David Brewer's Remarks at the 2008 ASECS Graduate Caucus Roundtable on Publishing
(reproduced with kind permission from the author)

I’m here to talk about the process of transforming a dissertation into a first book, how you get from here [holding up dissertation] to here [holding up book]. What I have to say comes both from the experience of having wrought such a transformation fairly recently and from that of seeing my junior colleagues strive to do so. I had hoped to be able to boil my advice down into a nice iconic number: say, five easy steps or a baker’s dozen’s worth of tips. Alas, as my students will attest, I had a bit more to say than I first thought. So here are my fifteen best pieces of advice, organized, at least roughly, in chronological order, from the very beginning of your dissertation writing to the moment when you get the book into production. I’ll try to move quickly.

1. Presume from the outset that your dissertation will become a book and practice saying so convincingly (to yourself, to your committee, to anyone who will listen when you go on the job market). Many potential employers will require a book of you for tenure; others will like or be impressed by the fact that you have one underway (which might work to your advantage), and it’s always easier to break a book apart into stand-alone articles, should you decide that that’s the best way to go, than to assemble at least a good book from such pieces (and you only want to write a good book).
2. Think hard from the very beginning (i.e., certainly from the stage of your prospectus and perhaps even from the preliminary dissertation description that is probably a part of your qualifying exams) about how your dissertation should be structured. Think about how the books you most admire (which may well not be first books) work in formal terms: what principles organize their chapters, what logic is there to the sequence in which the chapters appear). A good structure can really help show your ideas to maximum advantage; a lame or distracting structure can easily drive your readers (and potential allies) away. Above all, make sure that whatever structure you choose is a conscious and thoughtful choice, a decision as to what makes the most sense for you as a writer and for this particular project. Don’t go with the default “here’s my clever idea and how it works in four novels” unless that really, really seems the most compelling way to present your work.
3. As part of figuring out your structure, think hard about how you and other scholars you know read (and this would include not only scholars of your own generation, but those of your teachers’ generations as well: you might do well to take an informal poll). Fairly few of us, I suspect, read most scholarly books cover to cover. Rather, we read opportunistically, looking for material for our own writing and teaching. If this is true, ask yourself how you can best structure your work so as to showcase your biggest contributions in the chapters or sections that are the most likely to be read? Or, if you want to resist this trend toward opportunistic reading, how can you set things up—and how can you write well enough—that readers will want to read all the way through? In short, don’t just imagine yourself being read (though you should always do that); imagine yourself being read in the ways that you and your friends and colleagues and teachers tend to read and then figure out how best to work within or against those constraints.
4. Write well. An engaging prose style will produce a lot of good will toward both you and your work, good will that may help you make better arguments and that will cut you some slack if you go astray. If possible, go for wit, charm, and elegance, but at the very least insist upon straightforward clarity. And do so from the outset. Don’t try to simply get ideas down and promise yourself that you’ll come back later to clean things up. You won’t have the time to do so or at least you won’t have the time to do it right.
5. Write generously toward other scholars. The devastating put-down of a major figure in the field certainly has its oedipal satisfactions and can offer a pleasing kind of schadenfreude to your readers, but it has the potential to make you enemies (which you really don’t need at this stage of your career) and it ultimately suggests that you’re either insecure in your own abilities or not a collegial part of the broader republic of letters. You certainly don’t need to fawn; just respectfully disagree or pass over the more bone-headed moments in silence. Like your mother told you, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
6. Cite lightly. Don’t dump all that you’ve read into the manuscript. Just cite what you need to make your argument or to project the necessary image of yourself as a polished professional operating on an equal footing with other scholars. Presume your readers will give you credit for knowing more than you cite. Especially avoid the kind of citation that rounds up the usual suspects for no apparent purpose other than to have them rounded up. Not all work on, say, the eighteenth-century English novel has to trot out Watt, McKeon, Bender, Armstrong, Hunter, Gallagher, Warner, et al, just because they’ve shaped the field.
7. From pretty early on, start practicing how to pitch your project to scholars from outside the field and to colleagues who are in the field, but not the subfield (for example, if you’re someone who works on history of the book-type issues, get used to explaining the stakes and general contours of your project to people interested in gender ideology or nationalism or poetic form). Such scholars and colleagues are likely to be the kinds of people who will be hiring you, who will be your editors at journals and presses, who will be the readers for such journals and presses, who will be your tenure referees. If you can speak to them in a way that’s memorable and concise, you’ll stand out … in a good way. Practice pitching your project in different size chunks and levels of detail: ultimately, you’ll probably have to write descriptions of your work that range from a sentence or two (catalog copy, an introduction for a conference) to a paragraph (dust jacket copy, the 250 words you produce for Dissertation Abstracts, a job letter) to a page or two (a dissertation abstract to be enclosed with your job letter, an account of your research for your tenure file) to several pages (book and fellowship proposals). Think of these pitches as fractal, able to be scaled up and down for different ends and effects.
8. Both as you write your project and as you practice pitching it, stress your theoretical or methodological innovation as well as the specific material you’re covering. Projects that simply take a preexisting way of thinking and “apply it” (a dreadful phrase) to material that hasn’t yet been treated that way are unlikely to fair well in the current job and publishing markets. Both for intellectual reasons and for your own self-interest, think about how the theory or methodology you’re working with not only illuminates your material, but how your material might in turn modify, challenge, refine, or extend that way of thinking. Again, think about how we read, what you’ve gotten from the books you most admire. I suspect that in many cases, it’s been a new set of questions as much as it’s been a specific interpretation or assemblage of information. You want to be the one who’s offering up such questions.
9. Remember that most scholarly books, especially first books, are of a fairly fixed length, so make sure that as you write, you’re aware of the length of your manuscript. For a standard monograph, a manuscript of less than 90,000 or more than 110,000 words, including notes, will probably be a hard sell and I suspect it’s easier to get your manuscript in the right range as you write than to try to cut it later or to add a chapter or section that was not part of your original conception of the project.
10. (Here I’m beginning to move out of what you could/should do in graduate school into what you could/should do on the tenure track.) If your university has a dissertation defense, ask your committee to focus not just on what you’ve produced as the culmination of your graduate education, but also on what they think it needs to become a good book. If you don’t have a defense, ask your committee to give you such advice as they read the final version of the dissertation. In either case, take good notes and then sit on the whole thing for at least your first semester on the job (you’ll probably be overwhelmed anyway, but even if you aren’t you need a little time to develop the distance you’ll require in order to see the project as the beginning of a book manuscript, not the end of several years of dissertation writing).
11. Get your work out there to be cited and discussed (and, ideally, taught). Give talks at both national conferences like ASECS and small focused conferences devoted to your particular area, publish an article or two. But don’t over-harvest. That risks making your project seem less compelling both for presses to publish and for readers to read. I should think that no more than 40% of your book manuscript should have previously appeared in print and that’s probably pushing it. You want to whet your readers’ appetites, not sate them, because ultimately you want to be read, not just published. Your post-tenure career, your future mobility, and a surprising and perhaps distressing amount of your own sense of self-worth will hang upon your knowing that you’re being read and thought interesting, smart, important, whatever.
12. Find a cadre of like-minded scholars and potential allies, people working on similar things or asking related questions, and talk about your work with them. Seek out summer institutes and faculty seminars like the ones offered at the National Humanities Center or the Folger or the American Antiquarian Society or those sponsored at various universities by the NEH. Often they offer the kind of exhilarating and collegial experience that graduate school was supposed to be. And while you’re seeking out this cadre, make sure that it’s not wholly comprised of scholars your own age or from your own professional cohort. Indeed, you should make a point of cultivating senior scholars who might be in a position to help you with a well-timed reading of your work or introduction to an editor or recommendation to a press. And don’t be afraid to ask for favors. Remember Ben Franklin’s maxim that “He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged." Most of the senior people in any given field are quite busy, but they’re also, for the most part, pretty comfortable and secure and that security allows them to take a certain proprietary interest in the success of junior scholars whose work they find interesting.
13. Once a press has asked to see your manuscript, try to get a good sense of how it operates, what its time table tends to be, and then block out considerably more time than that in your tenure schedule, if this book is to be a part of your case. Obviously, this requires starting fairly early (though not so early that you don’t yet have a manuscript worth showing) and asking your friends and colleagues with recent publishing experience about the time it took. Indeed, understanding how different presses operate may shape where you send your initial queries. For example, my understanding is that Cambridge sends manuscripts to readers sequentially, rather than simultaneously, which could easily more than double the period during which your manuscript is in limbo. It may well result in better final books, but you need to make sure that you have the time to wait for those readers and properly respond to them without engaging in the kind of brinksmanship that makes departments and deans very nervous. The same thing would apply to any kind of illustrations you may wish to use: they’re an integral part of some projects and an attractive supplement to many others, but they’ll take longer and suck up more of your time than you can possibly anticipate. Start early.

My last two suggestions are more general. The single best piece of advice I ever got from my own dissertation director was to always overreach. Set out to write the final version of the dissertation and you’ll end up with a good first draft. Try to produce a polished manuscript ready to go into production and you’ll end up with a decent first round of revision. Try to write a book like the prize-winning second or third books you admire (I was going for something like Nobody’s Story) and you’ll end up writing a good first book. You’ll never reach the goal at which you’re aiming, but you’ll end up doing better than you would have had you confined your ambitions to something more modest and apparently manageable.

Finally, and I hope this is implicit in everything I’ve already said, make sure that you’re pursuing a question that you find incredibly compelling and fascinating and delightful. Chances are you’ll be living with this project for more than a decade and it will periodically be the source of a great deal of stress, both at work and (should you happen to live with anyone) at home. You’ll need that sense of delight and discovery and burning curiosity to carry you through and to remind you of why you got into this ridiculous profession in the first place. Thank you.

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