I have been reflecting about this blog and its content for quite some time. I write it for the new Ph.D. alumni who just got their degree and often go through a form of postpartum crisis with a period of nine months or so during which they do not know what to do with their manuscript—neither why nor how to publish it. This first entry discusses the why and the how.
They feel a form of vacuum, they have spent all these years of efforts, and now it’s done, they have a hard time believing it, and they are left to Nature, chance or whatever name you choose to give It, and they are compelled to procrastinate.
These are precious months that are lost in terms of career profile and simply progress as a human being. So then come all types of pretexts for not publishing the stuff, and the most common is second thoughts:
Well, they accepted my defense, but really the last month was in a rush, I could not really consider all the detailed remarks I received, and got a sense that I was quite off-track when arguing and making my point to the most aggressive scholar in the room at the time of defending my dissertation.
This feeling of euphoria should be capitalized on….because you made it. You defended…. However, for some
And what is left is a feeling of having been more than humbled. There is a nuance of shame in this feeling: did I really deserve to become a Doctor.
One student recently said she felt the committee did not notice all those parts done badly that should have been improved, and wondered if I (the advisor) had noticed those mistakes. She didn’t even believe it was good enough. Then later she thought that maybe the others didn’t even read it because they trusted him/her. Or other students say that
Actually I did not get real feedback from the advisor who perhaps was the most important to me, he said it was fine, just that, “fine,” but did not seem to care, gave just a few lines of feedback that she liked it, when I know she gave such long feedback comments to other advisees, and I feel what I wrote is so inadequate regarding my real purpose.
At final stages students may feel it is inadequate, or that they failed their purpose. Then they wonder if they passed because they actually achieved their purpose.
I kind of realized what was my real, deep purpose while writing the last chapter. It is what I should have done right from the start. It is a missed target. And when I heard the tiny, picky, multiple criticisms of this other scholar who kind of befriended with me to dig his multiple darts more profoundly and leave me in shambles, with the sense I had everything to learn, and I could have learned, had I chosen him as my main advisor. What a feeling of disgust I developed after these criticism vis-à-vis my own work.
The criticism is part of the process. The PhD student is the expert in becoming. The criticism may offset the details that the committee actually didn’t know, varying by its different members. It was original research. Yet these discrepancies are painful in the final stage.
I want to forget about it all. I’ll probably revise the manuscript next Summer. Do a much better job. Be less stressed. Also I may select one chapter and publish it as an article in a referred journal. For now I feel kind of rebel to the whole thing, and am trying even to reject the thought of touching it again. I am upset with this whole situation.
Yet, I have to admit, other just-defended alumni might have other rationales, such as:
My most common thought is extreme fatigue related to that PhD work, I don’t want to look at it, forgetting that to others it’s fresh; forgetting that it is great/well-done (while I am sick of it); and mostly because I’m overwhelmed trying to find a job/subsistence/ facing homelessness.
I have been on hiring committees for 25 years. I participated in various votes about hiring and tenure, and promotion. I am regularly consulted about it. So here is my take.
Do not miss a month before sending your work for publication. In a year or two it will be in the data banks, and it will be ‘late data.’ Now it is fresh, now is the time to send it for publication.
Most Ph.D. writers ignore that it is all right to publish one chapter or two of your dissertation and still propose it as a book for publication. If you look at big journal publishers, I mean Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Sage, etc., they all agree that you can keep your rights to republish your work in a single-authored book publication. You do not even have to request permission, it is written in their guidelines—just verify because things are evolving all the time. They require that you mention the first publication from which your chapter was derived, and vice-versa if you derive a scientific article from one book chapter. So things are much simpler than you thought.
Now when looking for a publisher, your choice will depend upon various criteria. If you plan a career in the academia, university presses are the choice to make. You absolutely do NOT want a vanity press, or a press to which you must contribute with your own pocket money. Some university presses such as SUNY Press may ask you to pay $800 for the index or do it yourself, and that may be OK. Likewise in international presses such as Peter Lang, from what I was told. But presses like L’Harmattan in Paris may ask for more. So reflect about the situation, and contact a publisher, following the guidelines for presenting a manuscript. In most cases, it may take up to three months before you get a response, often dictated by the nature of their Book Thematic Series and their Editorial Boards. In many cases the response will be negative, or they may ask you to modify the content to match the Series topic more closely. If the book project is accepted then the review process starts, which may last one year before you get a contract, often nonnegotiable for matters such as being forbidden to publish elsewhere on the same topic at large, and royalties of 4 to 5% on sales revenue. I know one scholar who objected to this section of the agreement, and she had to go through the same process again with a revision of the contract through the legal department which took months. It is dissuasive enough. Then you sign the contract, and a new review process starts, one more year passes, and you get final remarks with what you must change in your manuscript, and you may be given suddenly 30 days for the changes or it is over. Then the book is formatted and you receive proofreader remarks, maybe 2-3 remarks per line for the whole manuscript. You thought you wrote well, and you had received precise feedback from your friend who is a literate person and your family, and a panel of 5 top-notch evaluators, but no, you must re-do it line per line so your writing will not present any remains of jargon, will be clear for a 16-year old, avoiding any complex sentence and watering down the whole prose. You thought you had style, now what will be published will be the sanitized style of someone else.
The route to publish an article in a SSCI journal is not bright either. You usually have to propose your paper to one, then a second, then a third journal with up to 16 revisions each time until it is eventually accepted for publication, this is part of the game. At that time three years have passed.
Well, I told you I am also on tenure committee and you know what? The major, most common complaint is that new assistant professors did not have the time to publish during the first 6-7 years they got the job. They had to create courses, learn how to teach, prepare articles, attend committees, do some service, and come back to their articles, and then it took three years before their first article was accepted, and guess what this article was? A chapter of their dissertation. And then the committee discusses in the following terms: can we, should we accept in the tenure process an article that is still a prolongation of the dissertation? They appreciate it if it had been done during the first year. Same for a book, if you had published it right away. What they want is really that you show that you are capable of doing brand new, independent research. And they want something conceptualized, in which you situate yourself in the various trends that characterize your field of study. Too bad you procrastinated for three years.
Actually procrastination may not be the right term: in addition to the paralysis of securing employment and then (hopefully if you found it) beginning the new routine, you were paralyzed by your own new loneliness facing the academia’s crystal tower, in which all your possible defects were visible and nastily criticized. What you did not see is that you were your nastiest critic.
Deep Education Press was created to make this process less difficult and even easy. Our discourse is simple. We are a university press with qualified academic reviewers from all over the world. If we need another specialist to evaluate certain works we contact one. It is true we are new on the market, we started in 2013. But we follow professional common practices. Each book goes through a referee process, and the first pages of each of our books propose the comments of the best experts in the field covered by the book. The difference? We do the entire process in 4 months when other presses do it in 4 years. Do you have to pay something? Not a penny. We are a professional press. We have our criteria. We only publish books that are deep, that is who propose a profound account of their field of study and contribute to making a better world.
If your manuscript corresponds to this description and is of high quality—and we are not reluctant at publishing doctoral dissertations since they have been through a lengthy process of quality verification—then please send us your manuscript.
What difference will it make for you? Tremendous.
You can publish a book during the year that follows your dissertation defense. That may help in job search and in the hiring process. You can still publish an article or too about it that you derive from the book.
You are liberated from the load of the ‘what to do next’ worries: it is done! Now you can really start new research and look ahead, not backwards.
People will know you from your book. You may think it is a joke, but you might be happily surprised, like Jaime Wilches Usma at Antioquia University in Colombia, who was attending a large international conference one month after the publication of his book at Deep University Press. There was a plenary lecture with the top expert coming from California, and I let Jaime explain the rest (he authorized me to do so):
I have great news!!!! We just finished the National Conferences for English Teachers and you cannot believe it, the final plenarist from the University of California at Davis, closed his presentation on radical race theory with my book. He did not know me and did not know I was in the auditorium, and he presented a whole slide with the book cover and some ideas, and then he said that this was the most important book written about language education in Colombia. He then said something like: "if you know this guy, you need to talk to him, you need to read his book. His work is extraordinary" and so on and so forth. He then he started to refer to the most important scholars in Colombia and then he said something like, "but this book is really wonderful, it is just the best. Usma´s work is different and very well done".
I was just shocked. People were looking at me, because most of the audience know me, because I had even participated in panel about teacher education reform in Colombia yesterday. It was so great!!!! Thanks a lot for all. Really!!!
I then talked with him (the top scholar) and he was impressed. He told me he had bought the book and read it last week. And then he said that if he had known the book before, he would have just done his presentation on my book. It was just great. Then people began to ask me about the book and to express lots of admiration. The most important scholars from the field in Colombia coming from different cities were there. I am so happy and thankful!!! I am going to celebrate!
This week the School invited me to have a special event for all faculty and staffs and present the book. Believe me, it is causing lots of noise, especially because people go to Amazon and see all the comments from the experts. And now I see people having to read the book in universities and for further research here. And I can see the experts in the coming national conferences talking more and more about the book.
I hope this is YOU, very soon.
They feel a form of vacuum, they have spent all these years of efforts, and now it’s done, they have a hard time believing it, and they are left to Nature, chance or whatever name you choose to give It, and they are compelled to procrastinate.
These are precious months that are lost in terms of career profile and simply progress as a human being. So then come all types of pretexts for not publishing the stuff, and the most common is second thoughts:
Well, they accepted my defense, but really the last month was in a rush, I could not really consider all the detailed remarks I received, and got a sense that I was quite off-track when arguing and making my point to the most aggressive scholar in the room at the time of defending my dissertation.
This feeling of euphoria should be capitalized on….because you made it. You defended…. However, for some
And what is left is a feeling of having been more than humbled. There is a nuance of shame in this feeling: did I really deserve to become a Doctor.
One student recently said she felt the committee did not notice all those parts done badly that should have been improved, and wondered if I (the advisor) had noticed those mistakes. She didn’t even believe it was good enough. Then later she thought that maybe the others didn’t even read it because they trusted him/her. Or other students say that
Actually I did not get real feedback from the advisor who perhaps was the most important to me, he said it was fine, just that, “fine,” but did not seem to care, gave just a few lines of feedback that she liked it, when I know she gave such long feedback comments to other advisees, and I feel what I wrote is so inadequate regarding my real purpose.
At final stages students may feel it is inadequate, or that they failed their purpose. Then they wonder if they passed because they actually achieved their purpose.
I kind of realized what was my real, deep purpose while writing the last chapter. It is what I should have done right from the start. It is a missed target. And when I heard the tiny, picky, multiple criticisms of this other scholar who kind of befriended with me to dig his multiple darts more profoundly and leave me in shambles, with the sense I had everything to learn, and I could have learned, had I chosen him as my main advisor. What a feeling of disgust I developed after these criticism vis-à-vis my own work.
The criticism is part of the process. The PhD student is the expert in becoming. The criticism may offset the details that the committee actually didn’t know, varying by its different members. It was original research. Yet these discrepancies are painful in the final stage.
I want to forget about it all. I’ll probably revise the manuscript next Summer. Do a much better job. Be less stressed. Also I may select one chapter and publish it as an article in a referred journal. For now I feel kind of rebel to the whole thing, and am trying even to reject the thought of touching it again. I am upset with this whole situation.
Yet, I have to admit, other just-defended alumni might have other rationales, such as:
My most common thought is extreme fatigue related to that PhD work, I don’t want to look at it, forgetting that to others it’s fresh; forgetting that it is great/well-done (while I am sick of it); and mostly because I’m overwhelmed trying to find a job/subsistence/ facing homelessness.
I have been on hiring committees for 25 years. I participated in various votes about hiring and tenure, and promotion. I am regularly consulted about it. So here is my take.
Do not miss a month before sending your work for publication. In a year or two it will be in the data banks, and it will be ‘late data.’ Now it is fresh, now is the time to send it for publication.
Most Ph.D. writers ignore that it is all right to publish one chapter or two of your dissertation and still propose it as a book for publication. If you look at big journal publishers, I mean Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Sage, etc., they all agree that you can keep your rights to republish your work in a single-authored book publication. You do not even have to request permission, it is written in their guidelines—just verify because things are evolving all the time. They require that you mention the first publication from which your chapter was derived, and vice-versa if you derive a scientific article from one book chapter. So things are much simpler than you thought.
Now when looking for a publisher, your choice will depend upon various criteria. If you plan a career in the academia, university presses are the choice to make. You absolutely do NOT want a vanity press, or a press to which you must contribute with your own pocket money. Some university presses such as SUNY Press may ask you to pay $800 for the index or do it yourself, and that may be OK. Likewise in international presses such as Peter Lang, from what I was told. But presses like L’Harmattan in Paris may ask for more. So reflect about the situation, and contact a publisher, following the guidelines for presenting a manuscript. In most cases, it may take up to three months before you get a response, often dictated by the nature of their Book Thematic Series and their Editorial Boards. In many cases the response will be negative, or they may ask you to modify the content to match the Series topic more closely. If the book project is accepted then the review process starts, which may last one year before you get a contract, often nonnegotiable for matters such as being forbidden to publish elsewhere on the same topic at large, and royalties of 4 to 5% on sales revenue. I know one scholar who objected to this section of the agreement, and she had to go through the same process again with a revision of the contract through the legal department which took months. It is dissuasive enough. Then you sign the contract, and a new review process starts, one more year passes, and you get final remarks with what you must change in your manuscript, and you may be given suddenly 30 days for the changes or it is over. Then the book is formatted and you receive proofreader remarks, maybe 2-3 remarks per line for the whole manuscript. You thought you wrote well, and you had received precise feedback from your friend who is a literate person and your family, and a panel of 5 top-notch evaluators, but no, you must re-do it line per line so your writing will not present any remains of jargon, will be clear for a 16-year old, avoiding any complex sentence and watering down the whole prose. You thought you had style, now what will be published will be the sanitized style of someone else.
The route to publish an article in a SSCI journal is not bright either. You usually have to propose your paper to one, then a second, then a third journal with up to 16 revisions each time until it is eventually accepted for publication, this is part of the game. At that time three years have passed.
Well, I told you I am also on tenure committee and you know what? The major, most common complaint is that new assistant professors did not have the time to publish during the first 6-7 years they got the job. They had to create courses, learn how to teach, prepare articles, attend committees, do some service, and come back to their articles, and then it took three years before their first article was accepted, and guess what this article was? A chapter of their dissertation. And then the committee discusses in the following terms: can we, should we accept in the tenure process an article that is still a prolongation of the dissertation? They appreciate it if it had been done during the first year. Same for a book, if you had published it right away. What they want is really that you show that you are capable of doing brand new, independent research. And they want something conceptualized, in which you situate yourself in the various trends that characterize your field of study. Too bad you procrastinated for three years.
Actually procrastination may not be the right term: in addition to the paralysis of securing employment and then (hopefully if you found it) beginning the new routine, you were paralyzed by your own new loneliness facing the academia’s crystal tower, in which all your possible defects were visible and nastily criticized. What you did not see is that you were your nastiest critic.
Deep Education Press was created to make this process less difficult and even easy. Our discourse is simple. We are a university press with qualified academic reviewers from all over the world. If we need another specialist to evaluate certain works we contact one. It is true we are new on the market, we started in 2013. But we follow professional common practices. Each book goes through a referee process, and the first pages of each of our books propose the comments of the best experts in the field covered by the book. The difference? We do the entire process in 4 months when other presses do it in 4 years. Do you have to pay something? Not a penny. We are a professional press. We have our criteria. We only publish books that are deep, that is who propose a profound account of their field of study and contribute to making a better world.
If your manuscript corresponds to this description and is of high quality—and we are not reluctant at publishing doctoral dissertations since they have been through a lengthy process of quality verification—then please send us your manuscript.
What difference will it make for you? Tremendous.
You can publish a book during the year that follows your dissertation defense. That may help in job search and in the hiring process. You can still publish an article or too about it that you derive from the book.
You are liberated from the load of the ‘what to do next’ worries: it is done! Now you can really start new research and look ahead, not backwards.
People will know you from your book. You may think it is a joke, but you might be happily surprised, like Jaime Wilches Usma at Antioquia University in Colombia, who was attending a large international conference one month after the publication of his book at Deep University Press. There was a plenary lecture with the top expert coming from California, and I let Jaime explain the rest (he authorized me to do so):
I have great news!!!! We just finished the National Conferences for English Teachers and you cannot believe it, the final plenarist from the University of California at Davis, closed his presentation on radical race theory with my book. He did not know me and did not know I was in the auditorium, and he presented a whole slide with the book cover and some ideas, and then he said that this was the most important book written about language education in Colombia. He then said something like: "if you know this guy, you need to talk to him, you need to read his book. His work is extraordinary" and so on and so forth. He then he started to refer to the most important scholars in Colombia and then he said something like, "but this book is really wonderful, it is just the best. Usma´s work is different and very well done".
I was just shocked. People were looking at me, because most of the audience know me, because I had even participated in panel about teacher education reform in Colombia yesterday. It was so great!!!! Thanks a lot for all. Really!!!
I then talked with him (the top scholar) and he was impressed. He told me he had bought the book and read it last week. And then he said that if he had known the book before, he would have just done his presentation on my book. It was just great. Then people began to ask me about the book and to express lots of admiration. The most important scholars from the field in Colombia coming from different cities were there. I am so happy and thankful!!! I am going to celebrate!
This week the School invited me to have a special event for all faculty and staffs and present the book. Believe me, it is causing lots of noise, especially because people go to Amazon and see all the comments from the experts. And now I see people having to read the book in universities and for further research here. And I can see the experts in the coming national conferences talking more and more about the book.
I hope this is YOU, very soon.
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