Authoring a PhD

a contract between author and publisher is still a necessary basis for publication, it is rarely necessary to spend much time worrying about the division of the spoils, for they are often non-existent.
If the contract is not the reason for wanting to get your thesis published as a monograph, there are nonetheless three substantial reasons why it is worth doing. The first and most important incentive is just to get the message of your research out into the wider academic community. A book, any book, is a surprisingly long-lived and multi-accessible artefact. The chances of other people learning about and drawing from your research are much greater if you can write a good book, which then makes it onto the shelves of at least the major research libraries in your own country and overseas. A second incentive is to build your résumé or curriculum vitae and to establish your bona fides as a fully fledged academic researcher. In some social science disciplines (like economics) people now rarely write books to communicate research. In these areas journal papers are the main research medium, and most published books are student texts written by senior academics, sometimes penned by authors who are no longer operating innovatively at the research frontiers. But across the more text-based social sciences, and in all the humanities and arts disciplines, books still count fora lot. A third reason for producing a monograph is a composite of the previous two. Books are usually much more cited than journal articles. They area good way of amassing a large pile of citations on the Web of Knowledge. You will also find a larger stock of Web pages referring to a book on the best
Web search engines (such as the world leader inmost dimensions, www.google.com).
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Books generate name recognition. A good book maybe reviewed several times in academic journals with review sections, and it is still much more likely to be cited in bibliographies or included in student reading lists than are journal articles.
However, as the academic publishing industry has been consolidated into larger and more commercially orientated global corporations, the number of major firms that actually handle academic monographs has sharply declined since the
1980s. So your options of publishers to try are unlikely to be great and the chances of success are not high. Before you start 5 AUTHORING AP H D

a perhaps difficult, time-consuming and demoralizing book publishing process, you need to get clear whether there is a reasonable chance of success for your doctoral research. You should take advice on this issue from your supervisors or advisers, and from departmental colleagues and your examiners. If they are sceptical or not encouraging, it is probably not worth pushing things. Your topic may just be unsuitable or the publishing climate maybe very unfavourable in your discipline for academic monographs.
Assuming that you have surmounted this first hurdle, your next step should be to consider possible companies to approach with a book proposition. Monograph publishers are arranged in a rough order of general academic prestige that is also something of an order of difficulty in getting an acceptance. It runs as follows:
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Major university presses are at top of the hierarchy, such as those for Oxford and Cambridge in the UK or for leading Ivy League universities in the United States. These companies still publish key works of scholarship as part of their overall academic mission. There is often some bias towards their own alumni’s doctorates, but they also have some general sense of responsibility to academia more widely. They are typically only interested in the cream of works, however.
And even they may specialize in areas where they already have a well-established list and a reputation, or a series into which your PhD might fit. These kinds of publishing houses are very prestigious because they will carefully referee your book and suggest changes before accepting it (usually taking at least six to nine months doing so. If they like your text,
they may not worry overmuch about asking you to make large-scale length reductions. Then they will painstakingly sub-edit your text to a high standard and produce it well,
often taking a year to 18 months doing so. The main drawback here then is that (after you have added in time for you to make changes, the complete publication process may stretch up to three years. And beyond that the publicity for your book maybe rather skeletal – you should bank on doing most of the promotion work yourself.
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