What qualities make a dissertation publishable?

I was wondering if any of my erudite colleagues had any tips on writing a dissertation that can be published. I understand the basic requirements: Original topic, original research that addresses a need, and quality, scholarly writing. But is that all there is to it and the rest is just a crapshoot? Can anyone offer a strategy?

I plan to begin work on this as early as possible and continue throughout my PhD program, rather than waiting for the actual dissertation phase. I will be researching marketing in some fashion, and intend to use the small advertising company I have founded, and some of my clients, to aid in research.

I'm happy to hear from anyone, but I'm especially interested to hear from someone who has published.

 

Oh yea, I forgot. I can just buy a dissertation from that guy in China for $45. Why am I even going to the trouble of writing one?

I appreciate the links and will read them. Thank you

 

Based on the few dissertations I've read, a dissertation, as it's written is not publishable. They're not in a reader-friendly format. They need to be converted into a different format. Some topics lend themselves to this. Some writers are capable of this. Some aren't.

 

I am already thinking of how I can spin mine into a book. As it is now, it is dry and factual. I think that is the mark of a good dissertation

If I wanted anyone to actually read it (as a book), it would need to be rewritten.

 

these are tough times - offer $41.75 and see if they will take it

 

A publishable dissertation should be a good aid to insomnia and usable for a doorstop.

 

Maybe I could sell it as such and get filthy rich!

 

So it sounds like spinning an article off of your dissertation work and attempting to get that published is the way it would be done? Sorry, I have no experience in that sort of thing.

 

In my (not) extensive experience it seems like the easiest thing to do is to use the dissertation literature review to create an article. I have read a number of those lit review summary articles in scholarly journals.

 

From talking to my dissertation advisor, the dissertation as a whole is difficult to convert to a publishable format as a few have noted. Those who are going to read it as a dissertation are doing so for research purposes and are not likely to buy it as a book. Publishing scholarly articles on segments of the dissertation is going to be the best approach to getting your work out there.

 

OK, but if I do that, he may want to be listed as a co-author. I'll pay the extra $3.25 and take all the glory and accolades.

 

Thank you, very good.

 

Almost all approved dissertations from RA institutions (except for classified or proprietary ones) are published by UMI/Proquest. In the past I have purchased several theses and dissertations from there.

If you want to convert to a book for the general public then you can self publish through Lulu
Self Publishing - Lulu.com
I know a world renowned expert in reliability who publishes some of his works this way.

 

Thank you, Ian. If you published through Lulu, however, you couldn't call yourself officially "published" could you?

What is the distinction that Capella has, and NCU does not have, in the fact that some of their graduates are "published"? Just like everything else in life, there seems to be varying levels of "published". Straighten me out on this one.

 

It seems like you would have a sizable portion of your work already done. You would already have all of the research you would need, you would just have to write it in the form of a series of articles or a book.

 

Hi Michael,

I am writing a book in parallel with my dissertation. this will be my third published book. One of the criteria I used in choosing my research topic was that it had to be "bookable" as well as personally interesting to me. I think the key is to have a topic that is timely and relevant to a decent sized market, or to be able to generalize the lessons from your research to reach a broad market.

The main bonus that will come from the thesis is the new and original primary research.

The art in writing the "book version" is to strip out all the rote, boring academic crap, and spice up the writing to make it more accessible.

Unless you are already famous (think Bill and Hillary Clinton), you aren't going to have much luck with traditional publishers. Their business model is in such chaos now that they only tend to focus on "top ten" type offerings - the books that sell at airports.

Print-on-demand publishers like Authorhouse are a great alternative to get your work out on Amazon and other retailers. My first two books have both been adopted as textbooks (not what I was aiming at) and have paid for themselves (cost is approx. $1,000 for the full meal deal including ISBN number and wide distribution) many times over. And yes, you can call yourself published. Who's going to stop you?

Good luck with it!

 

Sure you could. Why wouldn't you? If you self-publish through Lulu, Createspace or Iuniverse, your book will have its own ISBN number and you can have your book listed in Books In Print.

As a self-publisher you would also be in good company. This is a list of a few people you might recognize who self-published at some point in their writing careers:

Margaret Atwood
William Blake
Ken Blanchard
Robert Bly
Lord Byron
Willa Cather
Pat Conroy
Stephen Crane
E.E. cummings
W.E.B. DuBois
Alexander Dumas
T.S. Eliot
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Benjamin Franklin
Zane Grey
Thomas Hardy
E. Lynn Harris
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ernest Hemingway
Robinson Jeffers
Spencer Johnson
Stephen King
Rudyard Kipling
Louis L'Amour
D.H. Lawrence
Rod McKuen
Marlo Morgan
John Muir
Anais Nin
Thomas Paine
Tom Peters
Edgar Allen Poe
Alexander Pope
Beatrix Potter
Ezra Pound
Marcel Proust
Irma Rombauer
Carl Sandburg
Robert Service
George Bernard Shaw
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Upton Sinclair
Gertrude Stein
William Strunk
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Henry David Thoreau
Leo Tolstoi
Mark Twain
Walt Whitman
Virginia Woolf

 

Another thing to think about with the publishing company vs. self-publishing is the return on investment.

If you go the traditional route, your literary agent will get a cut and the publishing company will get an even bigger cut. It's not unheard of for the author to earn no more than $2 per copy sold. To add insult to injury, if you go with a traditional publishing company, in the end you will still have to do most of the work to market and promote your book.

With the self-publishing option, however, the author keeps the larger amount. For example, with print-on-demand, if you sell a book for $20, the POD company may keep $5 while you get $15 per copy. Also, it's not too terribly difficult now to set up a web site where you can sell your book directly as a downloadable e-book. So, if you sell your e-book for $20, you get to keep $20. (These figures are rough estimates - your mileage may vary)

Let's do the math:

10,000 books sold through a traditional publisher: $2 x 10,000 = $20,000
10,000 books sold through a POD publisher: $15 x 10,000 = $150,000
10,000 books sold via web site as e-book: $20 x 10,000 = $200,000

The following is an example of a guy who wrote a few books and has been making a full-time living for the past five years off of the e-books and self-published books he sells:

The Well-Fed Writer: Commercial Freelance Writing - Land Lucrative Freelance Writing Jobs and Be "Well-Fed"

Just a decade or so ago it was necessary to go through a traditional book publisher to reach the widest audience. Today, an author can design a web site and use keywords to drive traffic to the site to sell e-books or POD books.

The times, as they say, they are a changin'.

 

While space does not allow for a comprehensive treatment of this topic, yes, your dissertation can (with some modifications) be published as a book. It is done all the time. Yes, your dissertation can (and should) be published as one or more journal articles. The way you plan and write your dissertation can facilitate both processes.

Publishing articles is, of course, much easier than publishing a book, due to the formatting of a dissertation, which generally involves a certain amount of redundancy. In general, qualitative-based dissertations tend to be easier to convert into books than those with strictly quantitative analyses. Also, the conventional five-chapter formatting of a dissertation would likely need to be modified.

A few things to consider when planning your dissertation with an eye to publish:

• 
  You are doing the right thing to consider this at the beginning, rather than after it is done.

• 
  Consider structuring your dissertation so that you are studying more than one thing. For mine, I identified and validate factors that influenced the institutionalization of distance learning programs at higher ed institutions. I also studied how well each of these factors was being implemented. As a result, I had two separate sources of data that were published as articles in two different peer-reviewed journals (i.e. two birds with one stone).

• 
  As you compose your dissertation chapters, create shorter "essential" versions for your articles. For example, the literature review for your dissertation will be much larger and more inclusive than the corresponding section in a journal article, which will be much more focused and include only those studies directly related to the major points of the article.

• 
  Have other people (in addition to your committee) read your work. You will likely be too close to it.

• 
  Select the journals that you wish to consider for your article early. Read several issues to become familiar with their styles, formatting, emphases, etc. Write your articles with the journal in mind (rather than waiting until the articles are done and then shopping for journals). The key to publishing is to make your article fit the journal, rather than expecting the journal to fit your article (they usually won't).

I hope that this helps.