Questions About Publishing Your First Book: Presses, Timing, Editing

I’ve just defended my dissertation and could use some advice on navigating the book publishing world: can you approach more than one press at a time with a book proposal? How long do you need to wait to hear back from press A before you send your proposal to press B?

Congrats on defending! In a way, the hard work is already done: you have gained expertise, proven yourself a scholar, and found an original contribution to make to scholarship. In another way, however, it’s time to start again. Dissertations and books are two distinct genres, divergent in form and purpose. This means that almost every dissertation will need a fair amount of rewriting and repackaging before it reads like a book. So, for example, many dissertations begin with some pages of the author positioning her work within the scholarship, but books should begin with the author more or less telling the reader why the book will be interesting, valuable or even necessary.

For a guide to this process, find a recent academic book that you’ve loved (or two) and pay attention to how it reads. How does the book begin? Do the starts of chapters seem to grab your attention? Do they announce what the progress of the argument will be? Then emulate it all the way.

You should always send in an actual book proposal with your work and follow the guidelines proposed on the website of the press. You’ve probably not written one of these before, so use a model for this too: ask a couple of trusted advisers or published friends to see ones that they’ve written. Think of it as a new genre that must be mastered, the literary form of persuading people to read your work. This document may only ever be read by three people, but it will have an outsized influence in what happens to your work, so give it time. And it may do more. The process of writing it could serve as a roadmap for you too, a way forward for transforming the information you brought together in your dissertation to become the narrative of a book.

You may not think you went into Classics to shill your work to audiences, but: shill your work to audiences. Think about who your audience is, first of all, whether your work can be taught to undergraduate or graduate students, and whether there are areas beyond Classics that would be interested in your approach or material. Then, as you turn the dissertation into a book, rewrite it to meet that audience. This probably means making sure passages of ancient languages are translated, and that field-specific jargon is kept to a minimum.

As for approaching presses, the normal procedure is that you contact the editor of a press in your field and ask if they’d be willing to consider your manuscript. You’ll want to know their list pretty well — you can find this on their website — and be able to suggest that your work fits into their purview. In the world of Classics, British presses tend to publish much longer lists and are more open to first-time authors; on the flipside, you won’t get a lot of individual attention from editors. Also, you can expect your book (should it be published) to be expensive. American university presses tend to be smaller, more boutique operations, but you might find them harder to break into as a first-time author. If you know someone who’s published with the press you like, ask if she’d be willing to make an introduction. It’s a small field and these connections can help.

Finally, you can talk to more than one press but you shouldn’t send your manuscript off to more than one at a time. (This is an academic sin known as “simultaneous submission.”) The press to which you submit your work should send it off to readers chosen as experts in your field (they’ll be given your identity but you won’t know theirs). It can reasonably take up to six months for a press to hear back from readers, and sometimes longer. You can check in with an editor and ask for status updates. Sometimes an editor will apply pressure to a reader who’s MIA, but there’s only so much they can do. If it looks like the delay is becoming unworkable, then pull the manuscript (i.e., write a polite email to the editor retracting your submission) and go elsewhere.

Good luck! The goal of all these steps is to reach many more people with your work, which is a great payoff for all that time you spent gathering the expertise to write it.

While trying to decide when to publish my monograph, I received contradictory advice from various faculty. One the one hand, I was advised that it was a good idea to start working on my monograph now (just one year past my PhD and in a non-tenure job). On the other hand, others suggested that I should only start working on the monograph once I have secured a tenure-track job, even if that may take some years. How do I move forward and navigate this contradictory advice?

I think that faculty who tell young scholars to delay are worried that work completed previously to one’s being hired at an institution won’t count toward tenure there. But I think that this is bonkers. There are two aspects to consider here: one is that the job market has changed from what it was. It’s now completely normal for new PhD’s to spend up to five years, or longer, in temporary positions before they secure a tenure-track position, if indeed they do. It would not be advisable to wait that long to produce real work. (Whether you can find the time to do so while being constantly on the market is another question.) The second consideration has to do with the timeframe of getting a book published.

As noted above, the process of submitting a manuscript to a press and getting even an initial reply can take quite a long time, never mind handling requests for revision or a possibly negative reply. And then, if you’re successful, the entire editorial process follows, and it’s usually not swift. With that in mind, don’t wait to work on your monograph. It’s fine, even wise, to write an article on something different to clear your head and get a publication in the works, but for the good of your long-term job marketability, get to the book pretty quickly. Committees hiring for tenure-track jobs want to know that their hire will get tenure, so seeing that someone is well on the way toward publishing a book is a great sign. In fact, hiring committees will not only ask how much revising you’ve done, but may well ask to see the work (beyond just your writing sample) if you make it to the final round of candidacy.

If the unthinkable occurs, and you have a book published before you show up to start your tenure-track position, then congratulate yourself on your stellar work ethic and keep writing. The endgame for hiring and tenure committees is to get and hold onto a scholar who will remain productive for years to come, so that’s what you need to show yourself to be.

Who do you turn to for reading your research work once you have a job? Do you turn to colleagues, old advisors, someone else? I’m not sure I want my chair reading unfinished, unpolished work when he is the one who will have to present me for tenure. In my case, he is the only other full faculty member in the department!

Good question. It shows that you’re thinking the right way about growing as a scholar. When I was starting out, I had to fight a self-protective instinct to hide my work until it was perfect, a day that never came. It’s much better to share, get advice, and take criticism — early and often.

As for with whom, if you really clicked with one of your advisers from graduate school, you can keep that person in your advising stable. But in general it’s good for your intellectual progress to find new readers, keeping in mind that once you walk away from graduate school with a PhD, no one is being paid to read your work anymore. So, at this point, you should start thinking of new readers more as peers than as advisors. Reach out to people in your field doing similar work and start conversing with them. While asking them to read your new work, you can express an interest in reading theirs. (And you can go further: co-organize a panel! Co-edit! Build the field you want to inhabit! Anyhow.)

You can also reach out to more advisory (i.e., um, older) figures whom you respect — not just as readers but as guides. If you’d like to find such people at your institution, consider looking beyond your department to those whose interests align with yours in some way. It can be great to learn to write for a slightly less specialized audience and these kinds of connections can help. Remember always to ask graciously. If people say yes, don’t overload them with a Russian novel’s worth of reading. If they offer comments, even harsh comments, receive them genially and thank them for their time.

As for your chair, asking for advice can be a smart thing to do, but perhaps wait till the work is somewhat more polished than not before you do so. You’re right to note that he’ll have to advocate for you, and you want to make that a simple and straightforward task. But, above all, follow your instincts! They seem pretty well intact from what you’ve written here.

For other thoughts on turning dissertations into books, and related matters, have a look at some advice offered at “The Professor is in” here and here, some more from an editor at an academic press (in bullet-point form) here, and a longer excerpt from an entire book on the subject here. The Internet wants to help.

A note to readers: the field is always changing and new experiences are constantly accrued. I’ll be offering my advice on a regular basis, but I get that my experience and knowledge are finite! Please use the comment section to add your own advice, experiences, and thoughts. What strategies have worked for you? What advice have you received, or given, that made good sense?

Finally, please send your questions about work and life as a classicist. You can write to me at nooter@uchicago.edu with the word “advice” in the title. Or for a more pure form of confidentiality (i.e., from me), send your question to confidential@eidolon.pub and one of the Eidolon editors will forward it to me without your name or other identifying info. Please be detailed about your situation in your question! We may edit it down for publication, but it helps me to know just what you’re going through.

Sarah Nooter is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and co-editor, with Shane Butler, of Sound and the Ancient Senses (Routledge, 2019). She is the editor of the journal Classical Philology.