worthwhile way. In addition once issued by such presses
your thesis does not become any more accessible than
sitting on the shelf in your university library. Vanity press
titles are not taken seriously either by the reviews editors of
journals or by university librarians doing book ordering.
And such operations typically have no marketing operations
to speak of. If a company writes to you offering to publish
your thesis sight unseen, or without any independent
refereeing process, you should be highly sceptical.With a small set of target publishers in view, your next task
is to come up with a book proposal that will seem viable. A PhD
thesis can only very rarely be published as a book without
substantial alterations. Your first priority should be to keep the
length of your proposed book manuscript down. A 100,000-
word piece of text will simply be too long and expensive for
publishers to even begin to look at, however academically
meritorious it may be. Your chances of publication are much
better if your actual thesis text is no more than 80,000 words,
which is why this has been the recommended main text length
of even a ‘big book’ dissertation throughout these pages. But to
make book publishing feasible even this restrained length will
need editing down a bit further. A manuscript of 60,000 to
70,000 words is widely quoted by publishers as the ideal book
length. There is rarely any incentive to go lower than this, how-
ever. Academic books of much less than 60,000 words may look
‘short weight’ and appear poor value for money to reviewers,
libraries or potential professional readers.
A second important change is to make a book version much
more accessible than your original thesis. Cut out all the ‘boring
bits’ if you possibly can. Once your doctorate has been awarded
and the full PhD text is available in your university library, you
can refer readers to it to explain the most esoteric or routine
points of methodology, or data, or other evidence. So there is no
need to reproduce such material again. Similarly you can econ-
omize a good deal on the referencing of materials. If you have
not done so already, switch to Harvard referencing and get rid as
far as possible of all but the most important endnotes.
Next consider whether your doctorate can be reshaped in
some way to enhance its potential readership and hence sales
256 ◆AUTHORING A PHD