Authoring a PhD
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BOLALAR UCHUN INGLIZ TILI @ASILBEK MUSTAFOQULOV, Ingliz tili grammatikasi
| Set out the academic rationale for the book. Explain the intellectual reasons why your book is valuable for your discipline or broad research area. It can be very helpful to attach at this point positive references about your PhD thesis from distinguished and well-known examiners, who can stress its suitability for publication and wide interest in the profession. A brief supportive reference from your supervisors might also be useful, if they are well-known people. Make clear, though, that what you are proposing is a thoroughly reworked book version of original, high-quality research, and not the direct publication of an unchanged P U BL IS HING YOUR RESEARCH 7 PhD thesis itself (or even large bits of it. Even the few publishers who still look carefully at academic monograph books may well shy away from the prospect of issuing your PhD thesis, sending you a premature standard letter of rejection if you leave any room for doubt. ◆ Specify the book’s structure. Give the overall length of the text, chapter and maybe section headings, and each chapter’s length. ◆ Describe the book’s contents. Write about half a page per chapter, concentrating on giving a substantive account of the book’s key value-added contribution. ◆ Give a market rationale for the book. You need to specify who the readers will be and make a properly justified and realistic estimate of the sales prospects fora hardback edition. Such books are expensive, especially from British or European publishers. They sell mostly to university libraries (but perhaps also to a business market in disciplines like management or information technology. You can also estimate some sales (50 to 100 copies) to professional academics in your particular subfield. In some circumstances it maybe feasible to anticipate some public library sales. A reasonable minimum number of sales to aim for is copies worldwide fora US-based publisher, although this may prove very optimistic if you are writing to a British or European firm producing very high-priced hardcover monographs. In this latter case 300 sales may seem more feasible. You should also include a case fora paperback edition, if you can estimate at least 1000 sales. Explain how the market would broaden out if lower-cost copies were available. Publishers will very rarely publish a paperback version of a monograph immediately, preferring to wait and see how many hardcover sales are achieved, so the paperback case is mostly nominal. But it may help to include one, so long as you can make a credible case. ◆ Include a very brief suggested marketing strategy. Try to identify journals and more general-purpose library or university periodicals which might review the book and generate sales. If your book is accepted the publishers will want you to fill in a detailed marketing plan questionnaire. But it can help convince them that your book has a realistic 5 AUTHORING AP H D chance of achieving significant sales if you seem to know how to promote it from the outset. In your marketing bit you can assume a reasonably prominent entry in the publisher’s catalogue in the year of publication, and maybe a briefer catalogue mention in the year after. But do not assume that the publisher will otherwise spend any money on advertising the book, a luxury usually dispensed within the monograph market. The effective period fora monograph book to achieve sales is normally two years. Sales in the first year are sustained mainly by the catalogue entry. With big firms the publisher’s reps bring the book to the attention of librarians and university bookshops, and promote it at academic conferences. Thereafter sales maybe generated by any reviews of the book in journals. If the book has not become known to members of the profession within two years, its chances of further sales are very slim. It can be very helpful to mention that you will email along list of relevant scholars yourself or can supply specialist mailing lists to the publisher. It is also helpful to promise to write conference papers to signpost the book at key professional meetings in the first year it comes out. You might also point to one or two articles that you have had accepted in good-quality journals, which will come out well ahead of the book’s publication and alert readers to its imminence. But you also need to make sure that (in the publisher’s mind) this does not undermine the reasons why people will want to buy your book. ◆ Download 2.39 Mb. Share with your friends:
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