Authoring a PhD

Major university presses
are at top of the hierarchy, such as
those for Oxford and Cambridge in the UK or for leading 
Ivy League universities in the United States. These companies
still publish key works of scholarship as part of their overall
academic mission. There is often some bias towards their
own alumni’s doctorates, but they also have some general
sense of responsibility to academia more widely. They are
typically only interested in the cream of works, however.
And even they may specialize in areas where they already
have a well-established list and a reputation, or a series into
which your PhD might fit. These kinds of publishing houses
are very prestigious because they will carefully referee your
book and suggest changes before accepting it (usually taking
at least six to nine months doing so). If they like your text,
they may not worry overmuch about asking you to make
large-scale length reductions. Then they will painstakingly
sub-edit your text to a high standard and produce it well,
often taking a year to 18 months doing so. The main
drawback here then is that (after you have added in time for
you to make changes), the complete publication process may
stretch up to three years. And beyond that the publicity for
your book may be rather skeletal – you should bank on doing
most of the promotion work yourself.
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Major commercial publishers with monograph lists
still exist,
although they are a rapidly diminishing species. If you can
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find one or several in your field then they may offer the
most attractive option open to you. These firms tend to be
quicker off the mark than university presses, more insistent
on reasonable length (70,000 word) books, better at
dissemination, and more commercial in their approach.
They make their money by having a large catalogue of titles
and producing relatively small runs of copies at fairly high
prices. The limit for first-print runs has come down from
(say) 300 or 400 copies ten years ago to below 100 copies
now. And ‘warehouse’ publishing can take place with digital
printing machines technology that can cost-effectively
generate single hardback copies of books from the
publisher’s formatted text database in response to individual
orders. This ‘publish on demand’ approach means that your
book may never go ‘out of print’. In some ways this is a plus
point for you, since your text remains available so long as
people go directly to the publisher, and you do not need to
worry about it being remaindered. On the debit side, the
publisher can retain the copyright for its full term (now 
70 years) without many real copies ever getting into
circulation. And bookshops and major retailers like
www.amazon.com may still robustly list your book as
unavailable, whatever its notional status.
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Less well-known university presses
also have some commitment
to monographs, but usually a highly selective one, focusing
on only a few fields or on their own doctoral students. If
your university has its own press it is always well worth
trying them, even if they do not have a big list in your field.
You may also try another university press that happens to
have a good list in your topic area or subdiscipline. Because
they do fewer books these presses may produce your work
faster than the top-rank university presses. But their big
drawback is that their catalogues usually have a much lesser
circulation, so the chances of your work being noticed in the
profession are much smaller. Sometimes their books are also
less prestigiously produced. And because the smaller
university presses do less work in this line, they may ask for
shorter manuscripts to keep their risk exposure down.
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