dissertation to a book

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From Dissertation to Book

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After many years of hard work, a dissertation is a monumental accomplishment. With so much time and effort coupled with the desire to add to scholarly discourse, many people hope to transform their dissertations into a book. Graduate writing has equipped scholars with extensive information about their discipline-specific genres, but the genre of book - and certainly a book hoping to appeal to audience outside of their field - requires new ways of writing. This page provides information and considerations aiding one’s efforts in a “publish or perish” world

Before you Begin

Many people feel the pressure of publication, especially of a book valued by scholars in your field, as they add that “Dr.” to their email signature. The truth is, book publication is still considered the standard even though many entities like the Modern Language Association (MLA) suggest moving away from a book as being the standard for tenure, instead giving articles and chapters more weight. Despite this pressure, it is highly recommended that you take some time (ideally at least a year) away from your dissertation. After dedicating so much time to such a specific topic over the past years, it can be difficult to look at your dissertation with the fresh eyes necessary to reshape it into a book without taking time away. 

Once you have taken this break and are able to greet your research anew, critically think about whether this should be a book. Trying to be objective, ask yourself if you really need a book-number of pages to convey your argument or if it would perhaps be better suited for an article or series of articles. Consider that the dissertation may actually have potential for both articles and a book. Another consideration for this choice is timeliness - articles come out much quicker whereas books can take a few years until they hit the shelves. If you think something might be old news in a few years, an article is the way to go. 

You may also consider researching subsidies. As a new author, you are a risk to your editor. Coming with funding to offset printing costs will make you less of a risk and ideally have your editor look at your proposal a little more deeply. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, remember to resource yourself. With workshops, grants, editors, senior scholars, and presses, you are not alone on this journey. While you may consider avoiding your committee so that your feedback is coming from fresh eyes, colleagues often have words of wisdom regarding the book-publishing process. Throughout the process, you’ll also get feedback from your editor and anonymous peer reviews. While it’s easy to get defensive, it’s important to acknowledge and value their opinions and explain your reasoning if you decide not to incorporate a suggestion. You and your editor are on a team, so you both may make compromises throughout the process. Remember - they are on your so team, so go in with a growth mindset and you’re next academic accomplishment will be more in reach. 

During the Process

Once you’ve decided that you are, in fact, going to make a book out of your dissertation, it’s time to prepare for the practicalities of this process. First, you need to figure out how you are going to make it possible for you to accomplish such a feat. Writing a book takes intense discipline, so it’s important to create clear goals and plans by considering all the steps it will take you to get to that finish line. Simple actions like scheduling protected writing time can make a huge difference in success. Perhaps you set a goal of writing one page every day. Remember that writing constructs knowledge and the act will get you closer to your final product, even if it isn’t writing that actually ends up in your book,

The process of transforming your dissertation into a book is centered around audience, so you’ll want to keep that audience at the forefront of your mind throughout the writing process. Consider very carefully who your ideal reader(s) are. There may be multiple, and that’s great. Is it scholars in your field? An “intelligent layperson” (Luey, 2004) outside of your field? Whatever group of ideal readers you end up with, review your writing from each individual perspective. People often dream of a broad audience of people outside of academia without actually seeking feedback from anyone outside of the academy. If you’re telling your editor that you believe this will appeal to a history buff outside of the academy, get feedback from someone in that group and have them note places where your writing is not clear. This generalist perspective will help you see what items like jargon are confusing or what information feels boring, increasing the chances of success for this book. 

When considering your new audience, remember that you no long need to share everything you know about your topic in this document. While you did have to prove yourself to your committee, this audience automatically assumes you are an expert, so sections that were proving you’re reliable can be ditched or significantly parsed down. This means your literature review will be significantly cut, if not deleted altogether. This is also true of methodologies unless your methodology is exceptionally groundbreaking and interesting. 

Your old audience had to listen to you - it’s part of their job description. This new audience will need to be actively reached. Even if your main goal is people in your field, to make a book broad enough to sell - which your editor is going to look for - you’ll need to write for a wider audience which may require you to let go of any anxiety about being “taken seriously in your field.” 

A book will require broadening the appeal of your topic. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways such as: 

• Humanizing your subject - this may take additional research (such as interviewing the people who make up your statistics) or be as simple as adding personal elements about your topic (such as adding personal life information that was outside of the scope of your dissertation focused on a person’s political career).
• Adding narrative elements - plot, characters, setting, your own voice, and a beginning, middle, and end that pushes the reader forward are all key to marketability.
• Finding a new angle - an angle that directly impacts your reader such as financial or navigation of a life event is going to reach a larger audience.
• Expanding the topic culturally and temporally - take a broad topic related to your subject and see the impacts and/or comparisons of contexts such as religions, race, communities, geographical region, politics, time period, etc. perhaps referencing other studies in your field.
• Justifying your topic’s value - you may hope to create a guide showing your topic’s influence in hopes of affecting mindsets, policy, and funding of stakeholders and those in power. 

While your presses’ and editors’ feedback trumps all, there are some general considerations all editors are looking for. As you walk the line between theory and narrative, you’ll want to consider items such as: 

• Transitions - does the book flow in a way that keeps the reader interested? 
• Chapter length - are the chapters similar in length? If not, what can be combined or split up? 
• Repetition - do you find places where facts, stories, or claims are being repeated? Where do those best fit? 
• Hyperquotation - do you have too many or too long of quotes? How can you reframe that information with a focus on your work? 
• Bibliography/End Notes - is this information necessary? Does your editor/press have limitations on these sections? 
• Hagiography - are you ever writing about a subject without criticism? How can you make sure your argument is balanced? 
• Tables and Graphs - Does the chart fit without having to turn the book sideways? Does it repeat what’s in the prose making it not worth the cost? Can charts be combined? 

Now That You Have a Book

While some people may not have a completed book when they submit a proposal, many have at least a large chunk written and certainly a general outline and thesis. If you do have a whole book complete, you may consider the following advice in the “before you begin” part of the process. 

With the reality of budget cuts, editors are accepting fewer and fewer book proposals, making it more imperative than ever that your proposal sticks out. If you are an emerging scholar in your field, you probably won’t have the benefit of being actively sought out by publishers. This means you’ll need to do your research to find the right press and editor for you. Editors tend to have niche areas of topics they like to publish. Check out who published resources you used or check out the list of latest book releases in your field to see who is publishing work in your subject area. These are the publishers that you should propose to. 

First, make sure that you follow proposal formatting and content requirements. If you don’t, an editor may disregard your proposal due to the inability to fit within their genre guidelines. Furthermore, if you write more than they ask for, they may assume you cannot write in a concise and clear way and choose to put it in the “no” pile. Beyond this, to make your proposal attention-grabbing, you’ll want to draw them in with a title, table of contents, and abstract or first chapter that are clear, concise, and interesting to someone who may not share your natural enthusiasm for your topic. Typically, the more concisely you can get your points across, the more faith they’ll have in you as a writer. 

This also ties in with something academics may feel uncomfortable facing - this book needs to make money. Editors often look to see if their writers are able to get their point across concisely because fewer pages means less printing cost. Similarly, having low numbers of pictures, graphs, and charts, which cost more to print, can make your book feel less risky to an editor. Being upfront about what costs you anticipate and which you can avoid will help your editor calculate if this book is worth taking the risk of taking on a new voice to the field. 

Final Thoughts

The transformation from dissertation to book can be very exciting. Oftentimes, creating a broader appeal brings out engaging, compelling writing that will be more readily available to the masses. With this book, you have something to say instead of something to prove. Enjoy your new status as an expert as you get to share your unique findings with the world, moving your discipline forward. There will most likely be obstacles and frustrations along the way, but remember that you have already completed the monumental task of writing a dissertation and you are also capable of this. Best of luck on this journey!

LUEY, B. (Ed.). (2008). Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors (2nd ed.). University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt13x1g8x

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How to Turn your Dissertation into a Book

You finished your dissertation and want to turn it into a book? Then don’t let the revision process scare you – we've got you covered with helpful tips and tricks on the way.

This post is part of a series, which serves to provide hands-on information and resources for authors and editors.

After years of hard work on their dissertation, more than a few Early Career Researchers consider turning their PhD research into a monograph. While this is great to reach a whole new audience, the process of getting there can seem complex and daunting at first.

But we’re here to help!

The first and most essential step is to decide whether your dissertation should become a book at all. For many scholars this is a no-brainer, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, where the publication of books is crucial for getting professional recognition, climbing up the career ladder, and eventually gaining tenure.

Your dissertation could also be published in the form of one or several journal articles. Or something you just want to upload on a university server and be done with.

However, let’s say that you do want to convert your thesis into a publishable book, here are the general steps of this exciting undertaking:

• Find your match
• Build your confidence
• Get down to the nitty gritty
• Pitch your work
• Respond and revise

1. Find Your Match

The process of revising a dissertation goes hand-in-hand with the search for the right publishing house. The question what kind of book you want or need will influence your choice. Vice versa, the publisher shapes what kind of book you will be rewarded with.

Publishing with an established publisher is still considered as a sign of quality. They take care of things like quality control and peer review, and they select their titles carefully, so they fit their lists. This also means the books will sell better. Moreover, and most importantly: a publisher makes your work visible, be it online, in catalogues, on conferences, book fairs, or by distributing your book among libraries and universities.

Are you looking for the right press to publish your academic work? Find out here whether De Gruyter might be the right partner for your project!

Ask yourself this: Where do you want to see your book? Where have your favorite publications been published? Browse bookshelves, and visit book exhibitions at conferences . Talk to editors, approach them, ask for their conditions; check websites.

But whilst you do all of that: Please never submit to more than one publisher at the same time. Wasting editors’ time is frowned upon and doesn’t bode well for future publication with the house.

2. Build your Confidence

Once you decided on which press would be a good choice (from university presses, independent academic publishers, trade publishers etc.), there are a couple of things you need to take into consideration.

First and maybe most importantly: Be kind to yourself. Acknowledge what you have already accomplished. This has been a huge effort, and you have earned every right to be proud of yourself! Then, get to work.

Be prepared to invest time and nerves into reworking your dissertation. Focus on what you have already done, and build from there.

Remember, a book is not a dissertation. You do not need to convince anyone anymore that you are the expert and that you have done your reading. The reader of your book trusts that you are, and that is why they bought it.

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3. Get Down to the Nitty Gritty

• Envision your audience. This will help you give your dissertation a makeover.
• Your viva was probably a while ago, so lots of new and interesting research has been published since then that could potentially influence your work. Do the reading.
• Go over your literature review and see what is not needed anymore for your argument. Do not quote other people as much – the reader wants to know what you think. The reader of your book is also not hugely interested in all of the methodologies out there. Tell them what you used and why, but cut everything else.
• Tell the reader in the introduction what the book’s central argument is. What is your contribution to the field? What’s new? In the conclusion, tell them what the consequences are. What difference do your findings make? How do they help the field?
• Try to stay close to the 100,000 word threshold (=300 pages), including notes. Keep the manuscript sleek, limit the apparatus. Try to have chapters of equal lengths.
• Sure enough, images are nice and often help the reader get a sense for the text, but do not forget that you have to clear rights for most of them, and get all the technicalities for print sorted.
• Use simple wording. Be on point. Always remember your audience needs to understand you, and not all of them are experts.
• Go easy on the footnotes: Resist making them a container for all of the brilliant thoughts that don’t quite fit in the flow or argument of your book. If a remark doesn’t belong in your text, it might not belong in your book altogether.

Bear in mind: With a dissertation, you have something to prove. With a book, you have something to say.

4. Pitch Your Work

After revising, you need to prepare a pitch: Sell your book! Let the publisher know why your research is important and how it changes the field. What’s the unique selling point of your book, what sets it apart from others?

To get started, check the publisher’s website. Usually there is a proposal form hidden away somewhere. Try to find information on the submission process and/or a personal contact. Follow the guidelines, and write an e-mail to the responsible Acquisitions Editor.

Indicate that you are familiar with the scope of the publisher’s list. Maybe you know of a book series of theirs, where your work might fit in. Let them know you did your homework, and that you are invested. Describe how your book complements other titles in the series and why it would be a great fit.

Learn more about book proposals in our blog post “How to Write an Academic Book Proposal: 6 Questions for Laura Portwood-Stacer” .

Be concise. Your proposal should demonstrate not only that you are an expert on the topic, but that you can condense and synthesize what you know, that you can share it concisely, and that you can present your research in a way that is stimulating and thought-provoking.

Usually, the more material you send, the better. Being able to read a sample chapter of the dissertation, in addition to the proposal, makes it much easier for the publisher to get a sense about the writing style of an author, who is still unknown to them.

5. Almost There! Respond and Revise

After you submitted, and heard back from the editor of the press, you can relax a little. Your manuscript is now either under consideration with the editor or already sent out for external peer review. This might take a while.

Chances are, when you hear back from the editor the next time, the reviewers will have criticized parts of your manuscript and are asking for improvements. Hence, you will need to get back into the text once again. This can be a hard moment, but remember: you are so close now! Revise one last time and at the end of the road, you might already see the light of your shiny new author contract.

Good luck – you got this!

If you are interested, check out this related blog post

[Title image by hanna grace via Unsplash]

Rabea Rittgerodt

Rabea works as Acquisitions Editor at De Gruyter. She is specialized on 19th & 20th century social, cultural, and global history. You can follow her on Twitter via @RabeaRi .

Sophie Wagenhofer

Sophie Wagenhofer works as Senior Acquisitions Editor Islamic & Jewish Studies at De Gruyter.

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Turning Your Dissertation into a Book

Interested in publishing your dissertation as a book? You will likely need to revise it extensively so it will appeal to a wider audience and compete in the literary marketplace. Here are some guidelines to help you in this process.

• Allow plenty of time!
• The review process can easily take up to a year, as it entails a peer review of your manuscript, potential revisions, further peer review and then approval.
• The editing process can easily take a year to a year and a half as it entails copyediting, design, typesetting and proofreading, preparation of the index, printing and binding.

Dissertations differ from books in several ways

• Dissertations are highly specialized, while books are geared to general readers.
• Dissertation audiences are usually fewer than 100 readers — books are about 500 or more, in general.
• In a dissertation, the author’s authority must be proven; in books, it is assumed.
• Dissertations contain extensive documentation (to prove authority), while books document to credit sources and help the reader.
• Dissertations can run long; books are often far shorter.

Elements that make a good book

• A concise, memorable and intriguing title that includes essential key words
• Clear and effective organization
• A succinct introduction
• Illustrations that enhance the text
• Sections that are meaningful either alone or as part of the total book
• Navigational aids, such as chapter titles, running heads, subheads, notes, bibliography, index
• A voice (relationship of author to reader) that functions like an invisible tour guide or creative storyteller, and avoids sounding like a lecturer at a podium

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From Dissertation to Book, Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Second Edition

Purchase options and add-ons.

• ISBN-10 022606204X
• ISBN-13 978-0226062044
• Edition Second
• Publisher University of Chicago Press
• Publication date October 18, 2013
• Part of series Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing
• Language English
• Dimensions 7.98 x 5.12 x 0.45 inches
• Print length 184 pages
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Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., from dissertation to book, the university of chicago press.

Why This Book

The morning after defending the doctoral thesis is the first dayof a scholar's brave new world. But aside from recommendingthat you publish, graduate schools rarely take the time to explainjust what you should do with your dissertation. There'san expectation that the student is on the brink, or that thisexcellent piece of new scholarship will naturally find its placein the academic firmament. But how to get it there? And inwhat form?

Senior professors are often too far from the process to giveuseful advice. Junior faculty are usually just as puzzled asgraduate students by the mechanics of scholarly publication.But each year, many dissertations are written, and some arepublished. Among those, a few become widely read works thattransform not only what but how we think.

To the new PhD's eager question—"What do I do now thatI'm done?"—this book offers answers rather than an answer.There can't be just one. The key to any of them, though, is revision.

Revision can mean a lot of different things, maybe especiallyfor scholars. Young academics talk about revising their dissertationswhen they mean they will do hardly anything at all, orrewrite every sentence, or settle for something in between. Thisbook is in part about what can be done with a doctoral dissertation,choosing among your options, and moving forward. Whereveryou begin, and whatever investment of time and energyyou plan to make, your goal is to take something already writtenand make it more.

Taking that dissertation and making it "more" isn't a straightpath. It's a curving route with loops and off-ramps. Yet onceyou know where you want to go, there are more and less efficientways of getting there. From Dissertation to Book is itselfmeant to be a map, charting out your possibilities and givingyou driving instructions.

In more than twenty-five years as an editor of scholarlybooks, I saw hundreds of books through to publication. As anyeditor knows, you whittle down thousands of proposals to getto those chosen hundreds. My job also gave me the chance towork with other editors on the books that they were consideringfor publication. Sometimes I learned most from reviewinga thick stack of proposals other editors were keen to put forward.This part of the job is what I've described as editing fromten thousand feet up. An editor-in-chief has a few minutes tostudy how an editor presents a rationale, a marketing strategy,and a financial analysis, as well as what outside reviewershave to say, and what the author's own words tell about clarityand purpose. In ways I could hardly articulate, this bookis a product of my engagements with all those manuscriptsand proposals. When I formally left publishing for academia,I found that publishing hadn't quite left me. I've continued togive workshops and lead seminars on scholarly publishing andhave been fortunate to be invited to speak at institutions of differentscale and with different missions. But however diversethose colleges and universities may be, they have one thingin common: all are inhabited by scholars with ideas and thedesire to see those ideas brought to light for the use of others.

The difficult academic market has dispersed ambitious andtalented young scholars more thoroughly than ever before. Toland a tenure-track job at an institution one has never visited—orperhaps even heard of—before the on-campus interviewis no longer strange. The consequence of the shortage in fulltimejobs is that highly desirable candidates are being takenup by institutions that might never have had a crack at thema long generation ago. In recent years I have had more thanone conversation with a university administrator expressingdelight (bordering on disbelief) that the upside of the terriblejob market has been that that institution landed its first hiringchoices—a privilege very few colleges and universities can enjoyand none can take for granted.

For readers of From Dissertation to Book this state of affairshas two consequences.

First, we—scholars, their advisors, hiring committees, andpublishers—need to be reminded that there are talented, productiveteacher-scholars across a broad compass of institutions.There have always been fine teachers at every level ofacademia, but this market is now sending them into every cornerof the scholarly world. New PhDs will go into think tanksand research libraries and other organizations affiliated withcolleges and universities. Some will take positions at collegesand universities that are not teaching slots—as student advisors,foreign program directors, registrars, fundraisers, communicationsspecialists. Into those nonteaching positions will goscholars eager to see their research interests turn into scholarlypublications.

Second, the rising tide of adjunct faculty is a direct consequenceof the paucity of full-time slots. As the percentage ofpart-time faculty increases, so there will necessarily be an increasein the sheer number of part-time faculty with scholarlyprojects in search of publishers. One of the unresolved politicalissues within the modern academy is the conflict between institutionalmission and a reliance on part-time appointments. From Dissertation to Book aims to function as a sort of writingcoach. This book can't resolve the larger structural conflictswithin the academy. But it's important to recognize that asdoctoral students earn their degrees and face a market thatoffers even fewer full-time positions than it did an academicgeneration ago, there will be more scholarly labor in danger ofdisappearing off the academic face of the earth.

At exactly the same time that the academic labor force isstruggling to determine what opportunities lie ahead, scholarlypublishing struggles with its own survival issues as it facesquestions of technology and dissemination, declining institutionalsupport and shifting outlets, changes in reading habitsand access, and the clamor for free open access.

It's hard to write a dissertation, a challenge to transform itinto a publishable manuscript, and a matter of skill and luck toget it published. In the second decade of the twenty-first centuryit's also a challenge for scholarly publishers to make spacewithin their publishing programs for first books.

Both the professoriate and the scholarly publishing worldseem always to be operating in crisis mode. It would be funnyif it weren't true. The process of transforming dissertationsinto books involves more than accommodating the needs ofyoung professionals and assessing the realities of the marketplace.It's also part of a larger effort to identify and preserveadvances in knowledge. Not every dissertation moves forwardour knowledge of a subject, but it's impossible to know twentyyears in advance which early works in a scholar's career willopen doors for the big breakthroughs.

The mechanisms by which publishers select first books forpublication are closely bound up with the ways in which dissertationsare rethought and reshaped. In making their selections,publishers are not only choosing what projects best fitthe market. They're also quietly making bets on what new constructionsof ideas will become foundational for the work infields we know well and fields we can't even name yet.

Publishers and academic authors view books in ways that overlap,but that are hardly identical. Academics, like all writers,tend to think that a great book idea is its own justification.Publishers want something that can stand as a book, not justa good idea indifferently presented. That means getting somekey things right—shape, length, voice—so that the audiencethe author believes is out there will want the result enough tobuy it.

It can be a shock to hear that your wonderful thesis nowneeds to be entirely rethought. A young scholar's writing life beginswith an apparent contradiction: a dissertation needs to bewritten, yet no publisher has to want it when it's done. I meeta lot of scholars frustrated that academic publishers seem tobrush off what graduate schools oblige their students to produce.But scholarly publishers look for at least two things in aproposal beyond a great idea and dandy prose. One is the author'scredentials—how an academic's training and appointmentenabled him or her to write the book in the first place. Thesecond is what we call the author's platform. By that we meanthe reputation and visibility the author has already established,and how, acting together, they will help get the intended bookto its audience. You don't have much of a platform comingstraight out of graduate school, but during a career of writingand publishing and lecturing, you can build a wider base andon it build broader ideas for broader audiences. Revising yourdissertation, as unglamorous an activity as it may be, is the firststep in creating a structure to climb.

Scholars know that our appetite for knowledge, right alongsideour ignorance, grows daily. But what we call "the market"continues to undergo radical changes, making access toideas increasingly challenging. The appeal of digital formatsand the highly complex issue of open access put greater andgreater pressure on traditional scholarly publishers. Librariesbuy books (the things with paper pages) ever more cautiously.Readers read differently. We look for answers or information,preferring a short ride on a search engine to the slower andmore complex demands of a book. Independent bookstores,once a haven for scholarly works, are an endangered speciesof commercial life. Neither campus stores nor the chain giants(often the same thing) can provide all that the academic communitywould like to see on the shelf. It's much harder for ascholarly book to be published today than it was thirty—oreven five—years ago, and increasingly unlikely that, once published,it will appear on a bookstore shelf.

Faculty members now approaching retirement came of agewhen it was possible to have highly specialized work publishedby a leading university press. These days, young scholars are oftenthinking about the second book before tenure —even thoughthere are senior faculty in their departments who were tenuredon a handful of articles and never went on to write a book at all.Buddhist calm might be the best response to this inequity; bitternessand resentment certainly won't help. The best advice Ican offer is to be pragmatic: take your own strengths and makethem stronger.

These are hard times for scholars and for their publishers.Yet even in hard times, it's important to remember that manydissertations can become manuscripts strong enough to beconsidered for publication, and a good number of them canbecome books. It's possible to revise a dissertation and to turnit into something more, but to do this well means first takingstock of what one has and what it might become. Turning adissertation into a book manuscript is one option facing therecent PhD. But it isn't the only one. A dissertation can becomemany things—a single scholarly article, a handful of them, aspecialized monograph, a broader scholarly work, a trade book,even the seeds of two or more distinct projects that could occupythe author for decades.

Some dissertations do get turned into books that attract asizeable readership. Those dissertations keep on speaking yearsafter publication. Martin Jay's Dialectical Imagination and KateMillett's Sexual Politics began as doctoral theses. So did DanielGoldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners , Mitchell Duneier's Slim's Table , and Jill Lepore's The Name of War .

Each year scholarly publishers present the reading publicwith first books that may become essential reading in theirfields. A few recent titles by authors who began with dissertationsand finished with successful books: Leor Halevi's Muhammad'sGrave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Isaac WilliamMartin's The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax TransformedAmerican Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2008), Karen Ho's Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham:Duke University Press, 2009), and Alondra Nelson's Bodyand Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

However much publishers may complain about the surfeitof PhD theses, however much editors may say they rarelyconsider them, there are always hunter-gatherers at scholarlyhouses who want the exceptional dissertation. Of course, editorspay particular attention to award-winning dissertationsin their commissioning fields. But word of mouth is still theeditor's secret weapon. Every successful scholarly editor relieson a network. Trusted faculty advisors can identify the mostpromising dissertations being written in the discipline, andif you're writing one of them an energetic editor may be intouch with you before you've hammered out chapter 3. Whatto do if an editor approaches you while you're still writing yourthesis? Listen, discuss, and be appreciative, but don't be distractedby even the most persistent editor's enthusiasms. Gettingyour dissertation written, approved, and filed is your firstand most important responsibility. After that comes the set ofquestions this book will address. Yes, the academic market isa harsh place, but if you're working on a dissertation aboutwhich you're genuinely excited, don't panic. If you have writtenan outstanding doctoral thesis, chances are still very good thatat least one publisher would like to talk to you about it.

But what makes a dissertation outstanding to a publisherisn't exactly the same thing that makes it outstanding to thescholarly community. The winner of the prize for the year'soutstanding thesis in the field of Kwakiutl grammar may havemade a signal contribution to the study of linguistics. A publisher,however, will see the prize only as a validation of the dissertation'sacademic quality. That might be enough to get a footin the door. An outstanding book would be something more, aswell as something different.

Perhaps the author has explained a feature of this languagein such a way that those of us who haven't studied Kwakiutlcan understand something new about the way speech expressesnotions of space and time. Maybe the author has gonefurther and posited something that shifts, if only by a few degrees,how we understand language acquisition. In that readjustmentcould lie a revolution in a discipline's thought. In orderto accomplish this, though, an author would have to thinkin terms of more than the usual two dimensions of academicwriting—page length and density of footnotes.

The dissertation is usually the longest work the youngscholar has ever written, an exhausting trek across the scholarlytundra. At some level, it's natural for that young scholarto see the dissertation's length itself as in some way symbolicof her achievement. After all, every book any of us picks uphas a heft in our hands: whether it's a physical book in physicalhands or a digital book in our metaphorical hands, a bookis a substantial thing. All writers want their books to be substantial,to have the weight capable of conveying the richnessof the author's thoughts. But—and it's the biggest but a first-timeacademic author must grapple with—the length of a bookmanuscript must be the result of the thought working insideit, not the thought's precondition. Nobody should set out towrite a 350-page dissertation, even if that turns out to be exactlywhat the writer produces. In the early nineteenth centurya German scholar published a dissertation in biblical studiesthat changed thinking about the composition of Deuteronomy.It was some eighteen pages long. In our day a dissertation onMichelangelo by the art historian James Elkins ran to six volumes(three for text, two for illustrations, and one for notes).The length of a dissertation, however, has nothing to do withreaching a broader academic readership; real books are different.

Getting length right is only part of revising the dissertation.Moving from dissertation manuscript to book manuscript involvesfinding within the thesis what can be of value to abroader readership. It also means finding what will interestyou, the author. This process is neither magical nor mysterious.It involves taking that interesting material you wrote andshaping it, lopping off the boring bits required to demonstratehow well you know your subject, and assessing the utility of allthose different scenarios in which you apply your particularinsight. It also involves stretching your interesting material inways you may not have originally foreseen. Remember howSilly Putty, that venerable semisolid entertainment, lifted a cartoonimage from the newspaper so you could stretch the figureinto new and unintended shapes? The stretching was the funpart. In rethinking your dissertation, imagine your subject interms of its plasticity. Revision offers a kind of freedom. Try tohave some fun with it. (Continues...) Excerpted from From Dissertation to Book by William Germano . Copyright © 2013 William Germano. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; Second edition (October 18, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 184 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 022606204X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226062044
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About the author

William germano.

William Germano is professor of English literature at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he has also served as dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences. Previously, he was vice-president and publishing director at Routledge and editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press.

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Getting Started, Again

A young scholar completes a Ph.D. thesis and is congratulated by the supervising committee. A first-rate work, it deserves the applause. “You must publish this, Pat, and soon,” one committee member says, and goes on to suggest two or three publishing houses to which Pat might now write. Encouraged by the response, Pat sends off the manuscript, fresh from the defense. Then the author waits, but it’s not a long wait. The manuscript comes back from the publisher. The pages, which appear not to have been disturbed, are accompanied by a note. It isn’t even a personal note, just a form letter. “Dear Author,” the letter reads, “Terribly sorry. We don’t publish unrevised dissertations.” The new Ph.D. is understandably frustrated. “If scholarly publishers don’t want what I’ve just written, why was I advised to write this, and to write it this way? I’m encouraged to publish quickly. My committee praised my work. But publishers don’t want it. What am I doing wrong?”

The answer is easy. Pat wrote a thesis, not a book.

A dissertation is written under the watchful eyes of a director and an advisory committee. Sometimes that structure may be a burden, or even an obstacle, for the writer. Having the wrong committee can make writing slower and more difficult than it need be. But whether one’s doctoral advisors form a well-knit team or a dysfunctional family, they form a support group, one handed to the writer by the university.

Once you leave the institution where you were awarded your degree, that support structure can seem, in retrospect, a great asset no longer in reach. Your university’s requirements, down to the language of your dissertation proposal and the number of chapters your committee insists you produce, constitute a set of rules—a grammar, if you like—within which you produce the dissertation. That framework is both a harness and a help, and it determines the shape of an argument, the nature of the prose, the pace of writing, even the place where the writing will be done.

Pat, the new Ph.D. whose unrevised dissertation has just been rejected by a publisher, isn’t doing anything Pat hasn’t been led to believe is right. But the operating instructions of scholarly publishing rarely form a part of graduate training, which means that young scholars are usually thinking about the academic book business for the first time when the dissertation is already complete. That’s late.

In today’s market, even a first-rate dissertation may fail to find a publisher, at least on the author’s first try. Who then is at fault? An inexperienced writer? A cautious editor determined to minimize financial risk for the publishing house? A dissertation committee out of touch with scholarly publishing today? The tenure system, with its demand for book-length publication in the face of increasingly unattractive odds?

Open Secrets

To scholarly publishers it seems that for generations, dissertations have been built on a surprisingly simple formula. Choose a topic, preferably one sufficiently narrow that no one else has elected precisely the same territory for exploration. Read everything written on the topic. Demonstrate, with less or greater subtlety, that you’ve actually done this reading via hundreds of endnotes, footnotes, and superscripts. Disagree with some aspect of received opinion about your topic. Document everything. Offer analyses that support your position. Although that may be the recipe for a dissertation, it isn’t the formula for a book.

This isn’t to say that dissertations aren’t valuable works of scholarship. Each year graduate students complete interesting, provocative, even groundbreaking dissertations. Their advisors are encouraging fresh subjects, as well as fresh approaches. Each year dissertations appear that will become books. (Become—not are already—books.) To judge by the manuscripts that scholars send to publishing houses, the majority of the theses for which the Ph.D. is awarded are still highly limited enterprises—confident treatments of narrow subjects, making claims to boldness but doing so by means of elaborate reference to the work of others. The average dissertation wears its confidence and its insecurity in equal measure.

That mixture of diffidence and bravura shows up in almost all doctoral work. When a dissertation crosses my desk, I usually want to grab it by its metaphorical lapels and give it a good shake. “You know something!” I would say if it could hear me. “Now tell it to us in language we can understand!” It isn’t the dissertation I want to shake, of course, it’s the dissertation’s author. The “us” I want the author to speak to isn’t just anyone, either, but the targeted readership that will benefit from a scholarly book. The recalcitrant garden-variety dissertation—lips sealed, secrets intact—will find a readership among two hundred library collections at best. Most won’t make it even that far, but linger at the ready in electronic format waiting for some brave soul to call for a download or a photocopy.

It’s hard to pick up a dissertation and hear its author’s voice. Dissertations don’t pipe up. Like the kid in the choir who’s afraid she cannot carry a tune and doesn’t want to be found out, the dissertation makes as small a sound as possible. Often that sound is heard by a committee of from three to five scholars, and no one else. Revising a dissertation is partly a matter of making the writer’s text speak up.

But what is it about the dissertation that makes it so unlikely that it can be made to speak? One senior scholar, veteran of many dissertation committees, cheerfully told me that the doctoral thesis was, at heart, a paranoid genre. “You’re writing it to protect yourself,” the professor observed, and meaning, too, that you are therefore not writing in order to create as bold and imaginative a work as possible. The dissertation is always looking over its shoulder. If you’re writing in literary studies, for example, your dissertation may be looking backward to be sure it’s safe from Foucault, Freud, Butler, and Bhabha, not that any of these worthies are threatening either you or your thesis in any way. To disarm your deities, you cite, paraphrase, and incorporate the ideas of leading scholars now at work. You pour libations to the loudest of the influential dead. The more you do this, the more difficult it becomes to see where your own work ends and the ideas of the Masters begin, so thoroughly has your writing absorbed a way of expressing itself. Then there are the scholars who sit on your dissertation committee. They may not be famous, but for the moment they are the Kindly Ones—the Eumenides—and you will want them on your side. These are natural responses to authority, to one’s teachers, to those who will pass judgment on your work. All this looking over the shoulder may be good for self-protection, but it gets between you and the book you would like to be writing.

The Not-Yet-a-Book

Many factors militate against a dissertation becoming a book. Yet some dissertations do, and many of these have the potential to become quite good books, a potential they often do not fulfill. The process by which a dissertation becomes a book has several intermediate stages, the most important of which is the transformation from one kind of unpublished manuscript into another, that is, from an unpublished Ph.D. thesis into an as-yet-unpublished book manuscript. Each is by the same author, each contains many of the same words and ideas, each is unpublished. The first is a stack of paper an editor simply won’t consider for publication, and the second is one the editor will look at with professional interest. You need to pique that interest.

Revising is lonely work, even for a young scholar trying to make sense of a freshly completed dissertation. Maybe you’ve completed your degree by now. You may or may not have a job. In the evenings, and on weekends, you’re working on the book based on your dissertation. This thing you’re working on now has no advisor, no committee. Unless you’re already under contract to a publisher, no one is demanding that chapters of your book emerge from your printer according to a strict schedule. You might, of course, arrange an informal committee to spur you on, but it will be a committee of your own making, probably friends and colleagues corralled into reading drafts and chapters. As they read your work, they will be weighing both their words and the strength of your friendship. Unlike a dissertation advisor, your best friend probably won’t read a sloppily written stretch of prose, look you in the eye, and say, “This won’t do.” A good dissertation advisor will say exactly that, and then go on to suggest how you might fix it. Unfortunately, that same good dissertation advisor may not be on call six months after you’ve been awarded your doctorate and are sitting down, by yourself, to turn a humble thesis into something glorious and public.

In some ways it would be simpler not to revise your dissertation at all and just begin with a fresh subject. Discard the whole thing—the research, the structure, the prose. Some writers do just that; picking up the Ph.D., they lay down the dissertation and never look back. One can even argue that it isn’t a total loss, since what the student learned from writing the dissertation doesn’t evaporate, and the expertise garnered in writing it will now hold the author in good stead. But a new idea is stirring in the author’s brain, and this time, he says to himself, he will do it his way. It’s my guess that many writers of dissertations wish they had the luxury of doing something like this—a great new idea, the courage to turn away from the recently completed thesis, and the institutional freedom to spend the next year or two on something entirely new.

Before you begin, you may have to do something so tough it can be crippling: overcome your boredom—maybe even revulsion—at what lies in front of you. Every scholar knows what writer’s block feels like, and dissertation writers are a target group for this disorder, especially in the twilight period of postdegree revisions. After having spent so much time working on a long and difficult project, some scholars simply cannot return to it. Suddenly, it’s easier to do nothing or to send it out unrevised.

Resist that temptation. An unrevised dissertation is a manuscript no one wants to see, but that doesn’t necessarily mean leaving yours in a desk drawer. As long as your work has potential, you owe it to yourself to find out what it can do. Rethink, decide, make your plans for revision and carry them through. Until you know what you have, you can’t know what remains to be done. Revising the dissertation may be going back to square one, stripping the whole project down to its chassis, or it might be something much less drastic. At least the material is familiar. At the moment, however, the thing before you, the manuscript that only a couple of months ago was your dissertation, is now something transitional, the not-yet-a-book. Once you can face your dissertation as actually something in the middle of its journey, you can begin to see it as others might.

What an Idea Looks Like

Like all writers, scholars depend upon words used as precisely as possible. In contemporary academic English, “thesis” and “dissertation” are almost interchangeable, and in this book I’ll use them that way merely to provide some variety. A thesis can, of course, be a master’s thesis or an undergraduate thesis, but a dissertation is always written for a doctoral degree. The dictionary’s succinct definition of a dissertation omits any mention of a proposition to be defended, and length seems to be the dissertation’s principal characteristic. A thesis might be very brief indeed. Martin Luther came up with ninety-five of them, and crammed them all onto a document correctly sized for a church door. For modern-day academics, a dissertation is expected to contain a thesis, that is, this lengthy exposition of evidence and analysis is supposed to contain a core argument. It might be said that the thesis inhabits and animates the dissertation. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems, at least to publishers, that the thesis—the heart of the dissertation—has stopped ticking. Argument gone, all that is left is length.

As they are bandied about by scholars, journalists, and the academic reading public, the words “thesis,” “hypothesis,” “theory,” and “idea” have become hopelessly entangled. In the Great Age of Theory, that heady period from the late sixties through the late nineties, many a modest idea came packaged as a Theory, with bona fide credentials leading back to Continental masters. The humanities yearned for the authority of abstraction. The social sciences were hardly immune—many of the most important theorists, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, came from the social science world. If theory aspired to a condition of intellectual purity, or inspired thousands of scholars to do so, it was a condition impossible to sustain for long. Theories of everything sprang up, with a concreteness that made it possible for a reader to connect a Big Abstract Franco-German Idea with educational practice in Illinois or the use of personal pronouns in Shakespeare’s late plays.

As theory became the queen of disciplines, it seemed that every young scholar was under the double obligation not only to come up with a theory, but to do it in a way that was—truly, madly, deeply—theoretical. A good idea might be an embarrassment when what was wanted was a highly philosophical examination of the subject, enriched with the work of German and French thinkers. “As Foucault has said,” “According to Hegel,” “As Derrida has written,” became the incipits of much academic writing, both at the professorial and graduate student levels. Theory meant many things to many people.

Even today, many dissertations fall into the trap of making claims too grand for the evidence mustered by the author. All too often, a small and perceptive idea is dressed up in clothes two sizes too large and trotted out as a theory. Publishers understand that a graduate student needs to demonstrate what he or she knows. But the book that a dissertation hopes to become won’t work if it appears to be a cottage built somewhere on the rolling estate of another scholar’s work. It would be healthy if dissertations could be entitled “My Footnotes to Jameson” or “Two Small Thoughts about Bretton Woods”—healthy, honest even, but unlikely to win the author a job.

A thesis is a work of scholarship and argumentation, and its primary function is to demonstrate that you are able to undertake professional-level work. It isn’t necessarily professional-level work in itself, though sometimes it can come close to that. Much is made about the idea of the writer’s “thesis”—the argument within the dissertation—as if each of the new Ph.D.’s created each year were expected to come up with a blinding insight. It was never so. Most dissertations have been written on the shoulders of giants. Many do even less, and just step on the giants’ toes. A wise dissertation director once counseled a nave graduate student that the dissertation would be the last piece of his student writing, not his first professional work. (It was good advice, and I’ve never regretted him giving it to me.) Every editor at a scholarly publishing house knows this, and most dissertation directors know it, too.

A dissertation demonstrates technical competence more often than an original theory or a genuine argument. This is, in fact, another of those open secrets of academic publishing: a book doesn’t actually need an original theory. It’s often more than enough to synthesize a range of ideas or perspectives, as long as one can do it in a way that creates a new perspective (your own) and provides the reader with further insights into an interesting problem. As academic publishers know, the first book manuscript will try to make claims it can’t fulfill. Your book does need a controlling idea, though. A thesis isn’t a hypothesis. Back in junior high, when the scientific method first came into view, most of us tested ideas on the order of “My hypothesis is that a dry leaf will burn faster than a green one.” Or “Snails will eat pizza.” We learned something about method, even when the green leaf failed to burn and the snails ignored the half onion, half extra-cheese. The first hypothesis was proven true, the second false. A doctoral thesis doesn’t test an idea in the same way. You couldn’t, for example, write a dissertation that tested the validity of the idea that terrestrial mollusks will consume fast food; there are better things for a biologist to be working on, and the result isn’t likely to be something that would make a book. You could challenge someone else’s thesis—for example, the art historian Millard Meiss’s idea that the plague in fourteenth-century Italy changed the way painters represented God. But in challenging it, you had better come up with a conclusion that takes exception to Meiss. It won’t do to “test” the thesis and conclude that Meiss was right. And you can’t posit a dubious idea merely to test it and find it wrong. “Dickens was the least popular British novelist of the nineteenth century.” This is false, and there isn’t any point in “testing” it merely to prove that the idea is groundless. I’ve offered examples that are intentionally exaggerated, but a more uncomfortable scenario might concern the thesis that argues an intelligent point badly, draws false inferences from good data, or builds a structure on a few readings as if they could by themselves map your universe of possibilities.

Some dissertations wrestle with their origins. Can you outmaneuver your famous dissertation director? Challenge the dominant paradigm in your field? Attack the work of the chair of the most important department in your discipline? Any of these forays will create controversy, and controversy isn’t necessarily bad. But it doesn’t mean that a dissertation that gets you into hot water within your field is automatically one that will be publishable as a book. Sometimes a young scholar needs to stage certain arguments in order to break free of powerful influences, and sometimes that will be liberating for the writer. But the contentious dissertation isn’t de facto more publishable than one that picks no academic quarrels.

A thesis is an argument, not a proposition to be tested. A doctoral thesis, however, is quite often not an argument at all, but only a very small part of a bigger argument taking place in one’s discipline or in American society or in culture more broadly. There’s a tension here between the imperative to be creative and the need to take a place in the larger conversation that is one’s scholarly field. A good dissertation director will skillfully guide a graduate student to a dissertation project that will give her the opportunity to show her stuff and not fall off a cliff or get stuck in a corner.

A good academic idea is connected to what has gone before it, modest in acknowledging the work on which it depends, but fresh. It’s not necessary for the idea to be startling or implausible on page 1, wrestling for the reader’s consent, and winning it by a fall on page 350. An idea for a book can be quiet, noisy, insidious, overheated, cool, revisionist, radical, counterintuitive, restorative, synthetic. Ideas are as different as the minds they inhabit. Some writers find it terribly hard to say what their idea is. “If you want to know what I have to say, read the manuscript!” a frustrated author declares. In a sense, that author is right—if you want to know what a writer has to say, read her thoroughly and with care. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to summarize her work or to find in it something we are happy to call her '“idea.” Your idea may be a massive corrective—think of the work on Stalin’s Russia made possible by declassified documents—or a study that looks at St. Paul’s well-studied writings in what Dickinson calls “a certain slant of light,” finding nuances and making small connections because you were there, thinking, at a certain moment. I keep an Ansel Adams poster in my office. More than we admit, books are like photographs, possible only because the camera and the eye were fortunate to be somewhere at the very moment when the clouds held their shape just long enough.

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 12-21 of From Dissertation to Book by William Germano, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2005 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. William Germano From Dissertation to Book ©2005, 152 pages Cloth $35.00 ISBN: 0-226-28845-5 Paper $16.00 0-226-28846-3 For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for From Dissertation to Book . See also: Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books by William Germano • Read an excerpt . A catalog of books for writers, editors, and publishers A catalog of reference books Other excerpts and online essays from University of Chicago Press titles Sign up for e-mail notification of new books in this and other subjects

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Scholarly Publishing

• Introduction
• Choosing Publishers - Considerations and risks
• Thesis to book?
• Vanity Publishers
• Presenting and publishing at conferences
• When choosing a journal
• Journals selection/ evaluation
• Open Research guide
• UOM Researcher publishing support
• Author Profiles

My thesis to a book?

• Quite frequently early career researchers are approached to consider publishing a thesis as a book. If you intend to publish your thesis in this way considerable editing and reformatting will be required first.
• Often examiners’ reports suggest publishing options.
• Books published by print-on-demand and vanity publishers may often not be eligible for categorising as an A1 (authored) book for internal institutional auditing purposes.
• If you are approached by a publisher please refer to our  What if you are approached by a publisher? Consider asking some of these questions  section.
• Also consider contacting the  faculty or liaison librarian  for your discipline to explore options and considerations further.

Is re-purposing of text acceptable?

Israel, M. (2018, January 20). Self-plagiarism? When re-purposing text may be ethically justifiable. Research Ethics Monthly . https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/self-plagiarism-when-re-purposing-text-may-be-ethically-justifiable

Mark writes up some tips for those considering re-using text that they have previously published.

Roig, M. (2016). Recycling our own work in the digital age. In T. Bretag (Ed.), Handbook of academic integrity (pp. 655–669). Springer.

Miguel helps to define self-plagiarism within science and scholarship and review its common forms - duplicate publication, augmented publication (when a dataset is republished with additional observations), salami publication (creating two or more publications from the same study), and text recycling (re-using substantial parts of your own previously published publications). He discusses the reader-writer contract and some scenarios of re-use in books (e.g., new editions, re-using portions of chapters from one book to another, from journal articles to book), , conference presentations (e.g., presented at more than one conference, conference presentation to journal article) and doctoral dissertations and theses (e.g., dissertation/thesis to publication, publications to dissertation). He explains why authors should be concerned about re-using previously published work.

Vanity publishers

Vanity publishers are publishing houses which charge authors to have their works published without the selection criteria usually used in hybrid publishing models.  Protect your future academic credibility and ensure maximum prospects for future publishing of your work in credible journals by carefully evaluating the credibility of these publishers BEFORE accepting any offers. Refer to our Choosing publishers section in this guide.

Torres, M.R. (2012, June 24). Advice: Dissertation for sale: A cautionary tale [Blog post].  Retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/article/Dissertation-for-Sale-A/132401/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

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• Next: Presenting and publishing at conferences >>
• Last Updated: May 14, 2024 3:45 PM
• URL: https://unimelb.libguides.com/Scholarly_publishing

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Trapped in dissertation revisions?

From dissertation to book: advice for future authors, published by steve tippins on june 8, 2020 june 8, 2020.

Last Updated on: 29th August 2022, 08:28 am

Many PhD students believe that turning their dissertation into a book is a great idea. I’ve even run into some people who are counting on recouping some of the costs of their program by turning their dissertation into a book and selling it.

The first question I ask them is, “How many dissertations have you ever purchased?” There is a market for some research, but the way academics are trained is to get the article through a journal. If they want, they can get access to your dissertation through a library. 

In order for a book to sell, it must be both accessible to a wide audience and be likely to sell a large number of copies (enough for the publisher to make a profit).

The point is, your dissertation alone is not the same as a book. Turning your dissertation into a publishable, marketable book is a massive undertaking. It essentially means starting the writing process over from Page 1. It is possible to do, and in some cases may be beneficial. But it’s not easy.

From Dissertation to Book: Should I Turn My Dissertation Into a Book?

There may be a market for taking what you’ve done and and turning it into a topic of broader appeal. However, you will have to “de-academify” it, or rewrite it in a way that’s accessible to people outside of academia.

Going from dissertation to book entails changing it from the format of a dissertation into a series of chapters and readable sections for the general public. This means a complete rewrite.

Finding a Publisher for Your Dissertation-To-Book

Even more important than rewriting is finding a publisher that will publish your book. Even if your rewrite is accessible and engaging, it’s still important that the book be marketable to enough people that the publisher will make a profit. 

Self Publishing

The simplest publisher to convince is yourself. You can self-publish and do the marketing on your own. Many traditional publishers do minimal marketing anyway. However, be aware that without a strong grasp of how to market a book, you may only sell a few dozen copies (or less). Many self-published books go almost completely un-read. 

There are many services that can help you self-publish and even market a book. However, there is an upfront cost and there is still no guarantee that you’ll make an income from it.

Traditional Publishing

A traditional publisher will pay you an advance upfront, so your income will be assured. However, it may be difficult to find a traditional publisher willing to take on your projet. You’ll have to market your book to the publisher and show them that there will be sufficient demand for them to take your book on.

How are you going to help them sell enough books to make it worthwhile? This is the question that you must answer. How can you show them that you have connections with enough people to have a built-in market for the book? That might mean having 10,000+ people in your network (social media, email list, or other networks) that you’ll be able to market to.

Another thing that you’ll have to show them is that you’re a credible expert. Fortunately, having completed a dissertation on the subject you’re writing about should establish your expertise.. 

Giving Up Control

It’s also important to be aware that when a publisher takes on a book, they may have ideas about what should be included in the book and what may not. So you may have to give up some control over the material. However, it may be worth it if the publisher can guarantee a wider audience and allow your material to get out in the world, and they take care of the upfront costs of publishing.

Shifting Focus

When you wrote your dissertation your goal was to answer your research question(s). It was not to solve a problem or change the world. While that question may be interesting, you might find a better market if you can turn your results into something that might help solve a problem or change the world. Essentially, you’ll have to broaden your scope.

From Dissertation to Book: How to Turn Your Dissertation Into a Book

Recognize the Scope of the Project

First, it’s important to recognize the large scope of the project you’re taking on. Writing a book is no small feat, even for someone who has already written a dissertation. Also, realistically evaluate your chances of getting your book published. Has a publisher already expressed interest? Will you be pitching publishers you don’t know? How much of a market is there for your topic? Have other books on the topic been published?  These are all important questions to consider.

Read Recently Published Books Related to the Subject

This will help you get a picture of how people are approaching your subject for a general audience. Also, when you submit a book proposal, you will have to list comparable works, so this will help you get an idea of which books you’ll want to include. Finally, doing this will help you see how the books are organized and what the tone is, giving you a head start for your own outlining and writing process.

Read Books About Writing and Publishing

Equally important is to have a solid understanding of the book writing and publishing process. I recommend William Germano’s classic, From Dissertation to Book . However, don’t stop there. WIlliam Zinsser’s On Writing Well is exceptional and should be required reading for anyone who puts words down on paper.

Un-Learn Academic Writing

In order to take your research project from dissertation to book, you’re going to have to un-learn all of the academic writing skills you just perfected. For example, you can (and should) use things like contractions and parenthetical phrases when writing a book for non-academic purposes. 

The average reader may not want to know that Scrum, Scrum, and Scrum (2014) said something tangentially related to what you’re doing. They don’t need to know what the P-value is. You’ll have to shift both the focus and style of your writing. The type of granular detail that’s required in a dissertation is rarely acceptable in a piece of nonfiction written for the general public.

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Talk to People About Your Topic

Talk to somebody else about your dissertation. Have a third person outline what they would want to know about that topic. Talk it through casually with multiple people. This will help you get out of the academic mindset and into the mindset of communicating with the public.

Presenting on or teaching about your research can also help you get a better grasp of how to communicate to people about it. Teaching helps to “crystalize” the concepts you’ve lived with for so long into something you can communicate easily.

Make an Outline

Make an outline and write the first chapter. Show it to people who will give honest feedback, especially those with expertise in writing and English. The first concrete step in the process of going from dissertation to book is to organize your research in a way that’s accessible to a broader, non-academic audience. 

Create a Proposal

Most nonfiction books are sold to a publisher before they’re completely written. Usually, this means submitting a proposal along with two or three chapters. Consult an expert for more information about submitting a proposal.

Be Engaging

it’s important to differentiate between what your committee wants when writing your dissertation and what a publisher wants when writing a book. Karen Kelsky of The Professor Is In says, “Presses are not interested in “solid scholarship.”  They are interested in products that sell.  Products that sell have to be differentiated from the competition–ie, they have to be exciting, new, and different.” She goes on to say, “Write with style and flair.  Just because you *can* write clunky, graceless prose in academia, and get away with it, doesn’t mean you *should.*  Be provocative.  Be original.  Be incendiary.”

Get an Editor

Think about finding an editor who edits popular nonfiction manuscripts, as opposed to an academic editor . It’s kind of like hiring a translate to put your work from one language into another.

Even if you’re used to writing for a general audience, the process of writing a dissertation may actually change how you write. It’s always a good idea to get an editor’s eyes on the manuscript to weed out habits that fit well for academia but not for the general public.

From Dissertation to Book: Should You Publish Your Dissertation as an Academic Article?

You should publish it as an academic article first, before you publish it as a book. If you have aspirations within academia, publications in peer-reviewed journals will be much more beneficial for your career than a publication by Simon and Schuster. 

The other dissertation-to-book option is to write a textbook. You don’t have to “translate” as much from academia. However, you would have to do a lot more research–your textbook has to be much broader than the scope of a single dissertation. And you’ll still have to show the publisher that there’s a market, and why yours is better than those that are already out there. 

Help Turning Your Dissertation into a Book

For anyone who intends to go from dissertation to book, the support of an experienced coach and scholar can be invaluable. My Academic Career Coaching services can help you turn your dissertation into a book and jumpstart your academic career.

Steve Tippins

Steve Tippins, PhD, has thrived in academia for over thirty years. He continues to love teaching in addition to coaching recent PhD graduates as well as students writing their dissertations. Learn more about his dissertation coaching and career coaching services. Book a Free Consultation with Steve Tippins

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• Knowledge Base
• Dissertation

How to Write a Dissertation | A Guide to Structure & Content

A dissertation or thesis is a long piece of academic writing based on original research, submitted as part of an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.

The structure of a dissertation depends on your field, but it is usually divided into at least four or five chapters (including an introduction and conclusion chapter).

The most common dissertation structure in the sciences and social sciences includes:

• An introduction to your topic
• A literature review that surveys relevant sources
• An explanation of your methodology
• An overview of the results of your research
• A discussion of the results and their implications
• A conclusion that shows what your research has contributed

Dissertations in the humanities are often structured more like a long essay , building an argument by analysing primary and secondary sources . Instead of the standard structure outlined here, you might organise your chapters around different themes or case studies.

Other important elements of the dissertation include the title page , abstract , and reference list . If in doubt about how your dissertation should be structured, always check your department’s guidelines and consult with your supervisor.

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Table of contents

Acknowledgements, table of contents, list of figures and tables, list of abbreviations, introduction, literature review / theoretical framework, methodology, reference list.

The very first page of your document contains your dissertation’s title, your name, department, institution, degree program, and submission date. Sometimes it also includes your student number, your supervisor’s name, and the university’s logo. Many programs have strict requirements for formatting the dissertation title page .

The title page is often used as cover when printing and binding your dissertation .

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The acknowledgements section is usually optional, and gives space for you to thank everyone who helped you in writing your dissertation. This might include your supervisors, participants in your research, and friends or family who supported you.

The abstract is a short summary of your dissertation, usually about 150-300 words long. You should write it at the very end, when you’ve completed the rest of the dissertation. In the abstract, make sure to:

• State the main topic and aims of your research
• Describe the methods you used
• Summarise the main results
• State your conclusions

Although the abstract is very short, it’s the first part (and sometimes the only part) of your dissertation that people will read, so it’s important that you get it right. If you’re struggling to write a strong abstract, read our guide on how to write an abstract .

In the table of contents, list all of your chapters and subheadings and their page numbers. The dissertation contents page gives the reader an overview of your structure and helps easily navigate the document.

All parts of your dissertation should be included in the table of contents, including the appendices. You can generate a table of contents automatically in Word.

If you have used a lot of tables and figures in your dissertation, you should itemise them in a numbered list . You can automatically generate this list using the Insert Caption feature in Word.

If you have used a lot of abbreviations in your dissertation, you can include them in an alphabetised list of abbreviations so that the reader can easily look up their meanings.

If you have used a lot of highly specialised terms that will not be familiar to your reader, it might be a good idea to include a glossary . List the terms alphabetically and explain each term with a brief description or definition.

In the introduction, you set up your dissertation’s topic, purpose, and relevance, and tell the reader what to expect in the rest of the dissertation. The introduction should:

• Establish your research topic , giving necessary background information to contextualise your work
• Narrow down the focus and define the scope of the research
• Discuss the state of existing research on the topic, showing your work’s relevance to a broader problem or debate
• Clearly state your objectives and research questions , and indicate how you will answer them
• Give an overview of your dissertation’s structure

Everything in the introduction should be clear, engaging, and relevant to your research. By the end, the reader should understand the what , why and how of your research. Not sure how? Read our guide on how to write a dissertation introduction .

Before you start on your research, you should have conducted a literature review to gain a thorough understanding of the academic work that already exists on your topic. This means:

• Collecting sources (e.g. books and journal articles) and selecting the most relevant ones
• Critically evaluating and analysing each source
• Drawing connections between them (e.g. themes, patterns, conflicts, gaps) to make an overall point

In the dissertation literature review chapter or section, you shouldn’t just summarise existing studies, but develop a coherent structure and argument that leads to a clear basis or justification for your own research. For example, it might aim to show how your research:

• Addresses a gap in the literature
• Takes a new theoretical or methodological approach to the topic
• Proposes a solution to an unresolved problem
• Advances a theoretical debate
• Builds on and strengthens existing knowledge with new data

The literature review often becomes the basis for a theoretical framework , in which you define and analyse the key theories, concepts and models that frame your research. In this section you can answer descriptive research questions about the relationship between concepts or variables.

The methodology chapter or section describes how you conducted your research, allowing your reader to assess its validity. You should generally include:

• The overall approach and type of research (e.g. qualitative, quantitative, experimental, ethnographic)
• Your methods of collecting data (e.g. interviews, surveys, archives)
• Details of where, when, and with whom the research took place
• Your methods of analysing data (e.g. statistical analysis, discourse analysis)
• Tools and materials you used (e.g. computer programs, lab equipment)
• A discussion of any obstacles you faced in conducting the research and how you overcame them
• An evaluation or justification of your methods

Your aim in the methodology is to accurately report what you did, as well as convincing the reader that this was the best approach to answering your research questions or objectives.

Next, you report the results of your research . You can structure this section around sub-questions, hypotheses, or topics. Only report results that are relevant to your objectives and research questions. In some disciplines, the results section is strictly separated from the discussion, while in others the two are combined.

For example, for qualitative methods like in-depth interviews, the presentation of the data will often be woven together with discussion and analysis, while in quantitative and experimental research, the results should be presented separately before you discuss their meaning. If you’re unsure, consult with your supervisor and look at sample dissertations to find out the best structure for your research.

In the results section it can often be helpful to include tables, graphs and charts. Think carefully about how best to present your data, and don’t include tables or figures that just repeat what you have written  –  they should provide extra information or usefully visualise the results in a way that adds value to your text.

Full versions of your data (such as interview transcripts) can be included as an appendix .

The discussion  is where you explore the meaning and implications of your results in relation to your research questions. Here you should interpret the results in detail, discussing whether they met your expectations and how well they fit with the framework that you built in earlier chapters. If any of the results were unexpected, offer explanations for why this might be. It’s a good idea to consider alternative interpretations of your data and discuss any limitations that might have influenced the results.

The discussion should reference other scholarly work to show how your results fit with existing knowledge. You can also make recommendations for future research or practical action.

The dissertation conclusion should concisely answer the main research question, leaving the reader with a clear understanding of your central argument. Wrap up your dissertation with a final reflection on what you did and how you did it. The conclusion often also includes recommendations for research or practice.

In this section, it’s important to show how your findings contribute to knowledge in the field and why your research matters. What have you added to what was already known?

You must include full details of all sources that you have cited in a reference list (sometimes also called a works cited list or bibliography). It’s important to follow a consistent reference style . Each style has strict and specific requirements for how to format your sources in the reference list.

The most common styles used in UK universities are Harvard referencing and Vancouver referencing . Your department will often specify which referencing style you should use – for example, psychology students tend to use APA style , humanities students often use MHRA , and law students always use OSCOLA . M ake sure to check the requirements, and ask your supervisor if you’re unsure.

To save time creating the reference list and make sure your citations are correctly and consistently formatted, you can use our free APA Citation Generator .

Your dissertation itself should contain only essential information that directly contributes to answering your research question. Documents you have used that do not fit into the main body of your dissertation (such as interview transcripts, survey questions or tables with full figures) can be added as appendices .

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“To Make a Splendid Showing”: Parading and Contesting Citizenship in Turn of the Century American Cities

Add to collection, downloadable content.

• Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
• Streets were the sites and settings for the crafting and displays of power, identity, inclusion, and citizenship. Streets were both democratic and highly regulated spaces. The ways in which groups laid claim to and used city streets was highly charged, since they amounted to claims made directly on the city itself. Groups’ use—or denied use—of the streets reflected contemporaneous debates over gender, inclusion, exclusion, and power. Particularly when the streets were the settings for grand spectacles, who had access to, use of, and control over the streets was far from innocuous. Given the growing heterogeneity, industrialization, urbanization, and exponential growth of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, ideas of who was or could become an ideal citizen acquired uncommon importance. Nowhere were these dynamics more on display than in the nation’s burgeoning cities. Through a set of case studies highlighting issues of inclusion and exclusion in public spaces, this dissertation explores debates surrounding citizenship and the role of parading culture in them. This dissertation examines how groups used urban streets in a ceremonial context to present themselves as ideal citizens. It contends that people took to the streets to formulate their sense of belonging and identity through parades, performing what this dissertation terms “civic manhood.” Civic manhood is a gendered performance that turn-of-the-century urbanites used to claim recognition and inclusion as ideal American citizens. It was a way of claiming ideal citizenship in a patriarchal society. Civic manhood leveraged turn-of-the-century expectations and responsibilities of manhood—including independence, self-mastery, loyalty, and the ability to provide for and protect dependents—on behalf of the city and nation. The performance and negotiation of civic manhood in the streets represented the connection between parading groups and the United States. Its performance was especially important to groups whose status as Americans was in question due to their occupations (such as laborers or investors) or ethnic/racial status (such as Black or immigrant Americans). Women, most notably suffragists and wage laborers, adapted civic manhood to claim that they too were ideal citizens worthy of inclusion in the civic community.
• Citizenship
• United States
• https://doi.org/10.17615/vzza-dz64
• Dissertation
• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Brundage, W. Fitzhugh
• Turk, Katherine
• Gellman, Erik
• Silber, Nina
• Remus, Emily
• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School

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