Apr 08, · All new Phd's hope that their dissertations can become books. But a dissertation is written for a committee and a book for the larger world. William Germano's From Dissertation to Book is the essential guide for academic writers who want to revise a doctoral thesis for publication. The author of Getting It Published, Germano draws upon his extensive experience in academic publishing to “With insight, compassion, and wit, William Germano has done all dissertation writers (and dissertation supervisors) a great service. This book should be handed to the candidate at the conclusion of all doctoral defenses.”—Eric Foner, Columbia University “Rarely is there a book William Germano is the author of several books, including Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books and From Dissertation to Book, both also published by the University of Chicago Press
From Dissertation to Book, Second Edition by William Germano, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®
The morning after defending the doctoral thesis is the first day of a scholar's brave new world. But aside from recommending that you publish, dissertation book william germano, graduate schools rarely take the time to explain just what you should do with your dissertation. There's an expectation that the student is on the brink, or that this excellent piece of new scholarship will naturally find its place dissertation book william germano the academic firmament.
But how to get it there? And in what form? Senior professors are often too far from the process to give useful advice. Junior faculty are usually just as puzzled as graduate students by the mechanics of scholarly publication.
But each year, many dissertations are written, and some are published. Among those, a few become widely read works that transform not only what but how we think. To the new PhD's eager question—"What do I do now that I'm done? There can't be just one. The key to any of them, though, is revision. Revision can mean a lot of different things, maybe especially for scholars, dissertation book william germano.
Young academics talk about revising their dissertations when they mean they will do hardly anything at all, or rewrite every sentence, or settle for something in between, dissertation book william germano. This book is in part about what can be done with a doctoral dissertation, choosing among your options, and moving forward. Wherever you begin, and whatever investment of time and energy you plan to make, your goal is to take something already written and make it more.
Taking that dissertation and making it "more" isn't a straight path. It's a curving route with loops and off-ramps. Yet once you know where you want to go, there are more and less efficient ways of getting there, dissertation book william germano.
From Dissertation to Book is itself meant to be a map, charting out your possibilities and giving you driving instructions. In more than twenty-five years as an editor of scholarly books, I saw hundreds of books through to publication.
As any editor knows, dissertation book william germano, you dissertation book william germano down thousands of proposals to get to those chosen dissertation book william germano. My job also gave me the chance to work with other editors on the books that they were considering for publication.
Sometimes I learned most from reviewing a thick stack of proposals other editors were keen to put forward. This part of the job is what I've described as editing from ten thousand feet up.
An editor-in-chief has a few minutes to study how an editor presents a rationale, a marketing strategy, and a financial analysis, as well as what outside reviewers have to say, and what the author's own words tell about clarity and purpose.
In ways I could hardly articulate, this book is a product of my engagements with all those manuscripts and proposals, dissertation book william germano. When I formally left publishing for academia, I found that publishing hadn't quite left me. I've continued to give workshops and lead seminars on scholarly publishing and have been fortunate to be invited to speak at institutions of different scale and with different missions.
But however diverse those colleges and universities may be, they have one thing in common: all are inhabited by scholars with ideas and the desire to see those ideas brought to light for the use of others. The difficult academic market has dispersed ambitious dissertation book william germano talented young scholars more thoroughly than ever before.
To land a tenure-track job at an institution one has never visited—or perhaps even heard of—before the on-campus interview is no longer strange. The consequence of the shortage in fulltime jobs is that highly desirable candidates are being taken up by institutions that might never have had a crack at them a long generation ago.
In recent years I have had more than one conversation with a university administrator expressing delight bordering on disbelief that the upside of the terrible job market has been that that institution landed its first hiring choices—a privilege very few colleges and universities can enjoy and none can take for granted. First, we—scholars, their advisors, hiring committees, and publishers—need to be reminded that there are talented, productive teacher-scholars across a broad compass of institutions.
There have always been fine teachers at every level of academia, but this market is now sending them into every corner of the scholarly world. New PhDs will go into think tanks and research libraries and other organizations affiliated with colleges and universities. Some will take positions at colleges and universities that are not teaching slots—as student advisors, foreign program directors, registrars, fundraisers, communications specialists, dissertation book william germano.
Into those nonteaching positions will go scholars eager to see their research interests turn into scholarly publications. Second, the rising tide of adjunct faculty is a direct consequence of the paucity of full-time slots.
As the percentage of part-time faculty increases, so there will necessarily be an increase in the sheer number of part-time faculty with scholarly projects in search of publishers, dissertation book william germano. One of the unresolved political issues within the modern academy is the conflict between institutional mission and a reliance on part-time appointments.
From Dissertation to Book aims to function as a sort of writing coach. This book can't resolve the larger structural conflicts within the academy. But it's important to recognize that as doctoral students earn their degrees and face a market that offers even fewer full-time positions than it did an academic generation ago, dissertation book william germano, there will be more scholarly labor in danger of disappearing off the academic face of the earth.
At exactly dissertation book william germano same time that the academic labor force is struggling to determine what opportunities lie ahead, scholarly publishing dissertation book william germano with its own survival issues as it faces questions of technology and dissemination, declining institutional support and shifting outlets, changes in reading habits and access, dissertation book william germano, and the clamor for free open access.
It's hard to write a dissertation, a challenge to transform it into a publishable manuscript, and a matter of skill and luck to get it published. In the second decade of the twenty-first century it's also a challenge for dissertation book william germano publishers to make space within their publishing programs for first books. Both the professoriate and the scholarly publishing world seem always to be operating in crisis mode.
It would be funny if it weren't true. The process of transforming dissertations into books involves more than accommodating the needs of young professionals and assessing the realities of the marketplace. It's also part of a larger effort to identify and preserve advances in knowledge. Not every dissertation moves forward our knowledge of a subject, dissertation book william germano, but it's impossible to know twenty years in advance which early works in a scholar's career will open doors for the big breakthroughs.
The mechanisms by which publishers select first books for publication are closely bound up with the ways in which dissertations are rethought and reshaped. In making their selections, publishers are not only choosing what projects best fit the market.
They're also quietly making bets on what new constructions of ideas will become foundational for the work in fields 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 just a good idea indifferently presented.
That means getting some key things right—shape, length, voice—so that the audience the author believes is out there will want the result enough to buy it. It can be a shock to hear that your wonderful thesis now needs to be entirely rethought.
A young scholar's writing life begins with an apparent contradiction: a dissertation needs to be written, yet no publisher has to want it when it's done.
I meet a lot of scholars frustrated that academic publishers seem to brush off what graduate schools oblige dissertation book william germano students to produce. But scholarly publishers look for at least two things in a proposal beyond a great idea and dandy prose. One is the author's credentials—how an academic's training and appointment enabled him or her to write the book in the first place.
The second is what we call the author's platform. By that we mean the reputation and visibility the author has already established, and how, acting together, they will help get the intended book to its audience. You don't have much of a platform coming straight out of graduate school, but during a career of writing and publishing and lecturing, you can build a wider base and on it build broader ideas for broader audiences.
Revising your dissertation, as unglamorous an activity as it may be, is the first step in creating a dissertation book william germano to climb, dissertation book william germano. Scholars know that our appetite for knowledge, right alongside our ignorance, grows daily. But what we call "the market" continues to undergo radical changes, making access to ideas increasingly challenging. The appeal of digital formats and the highly complex issue of open access put greater and greater pressure on traditional scholarly publishers.
Libraries buy books the things with paper pages ever more cautiously. Readers read differently, dissertation book william germano. We look for answers or information, preferring a short ride on a search engine to the slower and more complex demands of a book. Independent bookstores, dissertation book william germano, once a haven for scholarly works, are an endangered species of commercial life. Neither campus stores nor the chain giants often the same thing can provide all that the academic community would like to see on the shelf, dissertation book william germano.
It's much harder for a scholarly book to be published today than it was thirty—or even five—years ago, and increasingly unlikely that, once published, it will appear dissertation book william germano a bookstore shelf.
Faculty members now approaching retirement came of age when it was possible to have highly specialized work published by a leading university press. These days, young scholars are often thinking about the second book before tenure —even though there are senior faculty in their departments who were dissertation book william germano on a dissertation book william germano of articles and never went on to write a book at all. Buddhist calm might be the best response to this inequity; bitterness and resentment certainly won't help, dissertation book william germano.
The best advice I can offer is to be pragmatic: take your own strengths and make them stronger. These are hard times for scholars and for their publishers, dissertation book william germano. Yet even in hard times, it's important to remember that many dissertations can become manuscripts strong enough to be considered for publication, and a good number of them can become books.
It's possible to revise a dissertation and to turn it into something more, but to do this well means first taking stock of what one has and what it might become. Turning a dissertation into a book manuscript is one option facing the recent PhD. But it isn't the only one. A dissertation can become many things—a single scholarly article, a handful of them, a specialized monograph, a broader scholarly work, a trade book, even the seeds of two or more distinct projects that could occupy the author for decades.
Some dissertations do get turned into books that attract a sizeable readership. Those dissertations keep on speaking years after publication. Martin Jay's Dialectical Imagination and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics began as doctoral theses.
So did Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing ExecutionersMitchell Duneier's Slim's Tableand Jill Lepore's The Name of War. Each year scholarly publishers present the reading public with first books that may become essential reading in their fields. A few recent titles by authors who began with dissertations and finished with successful books: Leor Halevi's Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society New York: Columbia University Press,Isaac William Martin's The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics Stanford: Stanford University Press,Karen Ho's Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street Durham: Duke University Press,and Alondra Nelson's Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, However much publishers may complain about the surfeit of PhD theses, however much editors may say they rarely consider them, there are always hunter-gatherers at scholarly houses who want the exceptional dissertation.
Of course, editors pay particular attention to award-winning dissertations in their commissioning fields. But word of mouth is still the editor's secret weapon. Every successful scholarly editor relies on a network.
Trusted faculty advisors can identify the most promising dissertations being written in the discipline, and if you're writing one of them an energetic editor may be in touch with you before you've hammered out chapter 3.
Can You See This? with William Germano
, time: 1:08:53From Dissertation to Book, Second Edition : William Germano :
It seems that most all dissertations have telltale problems and limitations; Germano is a former book editor at a scholarly press and has seen enough of them to describe them frankly and helpfully. He pegs perfectly the fundamental flaw of graduate education: what you are asked to produce for your committee is not what publishers blogger.com by: 24 William Germano's From Dissertation to Book is the essential guide for academic writers who want to revise a doctoral thesis for publication. The author of Getting It Published, Germano draws upon his extensive experience in academic/5 Oct 18, · William Germano offers clear guidance on how to do this, with advice on such topics as rethinking the table of contents, taming runaway footnotes, and confronting the limitations of jargon. Germano draws on his years of experience in both academia and publishing to show writers how to turn a dissertation into a book that an audience will actually enjoy, whether reading on a page or a screen/5()
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