JUDY SINGER: I'm Judy Singer.
I'm the Senior Vice Provost
for Faculty Development
and Diversity.
And I want to welcome you all to
this event on book publishing.
We have a great panel here,
both from the publishing end
and from the
faculty end, to help
provide insights in how
you go from having written
a dissertation, which I
presume everybody in this room
has done, and writing a book.
Some of the people
who are here are
people who have historically
been book people.
In other words, when you
wrote your dissertation,
you actually thought about
framing it in terms of a book.
Others are making a transition
from having written more
on the paper side,
and are thinking
about how you could convert
those ideas into a book length
manuscript.
I've written three books.
I fall in the second camp.
I'm a statistician, so I'm
primarily a paper person.
But the task of writing
a book is a daunting one.
There's something about being a
faculty member where everybody
assumes that somehow, when you
turned in your dissertation
and you got the sign off from
your advisor and other people
on your committee, you
magically knew everything
that you needed to know
about academic publishing.
And I think one of the things
you're going to hear today
is, that's not the case.
And so, for those of you who
are in the midst of writing,
I think you're probably
confronting that spot on.
And we hope that this
gives you an opportunity
to learn from a
distinguished panel about how
to take those next steps.
To introduce the
panelists, I'm going
to introduce my
colleague, Amy Brand, who
is the Assistant Provost
for Faculty Appointments.
Thank you.
AMY BRAND: Good
afternoon and welcome.
First and foremost, I just
want to say that I'm really
delighted to have this
panel and, also, to have--
I think for the first
time in our events
within the office of
faculty development
and diversity-- some colleagues
from MIT as well, which
is my alma mater.
We have very limited
time, and we really
want to encourage discussion.
So you'll notice that we
have the panel being filmed,
but when it comes to the
time of asking questions
during the Q&A, we're
going to turn that off.
So feel free to
ask any questions
you like of the panel.
In the handouts, you'll
see that we've put
in bios of all of our speakers.
So, rather than give lengthy
introductions, which they all
do deserve, I will start
with Elizabeth Knoll who's
Senior Editor for the behavioral
sciences, education, and law
at Harvard University Press.
ELIZABETH KNOLL:
I'm going to start--
and I hope you can hear me--
by talking about how to turn
your dissertation into a book.
Generations of
dissertation writers
have been paralyzed,
at least for a while,
by the philosopher Moore's
comment at Wittgenstein's
dissertation defense, "It is
my opinion that Mr. Ludwig
Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus is
a work of genius that
will completely change
all future work and philosophy.
But be that as it
may, it is well up
to the standards of a
Cambridge PhD degree."
Probably no one said this
about your dissertation.
But there is an
immense liberation
in realizing that you are
probably not a genius, at least
not yet, and that your
dissertation doesn't
have to show that you
are-- or change the world.
A dissertation, as a
rule, is a demonstration
of professional competence.
It shows that you have mastered
the literature in your field,
that you can do
research according
to the standards
of your discipline,
and that you can make a
persuasive and well-supported
argument, at least to that
very essential audience,
your committee.
A handful of senior faculty
advisors, here and there,
and some academic
programs now encourage
people to write their
dissertations as books from the
get go.
But for the most
part, a dissertation
is quite a different
creature from a book.
So how do you turn the
one into the other?
The answer is threefold.
At the most obvious and basic
level, there are the mechanics.
More deeply, there's
the authorial voice.
And finally, perhaps
least obviously--
but I think most
fundamentally-- there's manners.
And I don't just mean by
manners addressing people
by the correct name
or not insulting them,
though that's
certainly important.
I mean the kind of
manners that makes
a conversation a real
conversation and not just
alternating monologues.
Good manners means recognizing
another person's position,
constraints, and feelings
and caring enough about them
and respecting them so
that you don't ignore them.
In the case of book writing,
the obvious first people
you need to consider are your
editor and the reviewers.
But the really important other
people to be thought about
are your eventual readers.
So let me start with the easiest
part, which is the mechanics.
Most editors will tell
you just about everything
I'm going to say, and I
owe a lot of this talk
to some notes given by Kathleen
McDermott, the Senior Editor
of Harvard Press in history.
First of all-- get
out your pencils-- aim
for a final manuscript
of about 100,000 words
and absolutely not
more than 120,000 words
all inclusive, meaning
including the notes.
Now, assuming 335 words
per page in a 12 point font
with 1 inch margins,
100,000 words
is about 300 manuscript pages.
Second, keep the manuscript
as sleek as possible.
Limit the apparatus-- the
tables, the chart, the figures,
all illustrations.
The more illustrations you
have and the more complicated
they are, the less
appealing the manuscript
may be to a publisher.
Now many people wonder
why this is true,
if art-- that is,
black and white art--
is not more expensive
to print than text.
The answer is that
art is a complication,
and complication is
always expensive in terms
of people's time, your
own and the publisher's.
Art has to be a
publishable quality.
It has to be the right size.
All the permissions for the
art that you don't own yourself
have to be sought, granted,
and paid for by you.
All legends have to be supplied
and unambiguously linked
to the correct piece of art.
And everything has to come
in together and on time.
I think you can probably see why
this can create complications.
Then there are the elements
in the text that you should
reduce or remove completely.
The first, the
literature review.
Discussions of
other author's work
need to be integrated with
your argument or in the notes.
Second, the use
of other author's
characterizations of
problems or events or ideas.
Speak in your own voice.
Third, limit quotations.
Often quotations
are used to allow
you to invoke an authority.
Use only quotations
that say something
in a memorably pungent
or eloquent or funny way.
And keep them short.
Use quotations to vary
the voice in the text.
Limit the number of notes,
especially the discursive
notes.
I have an author right
now whose manuscript
is 103,000 words of text,
which is basically fine,
and 89,000 words of notes,
which is a lot less fine.
This is not a model
that you should follow.
And I'm not allowing
him to either,
but it's very painful
for him to have
to cut his 90,000 words of notes
down to approximately 10,000
or 15,000.
Avoid chapter opening
abstracts and chapter summaries
that essentially repeat the
chapter opening abstracts.
And you know who you are.
In this chapter, I will
discuss the nautical and legal
maneuvering that
led to the Norman
conquest between the
years of 1025 and 1035.
I will show A, B, and C. And
then at the end of the chapter,
you say the same thing.
Please don't do this.
Try to avoid using
a lot of subheads
and a lot of subdivisions
within chapters.
Let the chapters flow as
a continuous statement
and a continuous argument.
Avoid using subtitles in the
chapter titles or quotations
in chapter titles.
They often just get too
long and hard to read.
And try to make sure that all
the chapters are more or less
the same length.
Avoid the extremes of many short
chapters or a few very long
chapters.
15 typed pages is
probably too short.
70 typed pages is
probably too long.
I have a manuscript
right now of about-- it's
a reasonable length.
But it has only four
chapters, and each chapter
is 75 pages long.
It's un-digestible.
One can at least
see what it's about,
but it's very hard for readers
to sort of make their way
through chapters that long.
Now these are some of
the most essential, basic
mechanical changes.
As you revise and
rewrite though,
you'll need to mull
over matters that
are more ambiguous
and more arguable
and that are more of a
judgement call, which
gets us to the questions
of voice and style.
Now editors like me will always,
always, always say, avoid
jargon and insider lingo.
The line between jargon
and a technical term
with precise and useful
meaning for people in the field
is, admittedly, a
hard one to draw.
What is jargon?
It can follow Justice
Potter Stewart's famous line
on pornography, "I
know it when I see it."
More often though with jargon,
it's more likely to be the case
that your friends know
it when they hear it.
If they can't understand
a chapter or a passage
or worse, if they start to
laugh when you read some of it
aloud to them, you might want
to think about rewriting.
A highly theatrical editor whom
I used to work with sometimes
tells his postdocs,
"Take your work home
and read it to your husband.
Read it to your dog.
That will help you turn
this manuscript, which
is 28,000 times too long,
into something neat and crisp
and what people
would want to read."
If you absolutely need
the insider language,
and you don't want to
unpack it or explain it,
then keep it, and be prepared
to make the case for it.
But bear in mind that that
will come with a cost.
Insider language may
mean-- almost certainly
will mean-- a smaller
market for your book.
And that may limit the eventual
publisher's enthusiasm,
or at least the degree of
enthusiasm for the book.
Take some thought with
your table of contents.
Remember that it will
be the very first thing
that any reader sees
after the title page.
Susan Boehmer, who's the Editor
in Chief at Harvard Press,
says that a table of
contents should be a poem.
Now poetry may be asking a
lot, but your table of contents
can be clear,
immediately digestible,
and it will outline the
book's argument and scope.
It should fit on one
page, and a reader,
in scanning it should be able
to see what this book is about.
Write a real introduction
and a real conclusion.
In the introduction, say what
is the book's central argument.
What is it contributing
to the field?
What important
puzzle is it solving?
What previously unknown
story is it telling?
What piece of conventional
wisdom are you overturning?
And in the conclusion, tell
us what the consequence is.
What difference does it
make if you're right?
How might your argument,
or your discovery,
or your approach
help make more sense
to some other current
significant work or problems
in your field?
These questions about the
introduction and the conclusion
take us to the big
picture of the difference
between a dissertation
in a book and why I make
a point of emphasizing manners.
A dissertation is an exercise.
Part of the reason writing
a dissertation can sometimes
be so painful is
that, on one hand,
it matters so much to
your academic progress
and your career, and
on the other hand,
it matters not at all
to the wider world.
You probably already know
this from Thanksgiving,
when your aunt Debbie asked
you to explain, again,
exactly what it is you do.
In fact-- and this is
an important point--
the larger world is so
wary of dissertations
that you should scrub the
very word dissertation
from the final manuscript that
you turn into the publisher,
because some library
wholesalers will not
buy any books that
can be recognized
as revised dissertations.
But a book is different
from a dissertation,
and it's much, much
more satisfying to read
and to write.
With a dissertation, you
have something to prove.
With a book, you have
something to say.
The purpose of a dissertation
might be, in part--
realistically-- to
show how much you know.
The purpose of a book
is to make an argument
and join or create
a conversation.
As a potential book
author, you already
have some academic authority.
You have that PhD.
You're at Harvard, which
is a name to conjure with.
You have given conference talks,
and you published articles.
Your purpose now is
not to prove yourself
so much as it is to prove
your case to the people who
care about it.
That will probably not be
a huge group of people.
Just as your dissertation is
probably not the Tractatus,
your first book is
probably not going
to win a Pulitzer Prize,
unlike, say, Paul Starr's Social
Transformation of
American Medicine.
That's probably just as
well, because what would you
do for an encore in
your second book?
You need to have something to
strive for after you're 30.
But you do want
your book to be read
and to be readable
by all the people who
care about what you care about.
That's why editors will plead
with you to keep it short,
make it clear, omit
the unnecessary words.
What editors are really doing
is asking you to put yourself
in your reader's place.
Think about them as real people.
They probably are real people.
In fact, you probably
already know some of them.
They will be, in
the grand scheme
of things, people who
are a lot like you.
Busy, intermittently impatient,
with their own interests
and their own turf to defend,
but essentially curious,
intelligent, imaginative,
and as impassioned as you
are about the subject.
Otherwise, they wouldn't read a
review of your book, let alone
the book itself.
But life is short, and attention
spans are getting shorter.
The secret truth, which I
hereby reveal free of charge,
is that even the senior
people in your field
would rather not read more
pages of jargon laden academic
writing than they have to.
They've already read
quite a lot of it.
What they and other people
in your world want to know
is what you have to say,
how you're backing it up,
and why it matters.
And they want you to say
it as strongly but also as
straightforwardly as you can.
Here's a story that
I think is helpful.
The great physicist
Murray Gell-Mann
is famous for knowing not
just everything about physics,
but everything else, too.
He always pronounces the
names of people in places
as native speakers of the
languages would or should.
In fact, he has been said
to correct native Ukrainians
on their pronunciation
of Ukrainian.
There is a story that he
once told Richard Feynman,
also a great physicist-- a
colleague of his at Caltech--
that he had just returned
from "Moe-rhay-ah."
When Feynman finally
established that Gell-Mann
meant the city known to most
English speakers as Montreal,
he said, "Hey, Murray.
Do you believe that the purpose
of language is communication?"
It's a kind of
parlor game to argue
about who is the greater
physicist, Feynman
or Gell-Mann, and it's almost
certainly a silly question.
But every editor
and most readers
would put an extra couple of
flowers on Feynman's grave.
The purpose of language
is communication.
The purpose of your book
is to talk to other people.
And now, Phil will
tell you about talking
to the first round of
other people, which
is the publishers.
PHIL: Thank you.
