Authoring a PhD

Set out the academic rationale for the book
.
Explain the
intellectual reasons why your book is valuable for your
discipline or broad research area. It can be very helpful to
attach at this point positive references about your PhD
thesis from distinguished and well-known examiners, who
can stress its suitability for publication and wide interest in
the profession. A brief supportive reference from your
supervisors might also be useful, if they are well-known
people. Make clear, though, that what you are proposing is a
thoroughly reworked book version of original, high-quality
research, and not the direct publication of an unchanged
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PhD thesis itself (or even large bits of it). Even the few
publishers who still look carefully at academic monograph
books may well shy away from the prospect of issuing your
PhD thesis, sending you a premature standard letter of
rejection if you leave any room for doubt.
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Specify the book’s structure
.
Give the overall length of the
text, chapter and maybe section headings, and each
chapter’s length.
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Describe the book’s contents
.
Write about half a page per
chapter, concentrating on giving a substantive account of
the book’s key value-added contribution.
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Give a market rationale for the book
.
You need to specify
who the readers will be and make a properly justified and
realistic estimate of the sales prospects for a hardback
edition. Such books are expensive, especially from British or
European publishers. They sell mostly to university libraries
(but perhaps also to a business market in disciplines like
management or information technology). You can also
estimate some sales (50 to 100 copies) to professional
academics in your particular subfield. In some circumstances
it may be feasible to anticipate some public library sales. 
A reasonable minimum number of sales to aim for is 500
copies worldwide for a US-based publisher, although this
may prove very optimistic if you are writing to a British or
European firm producing very high-priced hardcover
monographs. In this latter case 300 sales may seem more
feasible. You should also include a case for a paperback
edition, if you can estimate at least 1000 sales. Explain how
the market would broaden out if lower-cost copies were
available. Publishers will very rarely publish a paperback
version of a monograph immediately, preferring to wait and
see how many hardcover sales are achieved, so the
paperback case is mostly nominal. But it may help to
include one, so long as you can make a credible case.
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Include a very brief suggested marketing strategy
.
Try to
identify journals and more general-purpose library or
university periodicals which might review the book and
generate sales. If your book is accepted the publishers will
want you to fill in a detailed marketing plan questionnaire.
But it can help convince them that your book has a realistic
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chance of achieving significant sales if you seem to know
how to promote it from the outset. In your marketing bit
you can assume a reasonably prominent entry in the
publisher’s catalogue in the year of publication, and maybe
a briefer catalogue mention in the year after. But do not
assume that the publisher will otherwise spend any money
on advertising the book, a luxury usually dispensed with in
the monograph market. The effective period for a
monograph book to achieve sales is normally two years.
Sales in the first year are sustained mainly by the catalogue
entry. With big firms the publisher’s reps bring the book to
the attention of librarians and university bookshops, and
promote it at academic conferences. Thereafter sales may be
generated by any reviews of the book in journals. If the
book has not become known to members of the profession
within two years, its chances of further sales are very slim. 
It can be very helpful to mention that you will e-mail a long
list of relevant scholars yourself or can supply specialist
mailing lists to the publisher. It is also helpful to promise to
write conference papers to signpost the book at key
professional meetings in the first year it comes out. You
might also point to one or two articles that you have had
accepted in good-quality journals, which will come out well
ahead of the book’s publication and alert readers to its
imminence. But you also need to make sure that (in the
publisher’s mind) this does not undermine the reasons why
people will want to buy your book.
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