may also opt to make your own index. (Typically, if you don’t do this, then the publisher will hire a professional to do it, which you will pay for out of pocket or with royalties from book sales.) You probably know the book manuscript better than anyone else and may be able to compile a better index than someone else would. If you go this route, then you will have about 2-3 weeks to put it together after you receive the final version of the rest of the manuscript. Once that’s done, all the work on your end should be finished unless you do something to promote your book near its launch.
I imagine there’s much more that could be said, but this wraps up what I have to say on the matter. If any of you have your own book-writing experiences that you want to share, feel free to add them in the comments.
Hi Trevor: Many thanks for the helpful and informative post, and can't wait to read the book!
I'd just like to second your point about asking for a deadline extension if you need it. I could have used one on my first book but was too afraid at the time to ask. I in turn needed one on my second book, and am glad I did ask this time around: it gave me additional time I really needed!
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 02/05/2020 at 11:14 AM
Thanks for the post, Trevor. I'm wondering whether or not you had already published parts of your dissertation as stand-alone papers in journals. I imagine there are extra permissions you'd need to get if this were the case?
Posted by: LM | 02/05/2020 at 11:40 AM
LM -- Good question. No papers I have published were direct adaptations of dissertation material. I do have two published papers that intersected with my dissertation topic a bit -- both were connected to the issue of whether individuals have an obligation to reduce their individual carbon footprints. The ideas in these papers come up in one of the chapters in my book, but the papers themselves were not reused -- just cited and referenced like any other work in the manuscript.
Had I wanted to reprint a paper as a chapter, I would have definitely needed to acquire permissions, and there was a formal process for doing that. I imagine every publisher has their own set of forms to complete for those requests, and if I had needed to pursue that, it would have needed to be initiated months before the final deadline for manuscript submission.
Posted by: Trevor Hedberg | 02/05/2020 at 01:31 PM
re LM: If you want to reuse material from journal articles, you need to get permission from the journal. Each journal has their own process or website for that. It's a pure formality and only takes a few minutes to complete. I believe the permissions were granted immediately when I did it. This is for using the material in a monograph. It might be different for other uses.
Posted by: Julia | 02/08/2020 at 10:38 AM
Every time you sign a publication agreement for an article - at least with any professional journal - they specify the conditions under which you can reuse parts of or republish in whole your paper. Often, certainly with Springer/Nature and other big publishers, you can use papers in other single author publications (that is, monographs). Really, people should read these agreements, at least once. They are legal documents.
Posted by: Publisher | 02/08/2020 at 12:54 PM