William Germano

In the social sciences and the humanities, publishing scholarly books is the name of the game for career advancement. Yes, teaching within an academic setting is crucial, but traction for tenure in these fields mainly comes through the pen. Most academics master how to please their advisors, peers, and mentors; few take the step of mastering the industry of publishing. William Germano’s book, laudably in its third edition from the University of Chicago Press, fills that gap by charting how academic publishing works, from traditional methods to digital domains.

For this type of academics, writing a book unlocks the next step in a career, but steps along this path are less obvious than getting a degree. This book demystifies the publishing process for scholarly book writers. It discusses everything from idea to post-publication, including proposals, choosing a publisher, reviews, contracts, publicity, and the electronic age. It’s exceedingly thorough. It’s also relatively up to date, though with a latest publication date of 2016, its section on quickly evolving electronic publishing could stand for another revision.

What can academic book-writers gain from mastering an industry that is somewhat outside of academe, ignoring that many scholarly presses are affiliated with universities? Well, increased knowledge facilitates increased precision, and more precision facilitates more efficiency, which in turn can facilitate greater impact. It makes your book about more than just your department and your students. You can see how your book works through other institutions and involves even society at large. Your audience more tangibly expands to include new readers.

Academics in the social sciences and the humanities provide the primary audience for this book. Not to be overlooked, however, are editors, staff in charge of publicity, and other participants in the academic publishing industry. Reading this work can help smooth out making a scholarly book product. Starting from academic writing, it shines the way of making this effort into a business process. Germano identifies many potential pitfalls and so expedites success, whatever that realistically looks like for you. By understanding the various roles in the process’s big picture, future writers who read this book can find the journey more fun and enjoyable.… (mer)

William Germano’s From Dissertation to Book serves as a guidebook for recent PhDs trying to figure out what to do next. While many dissertation committees tell post-defense PhDs that their dissertations are the making of a book, few explain how to turn the former into the latter. A former editor, Germano worked with many in the process of revising. He cautions, “Turning a dissertation into a book manuscript is one option facing the recent PhD. But it isn’t the only one. A dissertation can become many things – a single scholarly article, a handful of them, a specialized monograph, a broader scholarly work, a trade book, even the seeds of two or more distinct projects that could occupy the author for decades” (pg. 6). In that, he works to help writers make a decision on the future of their dissertation, specifically with an eye to revising the manuscript. Key to the process is knowledge of the author’s intended audience (pgs. 29, 61, 69). From there, Germano discusses the importance of the manuscript’s structure and the author’s voice: two points that differ between dissertations and books. The work itself is a good guide to thinking about the process of revision as newly-minted PhDs reexamine their dissertations.… (mer)

A usefully clear-sighted look at how to revise a dissertation for publication as a monograph. Germano gives some straightforward advice about how to step back from your own writing and how the publishing industry works, some of which I was already aware of, some of which I wasn't. He also helped to put into words some of the things I instinctively knew about my own dissertation, but which my advisor hadn't cared enough to either notice or help remedy. I would have liked some more practical tips, but I suppose in such a short space and in a work aimed at an audience across academic disciplines, that would have been a difficult thing to do. Still, valuable for the inspiration it provides to be ruthless with the scalpel when it comes to attacking the dissertation and turning it into something new.… (mer)