Authoring a PhD

worthwhile way. In addition once issued by such presses your thesis does not become anymore accessible than sitting on the shelf in your university library. Vanity press titles are not taken seriously either by the reviews editors of journals or by university librarians doing book ordering.
And such operations typically have no marketing operations to speak of. If a company writes to you offering to publish your thesis sight unseen, or without any independent refereeing process, you should be highly sceptical.
With a small set of target publishers in view, your next task is to come up with a book proposal that will seem viable. A PhD
thesis can only very rarely be published as a book without substantial alterations. Your first priority should be to keep the length of your proposed book manuscript down. A 100,000- word piece of text will simply be too long and expensive for publishers to even begin to look at, however academically meritorious it maybe. Your chances of publication are much better if your actual thesis text is no more than 80,000 words,
which is why this has been the recommended main text length of even a big book dissertation throughout these pages. But to make book publishing feasible even this restrained length will need editing down a bit further. A manuscript of 60,000 to words is widely quoted by publishers as the ideal book length. There is rarely any incentive to go lower than this, however. Academic books of much less than 60,000 words may look
‘short weight and appear poor value for money to reviewers,
libraries or potential professional readers.
A second important change is to make a book version much more accessible than your original thesis. Cutout all the boring bits if you possibly can. Once your doctorate has been awarded and the full PhD text is available in your university library, you can refer readers to it to explain the most esoteric or routine points of methodology, or data, or other evidence. So there is no need to reproduce such material again. Similarly you can economize a good deal on the referencing of materials. If you have not done so already, switch to Harvard referencing and get rid as far as possible of all but the most important endnotes.
Next consider whether your doctorate can be reshaped in someway to enhance its potential readership and hence sales 5 AUTHORING AP H D

appeal. Are there parts of the thesis which are off-putting for readers and that can be hived off to a separate journal article?
A prime candidate here is an overlong literature review chapter,
some of which might be spun off to form a review article in a journal. You can then simply reference the article in a shorter setup chapter for the main core of the book. (In rare cases a very strong PhD may best be published in the form of two shorter books, one handling the literature review elements more as a student-orientated book, and the other handling the original research.)
Before you approach publishers you should also examine whether there are elements that could be added to the book, to extend your thesis analysis and to make it more attractive for potential purchasers. In the social sciences if the period covered by your thesis ends some years ago, then publishers often want it brought right up to date. Similarly publishers maybe interested in additional sections or chapters which put a thesis analysis in a wider context, or make it less narrowly focused, and perhaps boost the book’s usability for advanced students as well as professional readers. Of course, any such additions come at a high price. You have to make space for them by achieving greater cuts in the wordage allocated to your original thesis chapters. New writing then takes extra time to accomplish, and you may also have to do new research to cope with the extensions.
Only when you have formed a plan for achieving a marketable, fully ‘book-ified’ version of your thesis should you approach publishers. You need to write a book proposal which meets these points:
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