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Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD

13 Feb, 10 tweets, 2 min read

Because this is always a burning question for first-time academic book authors, here are some red flags that the book you’re proposing hasn’t yet evolved away from the dissertation:

🚩 You’re trying to make all the claims and cover all possible aspects of your topic.

Compelling books usually make one main argument and see that argument through multiple angles or layers in the chapters. They don’t exhaust all possible interest areas of a given subject

🚩 You’re still focusing inward on the specific procedures and findings of your research.

You do need to communicate what you found and how, but it should be in the interest of illuminating some broader dynamic in the world, because that’s what readers will care most about

🚩 You’re too bogged down in the literature and what others have argued.

Your ideas should be the star of your proposal & book, bc that’s what your readers are there for. If ppl want to engage deeply with what other scholars have said, they can go read others scholars’ books!

Re: previous tweet — this doesn’t mean not citing appropriately or claiming all ideas as your own. It means weaving in previous scholarship thoughtfully, in service of communicating what you want readers to understand and recognize as important about your own work

🚩You can’t state succinctly what contribution your book is making and who it will matter to.

This is understandably really hard to get a handle on, especially when you’re close to the diss! This piece might help: insidehighered.com/advice/2019/08…

🚩 Your writing style feels defensive or tentative, as if you’re worried about proving you’re smart enough, you’ve done enough research, fending off all possible critique.

At some point you just have to own your ideas and put them out there.

Understanding who you’re writing for and why they’ll think your work is important will go a long way toward giving you an easier, more confident voice in your book. I think I said this a few days ago on here, but I’ll say it again: write for the fans not the haters

🚩I’ve had clients tell me that editors have said their citation style made their work feel too dissertationy.

Valid point but kind of feels like a distraction to me? Try to cite in the way the published bks from yr target press do, but honestly, the other stuff matters more

I hope it’s clear that none of these revisions are random hoops a publisher wants you to jump through just for the sake of doing something different than your diss. Changing all of these things makes your manuscript more readable and appealing to ppl who buy books

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More from @lportwoodstacer

Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD

@lportwoodstacer

13 Feb

This week’s newsletter covered some of the salient differences between scholarly publishers & trade publishers

Quick answer comes down to audiences & sales channels. Trade presses sign books they think will sell widely via retail. Schol presses less likely to stress mass appeal

There are scholarly presses that are not-for-profit (e.g. university presses) and scholarly presses that are “commercial” or for-profit.

Commercial is not synonymous with “trade”

Trade = sold to retailers at a deep discount in hopes of getting books placed on shelves and in front of a broad audience of readers.

Not-for-profit presses may decide to market some books as trade titles, if they see sales potential

Read 7 tweets

Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD

@lportwoodstacer

11 Feb

You don’t have to be a social media wizard to publish a scholarly book.

But if you do want to use social media to build platform (I.e. the ability to reach your likely readers directly), it’s much more effective to start years before your book’s release

People who start being active just in time for their book’s release aren’t doing anything wrong but they probably aren’t selling a lot of books that way. More useful when someone starts using social media to talk about their work in process, to bring readers along for the trip

Look at it less as sales work and more as helping people become invested in the same questions you’re invested in (which you’ll provide answers to in the book that you will eventually publish and they will then want to read)

Read 4 tweets

Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD

@lportwoodstacer

2 Jan

Here’s what you’ll need to prepare if you want to pitch yr academic book project to a publisher this year:

1. A working title for the book. Don’t worry, you can change it later.

2. A project description or overview. Summarize your main argument, how you prove it, why it matters

3. A description of yr intended audience. Don’t get too complicated. A simple, clearly targetable audience is better than like 10 different possible readerships

4. A brief discussion of other bks that share a topic, approach, or audience with yrs. They don’t have to be identical

5. A projected table of contents + summaries of every chapter you plan to include. These can change later too, but make sure you have a clear rationale for why every chapter needs to be there

Read 6 tweets

Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD

@lportwoodstacer

27 May 20

This is a thread for ppl who just finished their dissertation & want to turn it into a book. 1st, congrats, you’ve completed one the hardest projects (maybe the hardest) you’ll ever do in your life. Recognize this accomplishment & don’t discount it by thinking yr diss is trash

The first thing u shd do is TAKE A BREAK. If u can manage it, stop working on scholarly stuff altogether for a few wks. I know it feels like yr already behind but recharging will make u more effective later & above that u deserve to get in touch with other things that bring u joy

It’s crucial to get distance from the diss work. You can do a lot to work toward your book *while also* keeping away from the diss itself. Here are 6 things you can do:

Read 11 tweets

Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD

@lportwoodstacer

11 May 20

For a little over a year now, I’ve been tracking questions that prospective authors ask me. I’ve got a spreadsheet of about 400 Qs so far—not all unique, so I can track what comes up most frequently

One of the most asked questions is how to revise a diss into a book that publishers will want. There are helpful books on this whole topic, so I point ppl there first. Luey’s REVISING YOUR DISSERTATION. Germano’s FROM DISSERTATION TO BOOK. Harman et al’s THE THESIS AND THE BOOK

It’s ok if you didn’t “write your diss as a book” b/c a diss doesn’t have to fulfill the same needs for readers. Having worked w/ a bunch of academic writers on first books, I have my own list of 6 things a book really ought to have that a dissertation may or may not have.

Read 11 tweets

Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD

@lportwoodstacer

25 Feb 20

This is a very simple editing tip but maybe it will help someone who is stuck today. When I'm working on a chapter draft that I know needs developmental help & find myself getting overwhelmed by all the moving parts, here's what I do:

On a separate pad of lined paper, I list the chapter's content passage by passage. Every new idea gets a line, and I note the page numbers and section breaks as I go. The clean paper is key because it helps me clear my head from the actual MS draft, which is covered in my notes

As I write out the chapter's contents on the pad of paper, I use a different color pen to make notes on what's going to happen to each passage, e.g. need to add clarification here, cut repetition here, could move these three passages up to the end of section 2, etc.

Read 4 tweets

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