Authoring a PhD

Smaller or lesser-known commercial publishers
have more
specialist lists, smaller internet-and-mail-only marketing
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operations, and often higher prices and shorter print runs.
But they are otherwise similar operations to the bigger firms.
They are distinguished from vanity presses by being
commercially reliant on achieving sales and they still sign
contracts with their authors. In practice, the payment of
author fees is usually either completely nominal or (in view
of the non-commercial character of monograph publishing)
the firm may ask that it be waived entirely. Some
commercial publishers may also look for a partial subsidy to
help finance the costs of issuing monographs. It is well
worth exploring whether some form of limited subsidy may
be available to help secure book publication of your
research. Potential sources are your own department or
university, where little-known funds often lurk for years
without anyone bidding to them for assistance; national or
regional-level professional associations in your discipline;
and some kinds of foundations or charities. Ask your
advisers and departmental colleagues if they have any
suggestions here: this kind of information is often hard for
graduate students to find out unaided.
Included in the category of smaller commercial publishers
with monograph lists there are a diverse range of
companies. Some of them are medium-sized firms, well
known and long established. Others are reputable or well-
regarded companies, but quite newly formed. There are also
many start-up companies with an unproven track record
and potentially uncertain futures. Try to find out as much as
you can about companies before getting involved with
them, and be reasonably sceptical about promises from
smaller outfits. Make sure that you get sight of previous
books and catalogues that the firm has produced, and check
out the company Web site and its facilities. It is very
important for your career track purposes that your book
should be properly edited, designed and printed to a good
standard, and that it should be effectively distributed and
publicized so that potential readers get to hear about it.
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Vanity publishers
are not really publishers at all. Essentially
they ask authors to pay for the publication of their own
manuscript. They are not worth considering because a book
issued by them cannot build your résumé or CV in any
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worthwhile way. In addition once issued by such presses
your thesis does not become any more accessible than
sitting on the shelf in your university library. Vanity press
titles are not taken seriously either by the reviews editors of
journals or by university librarians doing book ordering.
And such operations typically have no marketing operations
to speak of. If a company writes to you offering to publish
your thesis sight unseen, or without any independent
refereeing process, you should be highly sceptical.
With a small set of target publishers in view, your next task
is to come up with a book proposal that will seem viable. A PhD
thesis can only very rarely be published as a book without 
substantial alterations. Your first priority should be to keep the
length of your proposed book manuscript down. A 100,000-
word piece of text will simply be too long and expensive for
publishers to even begin to look at, however academically 
meritorious it may be. Your chances of publication are much
better if your actual thesis text is no more than 80,000 words,
which is why this has been the recommended main text length
of even a ‘big book’ dissertation throughout these pages. But to
make book publishing feasible even this restrained length will
need editing down a bit further. A manuscript of 60,000 to
70,000 words is widely quoted by publishers as the ideal book
length. There is rarely any incentive to go lower than this, how-
ever. Academic books of much less than 60,000 words may look
‘short weight’ and appear poor value for money to reviewers,
libraries or potential professional readers.
A second important change is to make a book version much
more accessible than your original thesis. Cut out all the ‘boring
bits’ if you possibly can. Once your doctorate has been awarded
and the full PhD text is available in your university library, you
can refer readers to it to explain the most esoteric or routine
points of methodology, or data, or other evidence. So there is no
need to reproduce such material again. Similarly you can econ-
omize a good deal on the referencing of materials. If you have
not done so already, switch to Harvard referencing and get rid as
far as possible of all but the most important endnotes.
Next consider whether your doctorate can be reshaped in
some way to enhance its potential readership and hence sales
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appeal. Are there parts of the thesis which are off-putting for
readers and that can be hived off to a separate journal article?
A prime candidate here is an overlong literature review chapter,
some of which might be spun off to form a review article in a
journal. You can then simply reference the article in a shorter
set-up chapter for the main core of the book. (In rare cases a
very strong PhD may best be published in the form of two
shorter books, one handling the literature review elements
more as a student-orientated book, and the other handling the
original research.)
Before you approach publishers you should also examine
whether there are elements that could be 
added
to the book, to
extend your thesis analysis and to make it more attractive for
potential purchasers. In the social sciences if the period covered
by your thesis ends some years ago, then publishers often want it
brought right up to date. Similarly publishers may be interested
in additional sections or chapters which put a thesis analysis in a
wider context, or make it less narrowly focused, and perhaps
boost the book’s usability for advanced students as well as pro-
fessional readers. Of course, any such additions come at a high
price. You have to make space for them by achieving greater cuts
in the wordage allocated to your original thesis chapters. New
writing then takes extra time to accomplish, and you may also
have to do new research to cope with the extensions.
Only when you have formed a plan for achieving a mar-
ketable, fully ‘book-ified’ version of your thesis should you
approach publishers. You need to write a book proposal which
meets these points:
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