Authoring a PhD

Interviewer
:
What came first, the lyrics or the
music?
George Gershwin
:
What came first was the 
contract.
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Some theses become books, of a particular kind called research
monographs. A monograph, as its name implies, is a detailed
study of one particular topic. It stands at the opposite extreme
in publishing terms from a best-selling textbook, which may
cover all or many topics in a discipline. The worldwide sales 
for English-language monographs are usually measured in the
low hundreds, say between 300 and 600 copies. So although 
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a contract between author and publisher is still a necessary
basis for publication, it is rarely necessary to spend much time 
worrying about the division of the spoils, for they are often
non-existent.
If ‘the contract’ is not the reason for wanting to get your 
thesis published as a monograph, there are none the less three
substantial reasons why it is worth doing. The first and most
important incentive is just to get the message of your research
out into the wider academic community. A book, any book, is
a surprisingly long-lived and multi-accessible artefact. The
chances of other people learning about and drawing from your
research are much greater if you can write a good book, which
then makes it onto the shelves of at least the major research
libraries in your own country and overseas. A second incentive
is to build your résumé or curriculum vitae and to establish
your bona fides as a fully fledged academic researcher. In some
social science disciplines (like economics) people now rarely
write books to communicate research. In these areas journal
papers are the main research medium, and most published
books are student texts written by senior academics, sometimes
penned by authors who are no longer operating innovatively at
the research frontiers. But across the more text-based social sci-
ences, and in all the humanities and arts disciplines, books still
count for a lot. A third reason for producing a monograph is a
composite of the previous two. Books are usually much more
cited than journal articles. They are a good way of amassing a
large pile of citations on the Web of Knowledge. You will also
find a larger stock of Web pages referring to a book on the best
Web search engines (such as the world leader in most dimen-
sions, www.google.com).
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Books generate name recognition. 
A good book may be reviewed several times in academic jour-
nals with review sections, and it is still much more likely to be
cited in bibliographies or included in student reading lists than
are journal articles.
However, as the academic publishing industry has been 
consolidated into larger and more commercially orientated
global corporations, the number of major firms that actually
handle academic monographs has sharply declined since the
1980s. So your options of publishers to try are unlikely to be
great and the chances of success are not high. Before you start
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a perhaps difficult, time-consuming and demoralizing book
publishing process, you need to get clear whether there is a 
reasonable chance of success for your doctoral research. You
should take advice on this issue from your supervisors or advis-
ers, and from departmental colleagues and your examiners. If
they are sceptical or not encouraging, it is probably not worth
pushing things. Your topic may just be unsuitable or the pub-
lishing climate may be very unfavourable in your discipline for
academic monographs.
Assuming that you have surmounted this first hurdle, your
next step should be to consider possible companies to approach
with a book proposition. Monograph publishers are arranged in a
rough order of general academic prestige that is also something of
an order of difficulty in getting an acceptance. It runs as follows:
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