Authoring a PhD

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Include a specimen chapter.
Send your best chapter for the purposes of getting the book accepted. This may not necessarily be a very detailed core chapter, nor just a literature review. It should be a well-written chapter which shows your work in a good light but which is relatively easy fora referee to get into and appreciate. Sometimes it makes sense to provide a few extra pages of lead-in or scene-setting material for the chapter, and a summary of what comes next at the end. You will need to provide a purpose-edited chapter bibliography if you are using Harvard referencing,
but not if you are using endnotes. The point of the specimen chapter is to show that your work is well written,
of a good professional standard, on an interesting topic, and likely to generate the sales you have promised. It should be fully ‘book-ified’ with no unnecessary thesis apparatus. It obviously might carry more weight with publishers if you could promise to send a fully ready manuscript immediately by return if they would like to seethe whole thing. But this is rarely practicable, because you cannot invest all the effort involved in converting your entire thesis into book form without knowing how likely it is that any publisher will accept it. And it may not be crucial anyway. If a publisher is at all interested in adopting your book they will have to commission one or more academics to review your materials. It is normally much easier (and cheaper) for them to get a book outline plus specimen chapter refereed than a complete book manuscript, especially with a research monograph which demands that the readers pay close attention to detail. If you think a single sample chapter will not be enough to show what your book will be like, then send two chapters.
Assembling this package of materials is a time-consuming business, and waiting fora response also takes more time.
However, unlike journals you can legitimately send your book proposal and materials to more than one publisher at once. It is not a good idea to broadcast it to a large number of publishers,
however, because their commissioning editors also meet regularly at conferences and other venues and swap notes. Finding out that you have adopted a shotgun approach to seeking
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a publisher may lead them to take a collectively unfavourable view of your work. In addition, if you sendoff copies of your proposal to ten different publishers you are unlikely to have targeted the proposal sufficiently, and are more likely to receive a row of outright rejections. And if you send the first version of your proposal to all available publishers then you cannot revise it in the light of feedback you get and send it off in a different form to anyone else. So it is best to send your proposal pack to no more than the two or three publishers who offer the best chances of getting your thesis published, keeping other names in reserve fora second-round effort.
If a company comes back with an offer to publish your monograph you should virtually always close the deal. But there are just a few safeguards to keep in mind. You must have a proper contract not because you will make any significant money out of a monograph, which is highly unlikely, but in order to ensure that you are dealing with a reputable firm. The contract will specify that you supply the publisher with a clean manuscript, warranted to be free from libellous or defamatory material, of a certain length and meeting the comments of the publishers readers, by a certain date. In return for you ceding the publisher the right to market and distribute your text (usually worldwide) fora certain period, the publisher engages to deliver a book and to sell it in their normal way. A good contract from your point of view will have royalty terms in it, usually promising you something like 10 percent of the publisher’s
‘net receipts (that is, profits. Often such sums only kick in,
however, after the book has achieved a certain number of sales
(say 300 or 500 or 1000 copies, which maybe the maximum one might expect anyway fora high-level research monograph in hardcover. On this kind of book these royalty terms are not usually worth haggling over. You will very rarely get an advance on royalties fora monograph, but if you can extract one that is a small additional incentive for the publisher to promote your book positively.
The key thing to watch for in a monograph contract is how long it binds you to the publisher, and what counts as the publisher keeping your book in print. Holding your book on a digital server ready to print an individual copy whenever an order is received can mean that your book is never in practice
P U BL IS HING YOUR RESEARCH 1

available in any bookshop or really noticeable in any catalogue,
but remains formally in print forever. Be on the lookout also for clauses in your contract that may commit you to offer your next book to the same publisher for consideration, before it goes to anyone else. Only if your monograph has been accepted by a very prestigious and efficient publisher is it a good idea to let such a clause stand. Otherwise you should just draw a line through this bit and initial the deletion on the contract form,
asking your publisher to do the same.
Normally nothing much hangs on monograph contracts.
The author stands to make little or no money and the publisher to sell pretty few copies. But once in every several hundred titles something substantial may crop up. Perhaps you may not deliver your manuscript on time, a potentially fatal mistake to make in book publishing, and the publisher may disappoint your expectations of elastic deadlines by wanting to pullout of the deal altogether. Perhaps your book may suddenly sell a lot of copies or go to paperback, in which unlikely case the contract should ensure that you get a decent royalty. Perhaps someone may sue you and the publisher, which can be personally catastrophic for you, so take the non-libel, non-defamatory,
and non-plagiarization clauses in contract documents seriously.
Perhaps your publisher may go bankrupt or default on their obligation to publish your text, leaving you looking for some leg to stand on in getting back control of it. Normally these are remote contingencies, and with a friendly and reputable publisher not worth worrying about overmuch. But if in doubt, ask a more experienced colleague to check over a prospective publisher’s contract with you before signing up.

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