Thesis to Book Publishing for Early-Career Researchers: Why the Timing Matters?

 Thesis to Book Publishing for Early-Career Researchers: Why the Timing Matters When we’re writing up a thesis, particularly as an early career researcher (ECR) it’s such an overwhelming process! From finishing the writing, submitting the work, defending the thesis, the inevitable panic about ‘ what’s next?

‘ –job applications, post doc or fellowship applications, conferences, further research projects, the thesis itself, can then be one item that sits on the backburner for a while, simply ‘something to do after all the other urgent things are taken care of’.

But in many cases this can actually be the best time to get your thesis into book form. For the most part, your research is probably in its strongest form immediately after completion. It’s fresh in your mind, you’re most up-to-date on relevant reading and debates within your field and you’ve not yet accumulated a backlog of material since. It is often considerably more straightforward to do the required revision if your work is still fresh in your mind; updating citations and bibliography, strengthening arguments and so on, than when you’ve moved on to a new project.

Publishing your thesis as a book is not simply ‘preserving’ research that is only ever going to be read by you and the examining committee.

Instead it’s about making that research available while it still feels relevant, current, and connected to where your own academic trajectory is leading you. When a thesis is shelved, not only does your reading become dated but so does the subject of the discussion that you have in your thesis, and more generally you begin to focus on newer and different research concerns and preoccupy yourself with new sets of professional priorities. As a result the sooner after finishing that you can get the necessary revisions to a thesis made and get it published as book, the more likely it is to attract readership and make an impact within your field.

Why timing can affect whether publishing works A publishing the thesis into a book can be an effective way of establishing momentum at an early stage of your career, particularly when your research is highly specialized and aimed at an academic readership. For many ECRs applying for a academic job, fellowship or grants it helps solidify a specialist niche – that you not only did the research, but you’ve also developed it into a formal publication in book form which reinforces this and may in due course leads to additional research and writing invitations to collaborate on future work and contributes to enhancing institutional reputation and visibility of its research profile and the researchers concerned. For example, if your research interests your subject area and you want to contribute to ongoing discussions within the discipline you may not need to publish your thesis, but when you do plan to, now may be the time to start.

Where ISBN comes in When a thesis is turned into a published book it needs to be assigned a publication identifier to facilitate the cataloguing, distribution, availability through sales and library purchasing of published work internationally and ISBN helps make your thesis in book form easily accessible for the global reading audience including bookstores and online retailers.

Why is it important that a thesis should be more than a piece of submission material, that in essence a published book in this context should represent? Because a book not only requires its author to revise what is already published into a format that is suitable for a broader audience but also to identify potential readership who might not be reading a piece of written work if they did not see it in book form; this may be one means of achieving broader readership. If the thesis work represents what it claims – a significant contribution that would have implications beyond the writing of a final research document and a contribution to knowledge – it has merits which a researcher, and often with appropriate institutional support and mentorship, might wish to develop as part of a productive publication strategy. A number of things need to be reconfigured when translating a thesis into a book to ensure the new book does not read like an assessment piece.

The focus needs to shift from writing for examiners (or to demonstrate what a researcher has achieved as part of their thesis) to writing for the intended reading audience and it is necessary to reframe arguments and to present information in a logical and reader-friendly way.

When we are planning to go for an academic career in an area of scholarship, we are in some sense all in the business of building and presenting our credentials – whether it is to present for an academic post, a fellowship, or a grant proposal. A thesis is undoubtedly the most important and most significant academic work that we do during the PhD process and it should not therefore just become a piece of shelved work within the archives of the university. It is important to get the thesis into book format when you have finished while it still feels relevant and current.

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