HOW TO TURN A PHD THESIS INTO A BOOK

Debra Primo (UKZN press), Monica Seeber (publishing consultant) and Chris Thurman (author)

Monica Seeber convened the workshop and started by saying that "over the years there has been a request for a workshop on how to turn a PhD thesis into a book. It is not an easy thing, when I was a publisher years ago we used to receive many theses on different subjects, very few of them were in publishable form. It is a difficult and highly professional task and we are glad to be able to present a workshop on this. We hope to provide some insight through this workshop. I would like to introduce Debra Primo. She was with Juta Law in Cape Town but has now moved to UKZN Press and also here is Chris Thurman who has had his experience of getting his thesis published."

Debra– I will just dive straight into it and then Chris will follow. I will be talking from a publisher’s perspective and then Chris will follow with his experience. What I am going to touch on briefly are the main differences between a thesis and a book that is suitable for publication to a broader audience; also the process of submitting to a publisher and the main difference that lies with the audience you are aiming at and what you are trying to achieve with your thesis or book. These two things in turn affect the style and tone that you use in your book, and the length and presentation of your book.

Your PhD will have a very limited readership: It will be mainly the candidate, supervisors, examiners, and maybe a few devoted friends and family! On the other hand, with your book you are aiming at a much broader audience and the publisher would like you to aim for a lay audience because it comes down to the sale of a literary book. What you are trying to achieve is also very different. To your supervisor you are demonstrating that you know your field of work, your research capability and the new and significant contribution that you are making to that field. However, with a book, you are trying to engage and share your ideas with the readers. And of course, the publishers want to sell books, so they will be concerned about the viability of the project. Linked to that viability is economy, size and importance. So at UKZN Press we aim for about 90 000 words. It has to do with the book appealing to a wider audience and also relates to production costs and therefore the price and viability of the product. This is apart from the merits of the work itself.

Looking at style and tone: Get rid of the academia. Keep to plain English. Also use subheadings to get rid of dense, long paragraphs. You want to state your position and not argue your points ad infinitum.

Packaging is really the meat of this presentation. When you are converting your PhD, you want this new product not to read and sound like and look like a PhD. So, remove all references to your PhD being a PhD. (You may want to say this originated from a PhD.) Take out the Abstract and anything that is reading like an essay, take that out too. Also, talk as little as possible about the structure and how you going to go about doing things. If you need to say that, then make it brief and keep it to the introductory chapter. Typically in your thesis, each chapter will have an introduction, setting out the chapter goals but with a book you don’t need to do that. Just get straight into the topic. If you feel the need to have those introductions, treat them in an overview chapter: an introductory chapter that offers an overview of the book and how you move into the subject. Again, comments or statements about your methodology should become invisible. Or at least put it in your introductory chapter. Theoretical aspects must move to the background. I am not suggesting that you get rid of it, but let it move to the background and let your own ideas move to the foreground so that people are reading your thoughts and your ideas instead of academic jargon.

Don’t move from one quote to another and the next, or from one source to another. It must not look like a cut-and-paste job. Give your ideas only. Also keep your footnotes and your references to a minimum. Cut down on appendices. They are irrelevant. Also with tables and illustrations, keep them to a minimum because they break up your text. However in some scientific works you will need them, but still try to keep them to a minimum. On the more technical side, if you have had interviews and so on, make sure that those interviewees have given permission to be quoted in a published work, because permission to be published in a thesis is different from permission to be published in a book. If you can’t trace those people, then either leave the quotes out or quote them anonymously. You need to make sure that you have the necessary permission

The Publisher’s Association of South Africa (PASA) www.publishsa.co.za and the Professional Editors’ Group (PEG) www.editors.org.za have databases of people offering freelance conversion services. If someone comes to us with a raw thesis we usually say that we budget 12 months for conversion.

Submission — there are two ways. You can approach the publisher with a proposal but not the thesis. They want a short summary of what you’re doing, what you intend to do before they are willing to consider it. Or you can do the conversion and then approach them with the book. If you are going the proposal route, it should include:

1. the rationale for the book
2. a statement on the audience
3. a review of the existing literature
4. concentrate on what might be competing titles (published or unpublished)
5. tell them what is special about your book
6. an expanded table of contents
7. your CV

This will give the publishers something to work with. Then it will go through the review process. At the UKZN Press we will send the proposal out to independent reviewers.

The thing about submitting your thesis is that you have done years of research and you want the world to read it. But for it to be a book, it has to be accessible and more easily digestible. And, the publisher doesn’t want to see your examiners’ reports because the book goes through its own review process.

Recommended reading

· Germano, W. (2005) From Dissertation to Book. University of Chicago Press.

· Various publisher’s Websites.

Chris Thurman – Well my side is more anecdotal, based on my own experience. It was a very positive one working with UKZN Press. At the beginning of my doctoral research I realized that I had to write my thesis with the book in mind. Don’t write the thesis as a book, however. And it is easier for the people in the American academia to affirm this because theirs is a clearly structured process followed, but here in SA it is different. Fundamentally your PhD thesis is a means to an end. For some people the end is to establish an academic career and for others it is to produce a book out of the thesis. Even in the hard sciences or pure sciences, there is scope to think about how that book can be received by people who are not specialists in the field. And a useful way will be to talk to friends and colleagues who will be interested in your project. This forces you to repackage or present it in ways that are more concise than how you would have it in the book. So, be aware that the world outside you is important.

I think that my other advice is to be patient, because it is a long process. If it took you 5-10 years to complete the thesis itself, after the book has been accepted it could also be decades before the actual book is on the shelf. So it is a long process. Art is long — life is short! I think most of us have anxiety about relevance, about being up-to-date and up-to-speed in pertaining to issues of the day. But scholarly research goes have a long shelf-life. So it can also be healthy to complete your PhD, to leave it for a while and go back to it with fresher eyes 18 months later. Then, assuming that all goes well, there is the time required with those who work with an editor or work on their own in adapting the project thesis into a book. I think an important thing is not to be too precious about the work. It is a very humbling thing when you work with editors who are not aware of your field but who are patient with the academic discourse. They will want to chop and change things a lot. But in fact, what is happening is that it is being made more accessible and reader-friendly. In order for this adaptation process to be an enjoyable one, one needs to respect that those in the publishing industry know better what makes a book more reader-friendly than we do as academics. I think it is a very invigorating process. One needs to look forward to engaging additional readers. The person who edits your thesis and helps you turn it into a book manuscript or the person who accepts the manuscript will play the role of an interested and engaged reader. They are there to make substantial changes so we should not be too precious about our work. From the author’s point of view, the advice that Debra has given includes the basic steps that one can take in the process of adapting a thesis into a book: If at all possible, while writing the thesis, keep the book in mind, since it is really the book that is the end-goal and not the thesis.

Debra – Before questions I want to add something else. Even before embarking on the conversion process, just stepping back. What reminded me of that is when you talk about relevance and the fear of losing that relevance. A question you also need to ask is if your thesis is suitable for conversion to a book, or whether it shouldn’t be published as a series of articles instead. So this might be another thing to think about.

Questions:

• Mamolupe Dladla : Is it only a PhD that can be converted into a book?

Debra— It’s mostly PhDs that come to us for publication, but there is no reason why another piece of writing can’t be converted. There is no principle that says another piece of academic writing can’t be converted.

Chris — Well masters theses also generally do render themselves capable of conversion -- depending on originality, length, and accessibility.

• Simon Mapadimeng : One thing that bothers me about SA. It is a point for criticism. First, I appreciate your input. There seems to be a requirement for compliance and I hate to be compliant! I am saying this because I have colleagues who did PhDs around the same time as me. My experience with them was that immediately after completion, within a year, they are published as books. And I have come to realize that increasingly there is more support for publishing PhDs overseas as opposed to in Southern Africa. The main reason is because the publishers are making this a difficult and painful process. Experiences elsewhere have suggested the opposite to being patient as pointed out by Chris. How do we change the tradition and get to a point where we are competing very well? The SA publishing industry is problematic and that’s why we have this issue of the politics of publishing in South Africa.

Debra— Probably you will only get a partial answer to that question. I don’t see it as a problem as you put it. First of all we need to look at what we call ‘publishing’ because I know that in Europe there are publishers in some countries where it is a requirement that your PhD be published, and there are publishers who specialize in that. And what they do is that they literally print 5 or 6 copies, and that fulfils the requirement! So we need to be careful of what sort of publishing requirement we are talking about. For South African publishers e.g., we recently co-published a book. This was a PhD thesis conversion in conjunction with an overseas publisher. However, we found out a few months ago when the copies were sold out and we had approached the overseas publisher and found out that they had only printed three copies! For South African publishers there are limitations in terms of what we can take on because we are a small reading population. You are talking about scholarly works and it’s a very limited market. So viability, economies of scale etc., dictate that you have certain requirements. If you are a commercial publisher there is no way of getting away from that. If you are a funded organization then you can have other considerations.

Chris— Print-on-Demand has added another option to the publishing industry. There is well documented news about PhDs being mass published as part of an institutional culture and it is easy to get swallowed up by this. Another difference between SA and overseas is the proportion of readership for the kind of book produced. Also, the question of external funding is a big one.

Debra— A lot of our authors ask for that because they worry about their books being accessible in other markets. But most publishers will have distribution channels outside the borders.

• John Singh: To what extent does an author get involved in marketing the book?

Debra– We generally ask the author for suggestions as to marketing channels or to just give us information about professional subject organisations that might exist.

• Oswald Mtshali : What is the difference between a thesis and a dissertation? The words have been used interchangeably in the discussion { In the SA context, they are the same.} #2. How can I republish my late brother’s 1967 out-of-print thesis on Rhodesia: background to conflict, using his name but using my resources? #3. My (Columbia U) doctoral dissertation was on Black South African literature for South African High Schools. Because I am quoting so many sources, I come into copyright problems.

Debra— #2. If you want to annotate, add or upgrade in some way then it is a new book. Otherwise it is up to the publisher who originally published to decide if it is time to print a new run.

Monica — #3. Please approach ANFASA who will help you with your individual problem in a smaller forum.

• Ruth Tomaselli : I am not happy with Chris’s assertion that you need to have a book in mind when you are working on your PhD. As a supervisor, I will jump all over you because I think there are different genres and each genre has its own merit. And I think a PhD thesis and a book are different. Each one must be looked at on its own merit. The lack of accrediting the supervisor when the book is eventually published is also an unethical problem. The difference between a general interest book and a scholarly work has precisely got to do with your ability as an author to take the subject and be able to use the information around that and interrogate it into a scholarly discourse. It seems to me that the trick is to make it intelligible and accessible but not simplistic.

Chris — I agree with a number of things you said. I think my point of writing something with a book in mind is valuable, if the impetus behind your project is the dissemination of knowledge. If you undertake a PhD and you are doing it because it will help you with promotion within your institution or you get paid more etc., then you’re undertaking the project not to communicate with a readership. Primarily, then you wouldn’t want to turn it into a book. But I think my starting point is that one takes up the PhD because one thinks the topic is important and you would like to communicate it to others, then working with the book will be more relevant to you. I think the main reason why you spend years working on a PhD is not so that you can be called ‘doctor’ but it is because you want to contribute to the betterment of our country or the world by writing on that particular topic for wider dissemination.

Debra— Here is just a comment on requirements of a PhD from a publisher’s point of view. We would like to see it as a publishable project. What I just gave you was a simplified version of what the process entails. Because in the end, the product we are looking for one that will appeal to a broader readership than your PhD thesis. It could be a narrow scholarly market or a broad lay market. Last week I had two works submitted on Zoology. The author took her research funds and used them to produce to adventure stories for kids. Her aim was to introduce these ideas and concepts to children through these stories. Sure, this is an extreme example. The point is that you are working for a different audience and that is my main point.

• Ruth Tomaselli : (Commentary, not a question) Intellectual knowledge is not the same as scholarly knowledge. The popularization of intellectual knowledge is quite not the same thing as scholarly publishing. It needn’t always have to come down to the lowest common denominator. The University Press is not the same as, say Caledon. There should be a niche market for really good scholarly work. Scholarly work does not have to in itself be inaccessible, but scholarly work needs to take serious ideas seriously. The mark of a true author is that he can make something appear to be simple, when it is actually highly complex. The mark of a genius is whether you can take something and express it clearly. At the same time a public intellectual should not feel embarrassed at being intellectual. You will have strong arguments and strong points. Your writing is not simplistic in any way and it is never going to sell thousands of copies. One of the surprising things about our publishing industry is that if you treat your audiences as adults, it sells. But we are always afraid that we are going to publish above the head {gesticulates} of some! {laughter} We seem to be afraid of even stretching the intellect of our fellow citizens or giving credence to the fact that the people are really interested in ideas, in technology and the genealogy of ideas. Why do we call certain things certain things? To me it is fascinating when my colleague tells me how names have changed. It’s not something that I know anything about, but he doesn’t have to talk down to me. He can talk to me as if I were an educated person. In this meeting, and in many meetings we go to, we all have a Matric! So why are we talking to each other as if we are 3-year old children? {Laughter} “Do you understand me?” “Shall I explain to you in little words?” {More laughter}.

Debra– If it seemed that I was suggesting that things need to be dumbed down. That’s not what I suggested. It’s absolutely not what I am suggesting. Just write clearly in plain English.

• Luyanda Ka Msumza : Thanks to both of you for your presentation because it speaks to me. I did a dissertation at UCT which was used as part of the land claims process. And for me, my main struggle was how to re-package it so that it just doesn’t sit in the library but reaches a wider audience. So I received feedback from an editor who talked about the same issues that you have raised.

Transcribed from audio and video recordings by Kundayi Masanzu and Ian Kennedy. Edited by Ian Kennedy.