How to Turn Your Dissertation into a Book (A Step-by-Step Transition)

So I want to talk about what I hear from a number of people, and that's, "Hey, I want to take my dissertation and turn it into a book." And yeah, you're doing a book-length project to an extent. So let's talk about the emphasis of dissertations versus the emphasis of books and the process of doing so. When people tell me, "I'm going to take my dissertation, I'm turning it into a book," many times they follow up with, "you know, I need to make some money back on this, so I'm going to publish this as a book so people can buy it, and then they can help me pay for all the money I put into this dissertation." Think about the last time you went through a bookstore, assuming there are any bookstores anymore. How often did you see a dissertation, or what looked like a dissertation, there? Even though it's a book-length project, a dissertation itself is not typically what's thought of as a book. Even though I can get it bound nicely, it's not thought of as a book. The simple way to think about this is dissertations are written for a committee to approve. Books are written for markets. If you think about your committee as a market, okay, but that's a market of 2 to 5. and selling them a book at $29.95 to those 2 to 5 people isn't going to recoup a lot of your costs. Academic training— writing your dissertation— trains you, prepares you to publish articles in academic journals, not to publish books for public markets. If your goal is to turn this into a book, it typically means rewriting, and many times starting with page 1. Think about the last book that you read. How often was it set up with APA references? How often did it repeat itself frequently like you do in a dissertation? You're going to need to be able to rewrite this in a way that gains people's interest. So if you're going to turn this into a book, one of the first things you have to think about is, is there a market for this? If there is a market out there for the topic that you wrote on, your first step most likely is to de-academicify, if I can create a word, this. Take it out of academic writing into writing that the market is looking for. You may have to broaden what you've done beyond the research question or research questions. You're also going to want to make sure that it's larger than an academic market that's looking at this. Yes, there are books for an academic market, but think about the number of art history professors there are or management professors there are versus the number of managers there are in corporations. That's when a market gets to be larger. And also, I tell many people, if 7 people read your dissertation, it's a bestseller. Well, if you're going to publish something, you're going to want more than 7 people to be buying your document. The other thing to be thinking about as a scholar, you may be better rewarded with journal articles, peer-reviewed academic journal articles, than books. But if your heart is set on publishing a book, let's talk about paths to get there. First, let's think about self-publishing. Self-publishing is basically what it says. You are doing the work. You have full control over what goes into the book, but you also have full responsibility. Self-publishing also means you are doing all of the marketing. You're— yes, I can go to a firm that says, we will help you self-publish and we will put it on Amazon for you and we will put it in Barnes Noble for you. Yeah, they'll get it on a list, but there's, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of books there. How is your book going to be seen by others? You have to market it somehow. From what I've seen, most self-published books only sell a few copies. Nice to say you're published and have a book out there. But, you know, I haven't seen too many people retire from their self-publishing book endeavors. Under traditional publishing, meaning there is a publisher who says, "Yes, we want to publish this," that can be a good option. And in fact, you can get an advance at some times for doing this. Now, you're probably not getting the type of advance of the people who are writing best-selling novels, or presidential memoirs unless you happen to be a president and we don't know about it. But your dissertation turning into a book, if you get an advance of a few thousand dollars, while that's nice, you're going to spend a lot of time on this. And before you make any more money, you have to have enough sales to have paid back the publisher for the advance. And a number of people find they could have worked at a fast food place for the number of hours they put in and made more money flipping hamburgers than working on this book. A publisher is going to ask, is there a market? And you're going to have to show them there's a market. In addition, what they're asking for now is things like, how big is your social media presence? Because they want you to help with the marketing as well. And if I'm going to a publishing company and their name is going to be on the book and they're going to do some marketing and They're going to do some editing. You may lose some control or a large amount of control over the content or the way it is presented or when it even comes out because you're now being published by another entity. So, if you've written a dissertation, what makes it viable to become a book in a more public market? The first is, is the topic of interest beyond a small academic group? Does your book form help readers solve a problem? And is there evidence that the publisher can make money doing this? Can they sell enough copies of a book for them to make money? And they have required rates of return and things like that. So if there's not a big enough market and you can't provide enough visibility and you don't have a large enough social media presence, all of these things that they have models that they can use to say, this is going to transform into this much money. If this much money isn't enough for them, they aren't going to move forward with it. So what do I need to do if I want to transition my document, my completed dissertation, into a book for public consumption? First I want to do is think about, is this a topic that there is interest in the general market? Second, I might want to read a number of books that have been published for this market in the last few years. What types of books are out there that have been sold, meaning they're popular for this market. I may want to unlearn academic writing, you know, make it flow a little better, make it of more interest to people who are reading outside of academia. I think you should talk to non-academics about your book and about your idea and about your topic to see what kind of interest that evokes. I want to outline a book, not a dissertation. It's not 5 chapters. I'm probably not going to have a huge literature review, and I may not talk a lot about methodology. These, you know, I might be emphasizing the results of what it means to people, so I might not want to outline like that. Typically, when you're dealing with a publisher, they're going to want to see 1 or 2 chapters of what the book is going to be, so you're going to put a lot of emphasis into writing a strong first and/or second chapter to give to the publisher so that they know what they're getting. And finally, you may want to be dealing with a non-academic editor who works on the flow of documents for books as opposed to dissertations. I mentioned earlier that if you've written a dissertation, if your career is academia, you you may want to be thinking about publishing articles. The currency in academia is peer-reviewed academic journal articles. You're going to get more credit for writing a couple of articles than you are for a book. Yes, books can be part of your CV. Yes, you can put them into, uh, for promotion and tenure and for getting publishing, Articles, journal articles carry more weight. Just as an aside, a textbook is different than turning your dissertation into a book or other books. Textbooks also are not peer-reviewed, so they aren't going to get a huge response for tenure. However, textbooks, you know, if you can write the intro to psychology or the intro to European history, or the textbook that gets adopted by many academics at many institutions, that means thousands of these books are going to be sold every year, which means you're going to make a lot of money on something like that. But it's not turning your dissertation into a book, and it's not typically a very popular book for outside of students. So, a dissertation can show that you can conduct original research. A book shows that you can communicate these ideas to the world beyond academics. Ultimately, remember these are different skills and different goals. No matter what you choose, good luck on your journey.