At the old fora, there was a discussion with this thread title, which I think had great advice from people like Hegemony and Ergative. I don't suppose anyone saved it, or pieces of it, and could re-post here? I've looked through the 13 pages under "research" at thefora.org and don't see anything like it. It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.
Many thanks!
I might have, I'll have to see if it survived a mn XHDD loss awhile back.
I, too, miss many parts of the old Forum.
M.
Quote from: glendower on May 26, 2021, 07:08:55 AM
It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.
You have amazing recall.
At any rate, even if people can't find an old copy, I'd be happy to contribute to a new thread. Weird as it sounds, I hit my stride in book writing (manuscript for book #4 will be at the press in July, manuscript for book #5 is in the works). I'd be glad to share.
Absolutely interested in your input, Traductio.
What has worked for you, and what did you start thinking would be good, but wasn't?
Just for starters...
M.
Quote from: mamselle on May 26, 2021, 07:58:51 AM
[W]hat did you start thinking would be good, but wasn't?
I wrote the manuscript for book #2, beginning to end, three times. It wasn't my dissertation book (that was #1), but my editor thought I was still in dissertation mode. I don't think I was, but the reviewers of the second manuscript (the first didn't make it out for review) agreed with the editor.
The lesson I learned was invaluable, however. Well, two lessons, really. First, if everyone thinks my manuscript reads like a dissertation (even if it isn't), it doesn't matter what I think. I just had to eat the humble pie and start over.
But -- lesson two -- what the reviewers were
really saying, I think, was that I didn't yet own the project. I might not have been writing for my dissertation committee, but I was writing for the editor, for the reviewers, etc. The turning point for me was when I said,
fine [grumble grumble expletive expletive], if that's the feedback you're gonna give, I'll just write the damn book the way I want to.That was the moment I owned the book, and that was the decision that forced me to look at some knotty contradictions I had been long ignoring, mostly because I didn't think I could untie them. I couldn't, but it was during revision three (which passed review no problem) that I hit upon the book's key ideas.
Now I can't imagine the book without those key ideas -- what was I thinking for versions one and two? I mean, I didn't even know what I was really arguing.
I'll come back later to talk about the way I've taken that process further.
Quote from: traductio on May 26, 2021, 07:53:50 AM
Quote from: glendower on May 26, 2021, 07:08:55 AM
It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.
You have amazing recall.
Not me, my browser. It kept offering that URL till I felt it was trying to tell me something. Thanks for your contributions to the new thread, and to Mamselle for checking her files. Though in what is usually a book field, I got tenure on articles, but I do want to write a book. Actually, three, but one thing at a time! I have maybe half a draft, and hope to have much more by the end of the summer.
Yes, as I've been saying I have about 4 book-joeys and 12 article-joeys in the pouch.
I've chosen 1 book project for now, and one article, and I'm trying to concentrate on those.
I'm also working on two chapters with a mind to sending them out first, rather than trying to write the whole thing. The first (intro) chapter will set up what's needed to frame the work; the next one covers the first historic period I'm looking at, with a structure that I expect to mirror in the following (chronologically ordered) chapters.
I started the book project in the summer, using Saturdays to write all day, longhand. I thought I'd have time to transcribe stuff at other points in the week, but I'm only now getting rid of the three other tasks that were preventing that, and I'm starting now to try to figure out the time frames.
At some points, I feel like I do know what I want for it and how I want it to go. But at other times, I don't, or I don't trust what I think I know.
I also believe, on the one hand, that it shouldn't matter what one's status as an independent scholar has to do with anything, but I suspect it could, even when blind review is supposed to be in place.
But that, as I keep saying, doesn't mean the work doesn't want to be done. And it seems to have picked me to do it, so I am.
So, all the help anyone can offer is most appreciated!
M.
Oh, I know what it's like to have the books wanting to get out!
I thought I'd come back and say something about how I wrote book #3 and manuscript #4. I've been finding myself investing a lot of energy in teaching (I really love to teach), much of it in trying to overcome the deficiencies of the books available for my topic (communication theory, as it happens).
So on a whim, I took six of my lectures and reworked them to draw out the thematic links more clearly show the progression from one to the next. Then I sat down and, under each slide, typed out the words I'd say if I were giving the lectures. It was a way to get around my perfectionistic tendencies. I mean, my lectures are always extemporaneous (I prep the slides, but that's it) -- the words will flow if I let them.
So I let them. Then I copied and pasted the words from each slide into a word-processing document and, well, revised the heck out of them. Spoken language and written language are not the same, of course, but the books kept something of my voice. It was one of the thing the peer reviewers liked for #3 (and will hopefully like for #4) -- they're books about communication theory, but grounded in my students' concrete concerns.
This technique wouldn't work for every book. The one I'm working on now is far too conventional for that trick to work. And for #3, I went into the process thinking I'd never publish the book anyway, so I could write it however I wanted to. I'd use it as material in my classes, so I didn't have to worry about hypothetical peer reviewers. (Of course, I did eventually have to worry about them, and it took some searching to find a publisher willing to take a risk on the manuscript. But that wasn't my concern as I wrote.)
Anyway, I thought I'd share the technique in case it might be useful for others. It certainly has proven useful for me.
That sounds like it would help with several of the articles I need to do--they were all born as Ppts and they're all clamoring to get into long pants and grow up to become "real," published pieces.
Trouble for me is, I can seem to imagine a performed reading/Powerpoint presentation very easily, and all the work that goes into the slides then needs to be transcribed, translated, or...something...into article format.
What you're talking about there might help. My slides can get complex; I like creating something more like a book page with the text and images, rather than the spare (arid, to me) three-point, ten-word lines I know are the standard (and I can follow that standard in text-only, but turn me loose on images, and...ummm....well....visual inebriation might describe it...).
One or two of the books are really probably going to be compilations of several presentations that have been riffing on the same theme for a few years now, too. So perhaps I should look at what you're talking about with those in mind.
And since this is supposed to be about books, I'll curtail the derail.
M.
I think what really helped was that I was writing down lectures where I'd already thought through all the things I struggle with in writing, especially the transition from idea to idea. In my teaching, I find I have to be very deliberate about showing my work, so to speak, or about how we get from A to A' to A'', before we can even get to B. With that preliminary work out of the way (it took me hours of working slides before I could "deliver" them in written form), the writing could be a lot more fluid.
Not academic, but...now researching and outlining a novel that I hope to begin actually drafting next week. My creativity that has been missing so completely for the past two years had suddenly returned! It is supposed to be historical fiction, so my academic training is actually coming in useful.
Quote from: apl68 on May 26, 2021, 12:47:48 PM
Not academic, but...now researching and outlining a novel that I hope to begin actually drafting next week. My creativity that has been missing so completely for the past two years had suddenly returned! It is supposed to be historical fiction, so my academic training is actually coming in useful.
That sounds fun. Happy writing!
Quote from: glendower on May 26, 2021, 07:08:55 AM
At the old fora, there was a discussion with this thread title, which I think had great advice from people like Hegemony and Ergative. I don't suppose anyone saved it, or pieces of it, and could re-post here? I've looked through the 13 pages under "research" at thefora.org and don't see anything like it. It was topic 831830 at the Chron site.
Many thanks!
I remember the thread! Hegemony has some fantastic advice. I wish we still had access to all of that content ugh
Since your browser still has the URL, it's probably worth checking archive.is (http://archive.is/) to see if they managed to save a snapshot of the thread at some point.
Probably not, but it's worth a try!
Otherwise... thanks for the advice already given in this thread! It's super useful. I've been plodding along on a publisher's book project (it's not really my own), and am looking forward to doing all this work for myself in the future. (Although I have to say, the publisher's project has been really instructive--I've learned a lot about corners of my subfield I didn't know anything about before, and some of those corners are really, really cool.)
You've posted something that looked like "sectioning" in the research thread, related to your book project--can you say more about that?
I was trying to figure out if it would be a useful way to think of parts of what I'm working on, but wasn't sure if you meant what I was taking from it.
M.
Quote from: mamselle on May 27, 2021, 11:10:39 AM
You've posted something that looked like "sectioning" in the research thread, related to your book project--can you say more about that?
I was trying to figure out if it would be a useful way to think of parts of what I'm working on, but wasn't sure if you meant what I was taking from it.
M.
Probably not useful, no--it's a teaching and research aid built around fifty puzzles in the subfield, which they want to extend to all subfields in the field. So a 'section' is just one of these fifty puzzles.
Quote from: traductio on May 26, 2021, 01:21:39 PM
Quote from: apl68 on May 26, 2021, 12:47:48 PM
Not academic, but...now researching and outlining a novel that I hope to begin actually drafting next week. My creativity that has been missing so completely for the past two years had suddenly returned! It is supposed to be historical fiction, so my academic training is actually coming in useful.
That sounds fun. Happy writing!
Thanks, traductio!
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on May 27, 2021, 11:50:35 AM
Quote from: mamselle on May 27, 2021, 11:10:39 AM
You've posted something that looked like "sectioning" in the research thread, related to your book project--can you say more about that?
I was trying to figure out if it would be a useful way to think of parts of what I'm working on, but wasn't sure if you meant what I was taking from it.
M.
Probably not useful, no--it's a teaching and research aid built around fifty puzzles in the subfield, which they want to extend to all subfields in the field. So a 'section' is just one of these fifty puzzles.
OK, thanks.
I was thinking about some way of using either word count or some other means of sub-dividing text into manageable segments.
Back to the keyboard...!
M.
In my field, articles are usually between 5000 and 7000 words, so I have carried that over into my book chapters.
I don't think the Internet Archive ever saved any sub-threads from the old fora, only the front page.
I have turned up this from my files, attributed to Hegemony; it might be from the thread I was asking about, though I didn't record that. I hope it'll be useful or enjoyable for people checking out this thread:
'You have a special challenge in that you need to keep up a publication record as if you were at an R1 while coping with a heavy teaching load. The model I was taught to aim for was 2-2-4: two articles and two smaller pieces every year, and a book every four years. Now, I actually think most people fall short of that. But if you want to move, you'd want to aim for an equivalent of that, in the most streamlined and efficient way. The first advice I'd give is to drop the second "2" -- the smaller pieces (generally book reviews, can also be encyclopedia entries or whatnot). Those are a luxury. The articles and books are the most important. So here are the rules as I see them:
1. Piggyback your current research on your last research. Use the same kind of materials, but viewed from a different angle or expanded. You can see the prolific scholars doing this already. For instance, the first book will be about Lincoln's White House staff, using the appropriate archives. The second book will be about women in Lincoln's White House, using the same archives. The third book will be about Lincoln's ideas of hierarchy, using the same archives. In every case, pick only an idea that's interesting to you, but pick strategically. Also pick something in which you don't have to embark on a whole new set of secondary reading.
2. Don't put every single thing you learn and think on the subject in the book. Save self-contained nuggets of findings for separate articles. For my last book, I finished the book and then wrote a spin-off article in three days. I had all the quotations right in front of me and knew the material so thoroughly that it just flew onto the page. If you can get four or five extra articles out of your book, that would be excellent. Don't feel the need to jam it all in; use this to plant articles in good journals.
3. Make every piece of writing earn its keep. Don't publish in edited collections; they count for less on the CV. Submit every article to a top-tier journal and work your way down the food chain. Position your book for the top presses. Don't make my mistake and give your book to lower-tier presses just because they ask for it and you think, "Phew! Someone will publish this!" Try all the top-tier presses first.
4. Find the CVs of the top people in your field and keep tabs on them. Keep track of how you measure up.
5. Minimize the busywork your job asks for as much as possible. Where possible, give assignments that are swift to grade; streamline teaching prep; keep extensive records so you don't have to redesign your classes every year.
Then try to get in 90 minutes of academic writing every workday; 45 minutes should be your minimum. Don't save it all up for a long weekend stint, which may or may not be possible when the time comes. The research shows that the most prolific people write for shorter periods and often.
6. Take Sundays off; ideally Saturdays too. Do not stay up working till midnight. Burning yourself out won't get the job done and also makes the job not worth doing. Your goal is to work smart, not exhaustively.'
Wow.
Thanks to both of you.
M.
When I realized that I wanted to write a book, I didn't have a topic yet. I just had a long-smoldering desire; even putting the desire on paper seemed risky. I started by identifying the types of things I would need to do in the next few years in order to make writing a book more possible. And I deliberately used conference presentations to help develop ideas/content that became different chapters.
Quote from: glendower on May 30, 2021, 12:02:25 PM
I don't think the Internet Archive ever saved any sub-threads from the old fora, only the front page.
I have turned up this from my files, attributed to Hegemony; it might be from the thread I was asking about, though I didn't record that. I hope it'll be useful or enjoyable for people checking out this thread:
'You have a special challenge in that you need to keep up a publication record as if you were at an R1 while coping with a heavy teaching load. The model I was taught to aim for was 2-2-4: two articles and two smaller pieces every year, and a book every four years. Now, I actually think most people fall short of that. But if you want to move, you'd want to aim for an equivalent of that, in the most streamlined and efficient way. The first advice I'd give is to drop the second "2" -- the smaller pieces (generally book reviews, can also be encyclopedia entries or whatnot). Those are a luxury. The articles and books are the most important. So here are the rules as I see them:
1. Piggyback your current research on your last research. Use the same kind of materials, but viewed from a different angle or expanded. You can see the prolific scholars doing this already. For instance, the first book will be about Lincoln's White House staff, using the appropriate archives. The second book will be about women in Lincoln's White House, using the same archives. The third book will be about Lincoln's ideas of hierarchy, using the same archives. In every case, pick only an idea that's interesting to you, but pick strategically. Also pick something in which you don't have to embark on a whole new set of secondary reading.
2. Don't put every single thing you learn and think on the subject in the book. Save self-contained nuggets of findings for separate articles. For my last book, I finished the book and then wrote a spin-off article in three days. I had all the quotations right in front of me and knew the material so thoroughly that it just flew onto the page. If you can get four or five extra articles out of your book, that would be excellent. Don't feel the need to jam it all in; use this to plant articles in good journals.
3. Make every piece of writing earn its keep. Don't publish in edited collections; they count for less on the CV. Submit every article to a top-tier journal and work your way down the food chain. Position your book for the top presses. Don't make my mistake and give your book to lower-tier presses just because they ask for it and you think, "Phew! Someone will publish this!" Try all the top-tier presses first.
4. Find the CVs of the top people in your field and keep tabs on them. Keep track of how you measure up.
5. Minimize the busywork your job asks for as much as possible. Where possible, give assignments that are swift to grade; streamline teaching prep; keep extensive records so you don't have to redesign your classes every year.
Then try to get in 90 minutes of academic writing every workday; 45 minutes should be your minimum. Don't save it all up for a long weekend stint, which may or may not be possible when the time comes. The research shows that the most prolific people write for shorter periods and often.
6. Take Sundays off; ideally Saturdays too. Do not stay up working till midnight. Burning yourself out won't get the job done and also makes the job not worth doing. Your goal is to work smart, not exhaustively.'
Thank you for posting these!!
I've been doing most of them, and will follow the remainder now that I've learned about them!!
Quote from: glendower on May 30, 2021, 12:02:25 PM
I don't think the Internet Archive ever saved any sub-threads from the old fora, only the front page.
I have turned up this from my files, attributed to Hegemony; it might be from the thread I was asking about, though I didn't record that. I hope it'll be useful or enjoyable for people checking out this thread:
'You have a special challenge in that you need to keep up a publication record as if you were at an R1 while coping with a heavy teaching load. The model I was taught to aim for was 2-2-4: two articles and two smaller pieces every year, and a book every four years. Now, I actually think most people fall short of that.
This is it! Thank you very much!
Larryc also had a great post about moving
Quote from: Morden on May 28, 2021, 11:15:11 AM
In my field, articles are usually between 5000 and 7000 words, so I have carried that over into my book chapters.
Thanks, that's useful. I have been wondering what the differences are, if any, between articles and book chapters. I knew one of my incipient books had to be a book when I started trying to write it as an article and the first section came in at 6000 words. I've done a series of related articles that could have been a book if I'd shaped it a little more carefully and dealt with one more text, but the extra text was a doozy and I didn't feel up to it.
Quote from: glendower on May 30, 2021, 12:02:25 PM
3. Make every piece of writing earn its keep. Don't publish in edited collections; they count for less on the CV.
This is good advice, but I wanted to add some nuance. It's true that in the humanities and social sciences, chapters in collected works tend to be "worth" less than articles, but so much depends on how you measure worth, as well as who's editing and publishing the collected work, and the journal. A chapter in a collection that people will read because it's edited by a big-name scholar is worth more than an article in a journal that no one will read. And catching the attention of that big-name scholar editing the book — that type of networking can be invaluable.
As for "worth" — this really depends on your goal. If you're a tenure track prof at a big name school, a book from Oxford UP (or whatever the top press is in your field) will be worth more than a book at a press perceived as less prestigious. But that Oxford UP book might be published only in hardback and cost $100 or more, which means you'll reach only a rarefied audience.
What if you are at a compass-point public school? In that case, the Oxford UP book, great as it might be, might not be what you want. Maybe you're a regional historian in Mankato, Minnesota, and you want to write a book that people will read and value. In that case, the Minnesota State Historical Society publishes a specialized series that would be
exactly what you want. (Plus it'll get you tenure, probably, if you're tenure track. And if you're an independent scholar, this historical series might be even more attractive — you'll reach your audience a lot better.)
What if you have tenure, and you want to write books aimed at third-year undergraduates because you realize they're the people you're most likely to reach in a meaningful way? (I'm describing myself here, of course.) I went out of my way, in the case of my most recent book, to find an open-access university press. There are a handful, some more prestigious as others. The one I published with is not necessarily prestigious (although I think it punches above its weight), but the press was open to the experimental nature of the book. (I won't go into details because they're not interesting here — I'll just say I had way more
fun writing, which means I threw out any convention I didn't care to follow.) Even though the press isn't prestigious, the e-book is free, and I've had people write me from India, China, and Mongolia to say they appreciated it.
What if you have a dissertation you want to turn into a book, but the topic is too focused for a conventional university press? Here I'm thinking of a student who went to Lexington Books because Lexington is willing to publish books with narrower appeal. (Of course, they're expensive as heck.) He teaches at a tiny school in a rural state (where he's quite happy — it's his home state), and a Lexington book will be far beyond anything most people there publish.
I think the only publishers I personally would tend to avoid (and even this comes with a caveat) are those like Routledge (I'm not a big enough name to have them publish one of my books in an affordable way) or Palgrave (their books are expensive as heck, too). But here's the caveat — Palgrave Pivot books (which in their paper form are $100+) are relatively well distributed electronically, and if you have access to a university library, you can probably get the e-book through the library's subscription, so you'll still find readers. A handful of really interesting books in one of my subfields have come from Palgrave lately.
And then there's my friend who breaks every publishing rule and wins prizes anyway. He self-published his first book (!) because he refused to yield any creative control. Then the book was picked up by a small publisher and won a major prize in the field of philosophy. His most recent book is similar — he got a revise-and-resubmit from a university press and turned it down because he refused to yield creative control. Brill just picked up the book, so it'll be expensive, but Brill took the manuscript as-is, and I'm sure it'll win more prizes. He can get away with this because his work is, in fact, brilliant, but I'm way more flexible. I wouldn't recommend this unyielding approach, but I always hold up his work as an effective counterexample to received common sense.
I am on board with this advice, though --
Quote from: glendower on May 30, 2021, 12:02:25 PM
Submit every article to a top-tier journal and work your way down the food chain. Position your book for the top presses. Don't make my mistake and give your book to lower-tier presses just because they ask for it and you think, "Phew! Someone will publish this!" Try all the top-tier presses first.
-- as long as you think about what "top-tier press" means with respect to your goals for writing.
CHE has a new piece about how not to get your book published (https://www.chronicle.com/article/6-types-of-book-proposals-that-dont-get-contracts). A to-not-do list if you will. But it also says what to do instead. Does it add anything that hasn't been covered here already?
I note that the #1 thing is to make a point that is clear. Why is that? "Stating a clear purpose or takeaway about your topic makes your book more marketable, because it provides a 'unique selling proposition' that the marketing team at your press can use to pique the interest of readers, librarians, and retailers."
In other words, when you start putting your book idea together, write down your "unique selling proposition" on a sticky note so that you don't lose your focus on marketability. I suspect that advice will be appealing to <0.1% of academic book authors.
For TLDR or paywall issues, here are the points:
6 Types of Book Proposals That Don't Get Contracts" by Laura Packwood-Stacer, a publishing consultant whose new book (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691215723/the-book-proposal-book) on this topic is published by Princeton University Press.
- The Topic-Without-a-Point Proposal
The Idea-Without-Evidence Proposal
The Still-a-Dissertation Proposal
The Too-Unique Proposal
The Proposal That Belongs at a Different Press
The Proposal They Never See
I'm in a field where articles or books are acceptable for t&p at most places. Books carry some prestige, but they are not well read and jr people are increasingly going the article route. I have not written a book and have not seriously tried, but it is something I'd like to do eventually (maybe soon, since I'm hoping to be tenured by this time next year - fingers crossed!). However, being in article mode for the last several years makes a book project seem incredibly daunting. Advice for moving out of the article structure and into book-thinking?
I had a difficult time with my co-authors and my publisher, so next time I will definitely write a book solo. I have thought about it, and one of my ideas for a longer review article that I shared with a mentor could lead to a book, but I think it is too niche for anyone to read. I am just so glad I negotiated the first right of refusal clause to be removed from the book contract so I am not stuck with a crummy publishing experience again. I did see a really great twitter thread on self-publishing and saved it for the future: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1401533042355851271.html
QuoteI did see a really great twitter thread on self-publishing
Although the author makes a number of good points about promotion and readership, he plays down the impact that self-publishing would have on job search committees, tenure committees, and promotion committees. Even if a book is positively reviewed (and the decision to self-publish is made long before any venues agree to review it), university committees are going to be very skeptical. Don't do it if you need this book as academic currency.
Quote from: darkstarrynight on July 22, 2021, 04:12:32 PM
I had a difficult time with my co-authors and my publisher, so next time I will definitely write a book solo. I have thought about it, and one of my ideas for a longer review article that I shared with a mentor could lead to a book, but I think it is too niche for anyone to read. I am just so glad I negotiated the first right of refusal clause to be removed from the book contract so I am not stuck with a crummy publishing experience again. I did see a really great twitter thread on self-publishing and saved it for the future: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1401533042355851271.html
The book proposal was already good enough for Oxford to sign a contract, so having a book of that quality is probably a prerequisite for his kind of success. He also did more marketing than most presses, which is understandably helpful. Most self-publishing authors can't get columns about their book published in major newspapers, for instance. So some initial public status is likely necessary.
Starting on the second draft this week. No question about WRITING it. PUBLISHING it will be another matter.
Congratulations apl68!
Quote from: apl68 on July 26, 2021, 07:45:25 AM
Starting on the second draft this week. No question about WRITING it. PUBLISHING it will be another matter.
Chime.
M.