Authoring a PhD

Give a timetable for delivering the final manuscript
.
Build in a
two- to three-month period for the publishers to send your
manuscript out to referees and receive comments back.
Then build in a further two to three months for you to make
the changes demanded in the referees’ comments.
Promising to be able to deliver a complete manuscript
within six to nine months is best for publishers. (Delivering
more rapidly than this is not much help, because publishers’
catalogues and publicity materials can rarely be redone at
shorter notice.) Stress that the manuscript is your
publications priority and that these timings will not slip. 
If you do not meet your delivery date then in theory your
publisher can cancel a book contract.
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Include a specimen chapter
.
Send your best chapter for the
purposes of getting the book accepted. This may not
necessarily be a very detailed core chapter, nor just a
literature review. It should be a well-written chapter which
shows your work in a good light but which is relatively easy
for a referee to get into and appreciate. Sometimes it makes
sense to provide a few extra pages of lead-in or scene-setting
material for the chapter, and a summary of what comes next
at the end. You will need to provide a purpose-edited
chapter bibliography if you are using Harvard referencing,
but not if you are using endnotes. The point of the
specimen chapter is to show that your work is well written,
of a good professional standard, on an interesting topic, and
likely to generate the sales you have promised. It should be
fully ‘book-ified’ with no unnecessary thesis apparatus. It
obviously might carry more weight with publishers if you
could promise to send a fully ready manuscript immediately
by return if they would like to see the whole thing. But this
is rarely practicable, because you cannot invest all the effort
involved in converting your entire thesis into book form
without knowing how likely it is that any publisher will
accept it. And it may not be crucial anyway. If a publisher is
at all interested in adopting your book they will have to
commission one or more academics to review your
materials. It is normally much easier (and cheaper) for them
to get a book outline plus specimen chapter refereed than a
complete book manuscript, especially with a research
monograph which demands that the readers pay close
attention to detail. If you think a single sample chapter will
not be enough to show what your book will be like, then
send two chapters.
Assembling this package of materials is a time-consuming
business, and waiting for a response also takes more time.
However, unlike journals you can legitimately send your book
proposal and materials to more than one publisher at once. It is
not a good idea to broadcast it to a large number of publishers,
however, because their commissioning editors also meet regu-
larly at conferences and other venues and swap notes. Finding
out that you have adopted a shotgun approach to seeking 
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a publisher may lead them to take a collectively unfavourable
view of your work. In addition, if you send off copies of your
proposal to ten different publishers you are unlikely to have tar-
geted the proposal sufficiently, and are more likely to receive a
row of outright rejections. And if you send the first version of
your proposal to all available publishers then you cannot revise
it in the light of feedback you get and send it off in a different
form to anyone else. So it is best to send your proposal pack to
no more than the two or three publishers who offer the best
chances of getting your thesis published, keeping other names
in reserve for a second-round effort.
If a company comes back with an offer to publish your
monograph you should virtually always close the deal. But
there are just a few safeguards to keep in mind. You must have
a proper contract not because you will make any significant
money out of a monograph, which is highly unlikely, but in
order to ensure that you are dealing with a reputable firm. The
contract will specify that you supply the publisher with a clean
manuscript, warranted to be free from libellous or defamatory
material, of a certain length and meeting the comments of the
publishers’ readers, by a certain date. In return for you ceding
the publisher the right to market and distribute your text (usu-
ally worldwide) for a certain period, the publisher engages to
deliver a book and to sell it in their normal way. A good con-
tract from your point of view will have royalty terms in it, usu-
ally promising you something like 10 per cent of the publisher’s
‘net receipts’ (that is, profits). Often such sums only kick in,
however, after the book has achieved a certain number of sales
(say 300 or 500 or 1000 copies), which may be the maximum
one might expect anyway for a high-level research monograph
in hardcover. On this kind of book these royalty terms are not
usually worth haggling over. You will very rarely get an advance
on royalties for a monograph, but if you can extract one that is
a small additional incentive for the publisher to promote your
book positively.
The key thing to watch for in a monograph contract is how
long it binds you to the publisher, and what counts as the 
publisher keeping your book in print. Holding your book on a
digital server ready to print an individual copy whenever an
order is received can mean that your book is never in practice
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available in any bookshop or really noticeable in any catalogue,
but remains formally ‘in print’ for ever. Be on the look-out also
for clauses in your contract that may commit you to offer your
next book to the same publisher for consideration, before it
goes to anyone else. Only if your monograph has been accepted
by a very prestigious and efficient publisher is it a good idea to
let such a clause stand. Otherwise you should just draw a line
through this bit and initial the deletion on the contract form,
asking your publisher to do the same.
Normally nothing much hangs on monograph contracts.
The author stands to make little or no money and the publisher
to sell pretty few copies. But once in every several hundred
titles something substantial may crop up. Perhaps you may not
deliver your manuscript on time, a potentially fatal mistake to
make in book publishing, and the publisher may disappoint
your expectations of elastic deadlines by wanting to pull out of
the deal altogether. Perhaps your book may suddenly sell a lot
of copies or go to paperback, in which unlikely case the con-
tract should ensure that you get a decent royalty. Perhaps some-
one may sue you and the publisher, which can be personally
catastrophic for you, so take the non-libel, non-defamatory,
and non-plagiarization clauses in contract documents seriously.
Perhaps your publisher may go bankrupt or default on their
obligation to publish your text, leaving you looking for some
leg to stand on in getting back control of it. Normally these are
remote contingencies, and with a friendly and reputable pub-
lisher not worth worrying about overmuch. But if in doubt, 
ask a more experienced colleague to check over a prospective
publisher’s contract with you before signing up.