authors such permissions to reproduce their own materials
without any copyright fee; for if they did not do so, their sup-
ply of copy would soon dry up. Journals always need to first-
publish material, however. They make their money by getting
original research into print, and their scholarly reputation
would suffer if they seem to be duplicating or reprinting mate-
rial which is already out in book form. The journal could also
run into copyright difficulties if the book version of your paper
by any chance comes out before the journal version, a not
unlikely event given the long time lags in journals publishing,
and one to strictly guard against.
So long as you keep these timings in sync there is no prob-
lem in publishing material in a journal article and then later in
a book. Many of the best organized senior academics regularly
generate one or several articles on different aspects of their cur-
rent research project, each of which ‘trails’ or refers to their
forthcoming book. Then they publish the full connected ver-
sion of the research as a book, varying from six months to a
year or two years later on. This approach delivers repeat mes-
sages to the academic community about the research, and is the
best way of ensuring that the work gets noticed at all. It would
also work for a student finishing her PhD, although it is a very
demanding ‘dissemination strategy’, viable only for the best or
most original doctorates.
Re-working your thesis as a book
Interviewer: What came first, the lyrics or the
music?
George Gershwin: What came first was the
contract.^8Some theses become books, of a particular kind called research
monographs. A monograph, as its name implies, is a detailed
study of one particular topic. It stands at the opposite extreme
in publishing terms from a best-selling textbook, which may
cover all or many topics in a discipline. The worldwide sales
for English-language monographs are usually measured in the
low hundreds, say between 300 and 600 copies. So although
PUBLISHING YOUR RESEARCH◆ 251