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[hollow_man]

This is a question I can't yet ask my dissertation advisor, since I think he'd just tell me to finish it. (I am! I am!)

I have a number of sections of my (humanities) dissertation that I'm confident are publishable as articles -- probably two significant ones, plus a handful smaller things. My question is how to go about publishing them. I assume I ought to send them out prior to publishing the diss as a whole, so that I get articles and a book for later tenure credit. I assume one doesn't publish articles out of a book that is already published (duh). Is all that right? Is there any downside to putting out articles first? Will publishing articles prior to a book make the diss more or less marketable to publishers?

[aristotelian]

I think you have answered your own question.  On the one hand, the conventional wisdom in my field is that publishing articles helps to get the word out about your research.  On the other hand, having too much of the material previously published reduces presses' potential interest.  In my field, the norm is to publish one or two chapters as articles.

[hollow_man]

In my field, the norm is to publish one or two chapters as articles.

Thanks, that's a helpful guideline.

Anyone else have thoughts?

[tenure_track]

IMHO this is the best order to do it:

1. Finish Dissertation - hand in a complete draft to your advisor and get a solid date set for the defense.

Only once you have that defense date set, then start turning 1-2 chapters or sections into publishable articles.  I found out the hard way that (in my humanities field, at least,) diss chapters do NOT translate into articles as easily as you'd think.  It has taken me approx. ten months of hard revising, post-Ph.D., to rework two chapters into journal-length articles.

Get the dissertation done first, then work on the articles, and worry about the book later.  If you continue to mature and grow in your thoughts, you will probably end up revising the articles substantially when you write the book later on anyway, because an article doesn't necesssarily translate well into a book chapter.

If you're like me, after you've had some time and distance away from your dissertation you will have different ideas about it and whether it belongs as a book or a collection of articles.  I thought mine would be a book, but now given the feedback I've received on my chapters my research has taken a different direction and I am working on a different book proposal.  I now see that my diss may form the starting-point for a book on a related topic, much further down the road,...but there is so much else I want to/need to write about first.

Hope this helps!

[trabb]

Mostly I agree with the ideas in tenure_track's post.  Here's the exception.  If you have no publications AND if you have a year or more of support remaining from your grad program, I would stop whatever you're doing right now, spend one month max getting one of those sections in shape for publication, and send it.  Then return to writing the dissertation.  You really don't want to be on the market in most humanities subfields with nothing at least in press.

[hollow_man]

I now see that my diss may form the starting-point for a book on a related topic, much further down the road,...but there is so much else I want to/need to write about first.

Hmm... thanks. I'm really hoping to be at a place with a two-book tenure standard, so I also really hope to knock one out with the diss itself. You seem brave to start over from scratch.

trabb -- thankfully pubs are not a problem. Interviewing may be, but pubs are covered.

[tenure_track]

You seem brave to start over from scratch.

Oh, I'm not starting over from scratch - far from it.  My current book topic is a direct response to feedback I received on my diss chapters, on conference papers, during the diss defense and during the year of revising chapters for publication, indicating that a related but slightly different (a bit more applied) topic calls to be explored.  So it's more of examining a new twist on the diss topic than starting from scratch.  I learned while revising chapters for publication that what makes for a great diss defense is not always interesting to journal readers - and I assume getting a book contract will be an equally hard sell if not more so.

But if you want to go for a TT position at a two-book kind of place, maybe you'd better stay in grad school while you work on the book proposal! I have friends who have done that - purposely delayed their defense date so they could have more time to work on research.  Once you start teaching f/t at an R1, I suspect there'll be precious little time to get two books published in six years.

[apablo]

Hmm... thanks. I'm really hoping to be at a place with a two-book tenure standard, so I also really hope to knock one out with the diss itself. You seem brave to start over from scratch.

trabb -- thankfully pubs are not a problem. Interviewing may be, but pubs are covered.

Do you mean that you've already got some publications on your cv, or that you're sure that your work is publishable? If the former, then you can relax. If the latter, the editors at the journals you send them to will be the judges.

And don't be too eager simply to publish your diss as quickly as possible if that means publishing with a press that's known for publishing under-revised dissertations. At the public R1 where I did my PhD, SCs will immediately toss the files of those who published with such presses. If your goal is to stay at the first place you work, then publishing quickly with one of those presses is probably fine. But if you're seeking mobility and/or are something of ladder-climber, then publishing well is essential, more so than publishing lots. 

[hollow_man]

Do you mean that you've already got some publications on your cv, or that you're sure that your work is publishable? If the former, then you can relax. If the latter, the editors at the journals you send them to will be the judges.

And don't be too eager simply to publish your diss as quickly as possible if that means publishing with a press that's known for publishing under-revised dissertations. At the public R1 where I did my PhD, SCs will immediately toss the files of those who published with such presses. If your goal is to stay at the first place you work, then publishing quickly with one of those presses is probably fine. But if you're seeking mobility and/or are something of ladder-climber, then publishing well is essential, more so than publishing lots. 

I have half a dozen peer-reviewed articles, two in top journals. Also a number of contributions to edited volumes and encyclopedias.

I really need to understand the book-publishing side of things better. I hope my advisor will eventually give me some field-specific advice about that. What you say makes sense, but I've heard things from people in my field that are different from what you recommend. For various reasons, the publishing situation in my field may be a bit different from others.

[apablo]

Do you mean that you've already got some publications on your cv, or that you're sure that your work is publishable? If the former, then you can relax. If the latter, the editors at the journals you send them to will be the judges.

And don't be too eager simply to publish your diss as quickly as possible if that means publishing with a press that's known for publishing under-revised dissertations. At the public R1 where I did my PhD, SCs will immediately toss the files of those who published with such presses. If your goal is to stay at the first place you work, then publishing quickly with one of those presses is probably fine. But if you're seeking mobility and/or are something of ladder-climber, then publishing well is essential, more so than publishing lots. 

I have half a dozen peer-reviewed articles, two in top journals. Also a number of contributions to edited volumes and encyclopedias.

I really need to understand the book-publishing side of things better. I hope my advisor will eventually give me some field-specific advice about that. What you say makes sense, but I've heard things from people in my field that are different from what you recommend. For various reasons, the publishing situation in my field may be a bit different from others.

Since you already have publications, don't publish too much of the diss. Publish one, key piece of it in a top journal and then work on revising the diss into a book manuscript. Scholarly publishing is tougher than ever these days, and presses will only publish books they think might break even by selling a few copies beyond what libraries buy. If you've published more than two chapters of the book, you'll have a difficult time having the manuscript accepted. And unless your book speaks to an audience broader than the handful of specialists in your given field, it's difficult even to have it sent out to readers at a press.

Check out William Germano's _From Dissertation to Book_. It explains very succinctly why those who send off even the most highly-praised dissertations to presses most often get it back two weeks later with a note that says: "Sorry. Limited list."

I should say that I'm in an MLA field. AHA fields might have different standards regarding which are "acceptable" press to hiring committees at top R1s and which aren't. It's pretty brutal in my field, though. Anyone who's published outside Hopkins, Chicago, Penn, Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, and a handful of other presses would have little chance of being hired by my old dept. It's stupid and smacks of "branding," but that's just how it is. The worst part is that a number of those presses these days -- with very few exceptions -- won't publish an author's first book, because they're all trying (sensibly enough) to recoup their investments and want proven "brand names" to help them do that. It's a potentially terminal Catch-22 for young scholars.

[hollow_man]

Thanks, apablo. It's especially nice to have a list of presses. (My advisor recently gave me a similar list of top journals in our field.) I will file that away.

My sense is that, in my field, it's a rare person -- even a superstar at an R1 -- who publishes first with any of those you mentioned. High-level work in my field tends to be technical (often involving ancient language competencies that essentially only professionals appreciate), so the market is typically not there. Instead, there are a number of European presses that seem to publish a lot of lightly-revised dissertations, and at least one here in the states.

[mingus]

Slice thinly and rush out into the post.

[hollow_man]

Slice thinly and rush out into the post.

Are you saying to submit as many articles as possible as soon as possible? That would be very different advice. Would you care to say more?

[trabb]

Slice thinly and rush out into the post.

Are you saying to submit as many articles as possible as soon as possible? That would be very different advice. Would you care to say more?

In other posts, mingus says that he/she is in the sciences.  In the sciences, from what I understand, a book isn't worth much, and articles are expected frequently.  If your dissertation were in the sciences, mingus' advice would probably be excellent.  Since it's not, I would take the advice of people who work in your field.