One thing that gets little attention in graduate schools is the importance of writing well. Graduate school programs are good at helping you develop research skills, an understanding of the historiography, and analytical skills, but they make little effort to help turn you into a talented wordsmith.
Poor writing as been a long term problem for historians. In writing my article on Theodore Roosevelt that I mentioned back in Blog XV, I learned that the quality of writing in the profession has been a weakness of academic historians for…ah…well…the entire twentieth century, which is to basically say since historians became professionals. There was no golden age when scholarly historians wrote well. I found complaints on this topic from the editor of the American Historical Review as far back as the 1910s.
This issue is no minor thing. Wordsmithing will help you advance your career. Obviously the most important thing is having something to say that is meaningful and important. Graduate schools are quite good at developing those skills. Turning fledgling historians into good writers is another matter altogether. Basically, being a good writer when doing history is tough. Not only do you have to know how to put words together well, but historical accuracy requires precision in your language. If that is not difficult enough, the historian also has to marshal evidence and use quotes to support their position. Setting up someone else’s words in your text is often quite difficult. Although the phrase “reads like a novel” indicates the status that fiction has in the writing world, I believe writing history well is actually more difficult than doing fiction well. History requires threading the needle carefully, while fiction allows you to color outside the lines if you want.
How specifically can writing well help you professionally? Well, academic presses are just like commercial publishing houses these days—they are in the business of turning a profit. I have talked to enough editors to know that they cannot knowingly publish a book, regardless of its intellectual merit, knowing they will lose money upon its release. One of the things that makes a book marketable, is the quality of the prose on its pages. So, writing well helps you get published, which is something that almost all historians must do to some degree or another. Another way in which writing skill comes into play is determining where you get published. It is easier to get published at bigger presses or even commercial publishing houses if you write well. Having a big press publish you has a whole series of second and third order effects that are usually quite positive for professional advancement.
What can you do to make yourself into a talented writer. I can offer two pieces of advice. The first is read an author that you think is good and pay attention to their style. Forget trying to understand their thesis and where it fits into the literature–just look at how they structure their words. I would also advise you to read the same basic type of genre in which you plan to write. So, reading Stephen King might not be as rewarding for a budding historian as paying attention to the work of Civil War historian James McPherson, even if you plan to write intellectual history Bourbon France.
My next piece of advice is to write something every day. Writing is a lot like exercise. The more you do it, the better you get. If you take time off and come back to it later, it hurts and some ability has been lost and needs to be mastered a second time. I have seen this happen often with undergraduates, but it also occurs a lot in grad school. Most history programs require that graduate students take one, or maybe two, research seminars. That just is not enough writing work. An original research paper is the ultimate test of writing, it is when you take the research and try to create something new. Through a series of unplanned events, I ended up writing four research papers in grad school. Several of them got published, and one won me the first of my five writing awards. I would like to think that there was some type of relationship between the extra work and the results. I also know that my writing has helped me get a job.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Blog XXIV (24): The Mechanics of Trade Book Publishing
This blog entry is going to focus on trade book publishing, which is the term the publishing industry uses for commercial titles. A lot of historians look down at “popularizers,” but there are a lot of sound reasons for academics to go this route, but as I write this essay (2009), now is not the time to do it.
Going the trade route has a lot to offer. You will make real money, you will have a big audience, and your ideas will get out into the intellectual marketplace far more readily than if you go the academic route.
The very first thing you need to do is to get yourself a literary agent. Why? Most editors at major publishing houses use agents as a gate keeping mechanism. If someone is willing to stake their professional reputation to this writer, then taking a look at the manuscript might be a sound investment of their time and energy. If you do not have an agent, then there is a real good chance you are one of the thousands of people out there that think they can write, but cannot. Agents also have relationships with publishers that can be useful to you. Many have worked at publishing houses earlier in their careers. They understand trends in the industry, know what editors want, and can negotiate better deals for you than you can for yourself.
How do you get a literary agent? Well, there are any number of ways. Most agents specialize the same way authors do. For example, there are agents that primarily represent romance authors, or science-fiction novelists, or those that do certain types of non-fiction. So, you want to do some research before contacting one. Contacting an agent who reprepsents mystery novelists about a presidential biography is a waste of your time and their's. There are many ways to get info on agents: you can buy books in the self-help sections of bookstores listing literary agents with their addresses. There are also specialized writing magazines available in bookstores that often discuss the process of finding representation or profile individual agents. The thing to remember: literary agents get dozens of unsolicited proposals on a daily basis. It is far better to go to one of the many writing conferences that are held around the country, which agents attend. A good one is the agents conference that the Writers’ League of Texas sponsors. This meeting is held in June. (For more information visit the League’s web site: http://writersleague.org/). You do not have to be a member to attend this meeting. There are a lot of meetings of this nature held around the country. At most of these gatherings, participants can usually schedule formal meetings with agents, where they can pitch their book ideas.
Getting a literary agent, though, is easier said than done. A good agent probably gets between 30 and 100 book proposals a week. As a result, they are looking for reasons to turn down good proposals, much less bad ones. Agents are in the business of making money and need clients who will bring in reasonably large advances. A $30,000 advance might sound big to you, but an agent gets only 10 percent and $3,000 is a good salary for a week, but what if you write one book every two years. My point—agents are looking for authors that can offer them the biggest return on their investment of time.
If an agent is interested in your book or book idea, they will ask to see a proposal. Remember this document is a marketing tool. The proposal should include a short synopsis of the book, its focus and argument. There should be another section which describes your professional credentials to write this study. Another section should describe the competition for the book, and another should describe the market of this title and ways that it can be marketed. The self-help sections of any decent book stores should have several titles that describe this process at greater length. One of best out there is Susan Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get it Published.
One of the most important things about the proposal is the writing sample. Literary agents need to sell two things to publishers: (1) your book, and (2) you. Your ability to write well is the most important part of that effort. Having an innovative new argument is far less important than it would be for an academic publisher. If you are an academic trying to go the trade route there is a general bias in the trade publishing industry that you should be aware of. Most publishers and literary agents assume that scholars cannot write well. Having spent a lot of time reading academic monographs, I can tell you that eighty percent of the time this is a safe assumption. Before going the trade route, you need to make sure you are in that twenty percent and even then, you better be ready for a lot of rejection from people that just assume that you are in the bottom eighty.
What advantages are there to going the trade route? You will get paid a decent amount of money for your efforts. Most academic publishers give no advance, while almost all commercial publishers do. (You need to note that an advance is basically your percentage of expected sales in advance of those actual transactions. It is possible that the book will sell better expected and you will get more, but that often does not happen and the advance is all you will get financially.) Trade publishers have bigger advertising and marketing budgets than most academic presses. The result is that your book will get promoted and sold to a large audience. There is an awfully big community of readers among the general public that enjoys reading history. It is often willing to appreciate a serious intellectual effort, but it generally expects quality in the prose. If you have a new argument, it will get noticed within the appropriate academic journals. In fact, it will probably will get reviewed more than would be the case were it published as an academic monograph because the marketing effort will be extensive enough to get the attention of these smaller, professional communities.
There are certain downsides to going this route. Trade publishers have well defined ideas on how well a book will sell. There approach is a lot like the thinking by analogy approach used in Hollywood: “This book is Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August meets David McCullough’s Truman.” This approach does not always lead to the best of analysis. If they think the book will sell 10,000 copies, they will give the author an appropriate advance and then make efforts to sell that book. Now, what happens if they sell 10,000 copies in the first week. You might be thinking, “Wow, that’s great! Keep going!” But a publisher might think, “Well, this book has 10,000 sales in it and we did that in the first week. The bet paid off. We made our money. Why throw good money away with any more effort. There are no more sales left in this book. We are done.” As a result, the book might be out of print within a year or two of its publication. As a result, it will be difficult for libraries to buy it after its initial publication and for it be an assigned reading in various courses. Even if the book stays in print, the publishing house will make very little effort after its initial push to sell the book.
These are the issues you have to weigh in making a decision on how you will publish your material. With all these points being made, right now (2009) is not a good time to go the commercial route. The current economic crisis has hit publishing hard. Sales at bookstores are falling. Publishers are cutting their staffs and few are interested in acquiring new titles from unproven writers. Even established writers—fiction and non-fiction, it does not matter—are having a difficult time getting reviewed because most magazines and newspapers are reducing or even eliminating their book review sections, which was a major element in the marketing/promotion effort of the major publishing houses. Many of these publishers are finding that their economic model is coming apart and are not sure how to replace it. The trade presses are in a lot of turmoil and this is not the best time to try to break into that world.
Going the trade route has a lot to offer. You will make real money, you will have a big audience, and your ideas will get out into the intellectual marketplace far more readily than if you go the academic route.
The very first thing you need to do is to get yourself a literary agent. Why? Most editors at major publishing houses use agents as a gate keeping mechanism. If someone is willing to stake their professional reputation to this writer, then taking a look at the manuscript might be a sound investment of their time and energy. If you do not have an agent, then there is a real good chance you are one of the thousands of people out there that think they can write, but cannot. Agents also have relationships with publishers that can be useful to you. Many have worked at publishing houses earlier in their careers. They understand trends in the industry, know what editors want, and can negotiate better deals for you than you can for yourself.
How do you get a literary agent? Well, there are any number of ways. Most agents specialize the same way authors do. For example, there are agents that primarily represent romance authors, or science-fiction novelists, or those that do certain types of non-fiction. So, you want to do some research before contacting one. Contacting an agent who reprepsents mystery novelists about a presidential biography is a waste of your time and their's. There are many ways to get info on agents: you can buy books in the self-help sections of bookstores listing literary agents with their addresses. There are also specialized writing magazines available in bookstores that often discuss the process of finding representation or profile individual agents. The thing to remember: literary agents get dozens of unsolicited proposals on a daily basis. It is far better to go to one of the many writing conferences that are held around the country, which agents attend. A good one is the agents conference that the Writers’ League of Texas sponsors. This meeting is held in June. (For more information visit the League’s web site: http://writersleague.org/). You do not have to be a member to attend this meeting. There are a lot of meetings of this nature held around the country. At most of these gatherings, participants can usually schedule formal meetings with agents, where they can pitch their book ideas.
Getting a literary agent, though, is easier said than done. A good agent probably gets between 30 and 100 book proposals a week. As a result, they are looking for reasons to turn down good proposals, much less bad ones. Agents are in the business of making money and need clients who will bring in reasonably large advances. A $30,000 advance might sound big to you, but an agent gets only 10 percent and $3,000 is a good salary for a week, but what if you write one book every two years. My point—agents are looking for authors that can offer them the biggest return on their investment of time.
If an agent is interested in your book or book idea, they will ask to see a proposal. Remember this document is a marketing tool. The proposal should include a short synopsis of the book, its focus and argument. There should be another section which describes your professional credentials to write this study. Another section should describe the competition for the book, and another should describe the market of this title and ways that it can be marketed. The self-help sections of any decent book stores should have several titles that describe this process at greater length. One of best out there is Susan Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get it Published.
One of the most important things about the proposal is the writing sample. Literary agents need to sell two things to publishers: (1) your book, and (2) you. Your ability to write well is the most important part of that effort. Having an innovative new argument is far less important than it would be for an academic publisher. If you are an academic trying to go the trade route there is a general bias in the trade publishing industry that you should be aware of. Most publishers and literary agents assume that scholars cannot write well. Having spent a lot of time reading academic monographs, I can tell you that eighty percent of the time this is a safe assumption. Before going the trade route, you need to make sure you are in that twenty percent and even then, you better be ready for a lot of rejection from people that just assume that you are in the bottom eighty.
What advantages are there to going the trade route? You will get paid a decent amount of money for your efforts. Most academic publishers give no advance, while almost all commercial publishers do. (You need to note that an advance is basically your percentage of expected sales in advance of those actual transactions. It is possible that the book will sell better expected and you will get more, but that often does not happen and the advance is all you will get financially.) Trade publishers have bigger advertising and marketing budgets than most academic presses. The result is that your book will get promoted and sold to a large audience. There is an awfully big community of readers among the general public that enjoys reading history. It is often willing to appreciate a serious intellectual effort, but it generally expects quality in the prose. If you have a new argument, it will get noticed within the appropriate academic journals. In fact, it will probably will get reviewed more than would be the case were it published as an academic monograph because the marketing effort will be extensive enough to get the attention of these smaller, professional communities.
There are certain downsides to going this route. Trade publishers have well defined ideas on how well a book will sell. There approach is a lot like the thinking by analogy approach used in Hollywood: “This book is Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August meets David McCullough’s Truman.” This approach does not always lead to the best of analysis. If they think the book will sell 10,000 copies, they will give the author an appropriate advance and then make efforts to sell that book. Now, what happens if they sell 10,000 copies in the first week. You might be thinking, “Wow, that’s great! Keep going!” But a publisher might think, “Well, this book has 10,000 sales in it and we did that in the first week. The bet paid off. We made our money. Why throw good money away with any more effort. There are no more sales left in this book. We are done.” As a result, the book might be out of print within a year or two of its publication. As a result, it will be difficult for libraries to buy it after its initial publication and for it be an assigned reading in various courses. Even if the book stays in print, the publishing house will make very little effort after its initial push to sell the book.
These are the issues you have to weigh in making a decision on how you will publish your material. With all these points being made, right now (2009) is not a good time to go the commercial route. The current economic crisis has hit publishing hard. Sales at bookstores are falling. Publishers are cutting their staffs and few are interested in acquiring new titles from unproven writers. Even established writers—fiction and non-fiction, it does not matter—are having a difficult time getting reviewed because most magazines and newspapers are reducing or even eliminating their book review sections, which was a major element in the marketing/promotion effort of the major publishing houses. Many of these publishers are finding that their economic model is coming apart and are not sure how to replace it. The trade presses are in a lot of turmoil and this is not the best time to try to break into that world.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Blog XXIII (23): The Mechanics of Academic Book Publishing
This blog entry is going to focus on academic book publishing. There will be another one that will focus on trade publishing, which is the term the publishing industry uses for commercial titles.
Academic book publishing works a good deal like the process for publishing articles in journals with some notable exceptions. There are presses that specialize in certain disciplines and in certain fields of history—if they have an interest in history at all. You should do a little research in looking at the previous titles they have published to make sure that press has an interest in publishing your type of scholarship. Sending a proposal to a press that has no interest in history is a waste of your time and theirs. Then you should put together a short proposal for your book. How short is short? No, more than 10 pages, but five or six would be better. The proposal should include a short synopsis of the book, its focus and argument. There should be another section which describes your professional credentials to write this study. Another section should describe the competition for the book, and another should describe the market of this title and ways that it can be marketed. Some academic books are never going to be sold to anything other than libraries; others can and will be used in classrooms. There are any number of books out there that you can find in the self-help sections of book stores that describe this process at greater length. One of my favorites, is Susan Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get it Published. This book focuses on trade publishing, but it offers a number insights that can help in the academic publishing process be it books or even academic journal articles.
The thing to note about your proposal is that it is not an intellectual document, it is a marketing document. Academic publishers are intellectuals, but they have to worry about bottom lines far more than faculty members. These days it is not uncommon for editors at presses to pass on intellectually important projects, even those in which they are interested, for commercial reasons. Editors at academic presses have little expectation of overseeing monster bestsellers, but these days they need to make sure that they at least break even.
When you send your proposal off, it is perfectly acceptable to send it to more than one press. Some presses, will send you back a short letter of rejection. One or two will express interest. Generally, editors want to have your manuscript under exclusive consideration. The reason: they are going to contact two or three peer reviewers and ask them to read the manuscript for them. This process is much the same as in submitting a paper to a journal. There is one big difference—the reviewers get paid. The amount is never huge—usually a few hundred dollars in cash or a slightly larger amount in books. But—and this is important—the editors do not want to send a manuscript out and pay their reviewers (they get paid regardless of the direction of their assessment) if someone else is also looking at the thing and there is a chance they might end up with nothing to show for all their effort and money.
One big difference between article and book manuscripts is that the author rarely stays anonymous. There is too much in the manuscript, including the introduction, that will tip off the reviewer. On the other hand, the reviewer probably will stay anonymous.
After the book has been accepted by the press, a lot of important stuff starts that is quite important, and actually is far more time consuming and expensive than the peer review process. Maps, photos, and illustrations need to be prepared. More and more, this is an obligation placed on the author. Lining up images for the book is an issue that authors often overlook. While you are doing your research, it is wise to invest sometime in photo archives. The last thing in the world you want to do, is to have to go back to libraries and archives just to get a few images for your book. Actually, the last thing you want is to have no images at all in your book.
Maps are an even more difficult issue. Few presses have cartographers on staff. These days with computers anyone with the right program can produce a map, supposedly. The problem is that the images that these programs produce really are not as good as maps drawn by hand by people who know what they are doing. As a result, the quality of maps in academic books has gone down since the mid 1980s.
Jacket design, indexing, and copy editing are also important activities. Authors should pay particular attention to copy editing, since this effort can alter the text in subtle but extremely important ways. If not done well, it can make you look like an idiot. It is also time consuming. Pay attention, no matter how good you are, there are mistakes in what you have done.
An index is hardly sexy or exciting, but it is extremely important for a scholarly study. Many, many people will use this part of the book. So a lot of care and attention needs to go into it. It is also a time intensive project and as a result, many writers hire someone else to do the work. The thing is, no one knows the book as well as the author. As a result, I have done the index work for each of my books. You should strongly consider doing the same.
Another effort that is on the author is marketing. This is generally the case regardless of it being fiction or non-fiction, academic or commercial. Only a few of the biggest academic publishers have real resources in this area. Most presses have small marketing staffs, and—this is quite important—the press has another eighty or ninety books to worry about selling. Add to that fact that no one understands the book better than the author, and it is no surprise that the author is expected to lead the marketing effort. Selling the book is important and is a topic that many authors tend to dismiss. How well your book is sold will affect both the number of reviews it receives and how many times it is cited. Every author thinks his book is the greatest thing since the invention of the printing press. Some are; most are not. You need to be aggressive, but realistic.
For an academic book, one of the most important things is getting the book reviewed in the right forums. Right now (2009) this area is where academic publishing has commercial publishing beat. Most magazines and newspapers are getting out of the book review business, which is a real problem for the big New York publishing firms: how do they spread the word about their authors. Generally speaking, academic journals are not cutting back in book reviews. The press that publishes your book will ask for a list of places to send the book for review. This listing is important because the worst thing in the world is not a bad review but no review at all.
The press will want other information: at what conferences should they try to sell the book; names of people that might use the book in a course; prizes for which they should nominate the book, etc. This is important information and the author should take it seriously. If they do not, the press certainly will not.
A word of warning is in order at this point. The staff at a presses tends to regard the author as rather insignificant—on my second book, I learned about the design of the book only after accidentally stumbling upon it while I was surfing the internet—and it is important that an author be proactive on this matter, offering suggestions and ideas.
Academic book publishing works a good deal like the process for publishing articles in journals with some notable exceptions. There are presses that specialize in certain disciplines and in certain fields of history—if they have an interest in history at all. You should do a little research in looking at the previous titles they have published to make sure that press has an interest in publishing your type of scholarship. Sending a proposal to a press that has no interest in history is a waste of your time and theirs. Then you should put together a short proposal for your book. How short is short? No, more than 10 pages, but five or six would be better. The proposal should include a short synopsis of the book, its focus and argument. There should be another section which describes your professional credentials to write this study. Another section should describe the competition for the book, and another should describe the market of this title and ways that it can be marketed. Some academic books are never going to be sold to anything other than libraries; others can and will be used in classrooms. There are any number of books out there that you can find in the self-help sections of book stores that describe this process at greater length. One of my favorites, is Susan Rabiner’s Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get it Published. This book focuses on trade publishing, but it offers a number insights that can help in the academic publishing process be it books or even academic journal articles.
The thing to note about your proposal is that it is not an intellectual document, it is a marketing document. Academic publishers are intellectuals, but they have to worry about bottom lines far more than faculty members. These days it is not uncommon for editors at presses to pass on intellectually important projects, even those in which they are interested, for commercial reasons. Editors at academic presses have little expectation of overseeing monster bestsellers, but these days they need to make sure that they at least break even.
When you send your proposal off, it is perfectly acceptable to send it to more than one press. Some presses, will send you back a short letter of rejection. One or two will express interest. Generally, editors want to have your manuscript under exclusive consideration. The reason: they are going to contact two or three peer reviewers and ask them to read the manuscript for them. This process is much the same as in submitting a paper to a journal. There is one big difference—the reviewers get paid. The amount is never huge—usually a few hundred dollars in cash or a slightly larger amount in books. But—and this is important—the editors do not want to send a manuscript out and pay their reviewers (they get paid regardless of the direction of their assessment) if someone else is also looking at the thing and there is a chance they might end up with nothing to show for all their effort and money.
One big difference between article and book manuscripts is that the author rarely stays anonymous. There is too much in the manuscript, including the introduction, that will tip off the reviewer. On the other hand, the reviewer probably will stay anonymous.
After the book has been accepted by the press, a lot of important stuff starts that is quite important, and actually is far more time consuming and expensive than the peer review process. Maps, photos, and illustrations need to be prepared. More and more, this is an obligation placed on the author. Lining up images for the book is an issue that authors often overlook. While you are doing your research, it is wise to invest sometime in photo archives. The last thing in the world you want to do, is to have to go back to libraries and archives just to get a few images for your book. Actually, the last thing you want is to have no images at all in your book.
Maps are an even more difficult issue. Few presses have cartographers on staff. These days with computers anyone with the right program can produce a map, supposedly. The problem is that the images that these programs produce really are not as good as maps drawn by hand by people who know what they are doing. As a result, the quality of maps in academic books has gone down since the mid 1980s.
Jacket design, indexing, and copy editing are also important activities. Authors should pay particular attention to copy editing, since this effort can alter the text in subtle but extremely important ways. If not done well, it can make you look like an idiot. It is also time consuming. Pay attention, no matter how good you are, there are mistakes in what you have done.
An index is hardly sexy or exciting, but it is extremely important for a scholarly study. Many, many people will use this part of the book. So a lot of care and attention needs to go into it. It is also a time intensive project and as a result, many writers hire someone else to do the work. The thing is, no one knows the book as well as the author. As a result, I have done the index work for each of my books. You should strongly consider doing the same.
Another effort that is on the author is marketing. This is generally the case regardless of it being fiction or non-fiction, academic or commercial. Only a few of the biggest academic publishers have real resources in this area. Most presses have small marketing staffs, and—this is quite important—the press has another eighty or ninety books to worry about selling. Add to that fact that no one understands the book better than the author, and it is no surprise that the author is expected to lead the marketing effort. Selling the book is important and is a topic that many authors tend to dismiss. How well your book is sold will affect both the number of reviews it receives and how many times it is cited. Every author thinks his book is the greatest thing since the invention of the printing press. Some are; most are not. You need to be aggressive, but realistic.
For an academic book, one of the most important things is getting the book reviewed in the right forums. Right now (2009) this area is where academic publishing has commercial publishing beat. Most magazines and newspapers are getting out of the book review business, which is a real problem for the big New York publishing firms: how do they spread the word about their authors. Generally speaking, academic journals are not cutting back in book reviews. The press that publishes your book will ask for a list of places to send the book for review. This listing is important because the worst thing in the world is not a bad review but no review at all.
The press will want other information: at what conferences should they try to sell the book; names of people that might use the book in a course; prizes for which they should nominate the book, etc. This is important information and the author should take it seriously. If they do not, the press certainly will not.
A word of warning is in order at this point. The staff at a presses tends to regard the author as rather insignificant—on my second book, I learned about the design of the book only after accidentally stumbling upon it while I was surfing the internet—and it is important that an author be proactive on this matter, offering suggestions and ideas.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Blog XXII (22): Book Publishing
What you publish in book format will usually play an even bigger role in shaping your professional reputation than articles. Books will also shape your promotions and employment opportunities. Believe it or not, your dissertation will start doing that even before it is published. As a result, you need to be careful and wise in what you decide to write about for a number of reasons. I offer seven considerations that you should keep in mind. You will hear some of these while in grad school, but I will try to stress a couple that do not get as much attention as they should:
1. Know your audience. This advice is basic to all writing, history included. Why? Knowing you audience will shape how you structure whatever you are writing, affecting considerations like language, structure, and pacing. Such is the case even for academic writing.
2. Buildup. The dissertation is where many grad students flame out and fail to earn their Ph.D. The reason for this failure is an understandable one. Writing is a lot like running. The skills that it takes to run a 100 meter dash are significantly different from what it takes to run a marathon. Likewise, writing a book review or 10 page seminar paper is different from writing a book. In grad school, most students are asked to write short papers. Most programs require only one or two research seminars, and during my student days I saw many people reluctant to take those classes. Through a series of accidents I ended up taking four research seminars before I entered Ph.D. candidacy and began work on my dissertation/first book. Like many, many other grad students I ended up turning one of my research papers into the dissertation. That research paper also became my first academic publication. Nothing unusually there. What was unusually, though, was the amount of preparation I had done in preparing for the transition. It helped…a lot.
3. Research/Logistical Support. When trying to find a project to write on there are a number of factors to consider. Not all of them are intellectual in nature. Some of these issues include: What will your main professor agree to supervise? How long will it take to research and write? Where can you go for grant money? How much research and travel will it require? What kind of contribution to historical understanding can you make? The last one is the issue that most grad students focus on—and they should—but a lot of these other issues are important. Having been a professor supervising thesis work at the undergrad and MA level, I have had some people come in and say they wanted to write on a certain topic. They were interesting topics, but ones on which I as a diplomatic historian knew nothing—a biographical study of Ernest Hemingway for example. You also do not want a topic that is going to take a decade to write or cost you significant sums of money, particularly if you do not have the funding.
4. Big versus small. There are two types of
dissertations/books. The big study and the small study. What does this all mean? It has nothing to do with page length. It has to do with impact. Consider two fictional studies: the first is a biography of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the other is a book that offers a new interpretation of why Nazi Germany lost the war. Let us say that interpretation is that Germany had no natural zinc resources. Which do you think is going to get more attention the Paulus book or the zinc book? Paulus is a real individual; the zinc example is totally fictional, but ask yourself how much distance you would get out of a biography on the Field Marshall versus a book that offered a new interpretation on the outcome of World War II?
Go big. That is my advice on picking a dissertation topic. Bigger is better and will service your career the most. The bigger argument will get you more notice among other historians, which will translate into better job options. This runs against the natural tendency of historians, which is to go small. That habit is understandable. It is easy to get enthralled with documents and tell interesting vignettes. The real challenge is to give meaning to these stories and explain their significance.
There is a caveat to this advice—and it is important—go big, if you can. For a lot of people, the object of running a marathon is not trying to win the race, but to finish. A book is an intellectual marathon, and if you have never tried to write something that long, your goal might just simple be to write something that is good enough to get you your degree, get published, and get you tenure. Trying to win the race and get the gold medal might be a goal for the next book when you have a little more experience and understanding of what you are trying to do.
5. Self Definition. There is another factor to keep in mind and something I did not really appreciate until after I was in the professoriate ranks and that my own advisors mentioned only in passing: a dissertation does a lot to define you as a scholar. Think of the writing of the dissertation as something like product branding and you as the raw goods. Let say you write a dissertation on Vicksburg with the title: City at War: Vicksburg, 1826-1914. Given that title there is probably a lot more to your book than just the Civil War battle, including an analysis of its legacy on Mississippi politics. You might think you can apply for any Civil War, urban history, military history, or southern history positions advertised out there, but that is not the case. Well, you can actually apply for the position, but you might not be a viable candidate if the department wants a southern history position and your book is primarily a battle history. To a lot of search committees that book makes you look like a military historian, end of story. You might think you can go for positions advertising for a historian of the Gilded Age, but that committee is going to look at your study and assume that the bulk of it focuses on the battle and say, “military historian.” Even if the department is receptive to military history, they need to put their institutional interests first. If their need is to fill a slot with someone who can teach classes on the 1880s and 1890s, you might not be the strongest contender compared to someone who did a dissertation on Mark Twain.
6. Long Term Planning: Gaddis versus Ambrose. Writing a book also requires that you think about its reception. This statement does not mean marketing, but it is similar to the big versus small issue that I discussed earlier. Let me offer two historians as examples of individuals that have done well in this area: the diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis, and the late Stephen E. Ambrose. Most historians are doing well if they write one book that is in print 30 years later or that people are discussing decades after its publication. Gaddis has done that at least twice and probably three times. Why? Well, he is good, but he has also done very well in taking on issues that are at the center of the debate. As a result, he is cited all over the place and his ideas must be at least considered and in a number of cases have carried the day. Then, there is Stephen E. Ambrose. Although now known as a popular historian, Ambrose was for most of his career a military historian. Early on, he made Dwight D. Eisenhower the central focus of his writing. Ambrose was one of the pioneering Eisenhower revisionists—historians who argued that Eisenhower was far more hands on and responsible for the policies of his administration than political observers at the time believed. He did many other projects, but the majority of his work revolved around the military aspects of World War II. Ambrose did well for himself in sticking to this topic and had books come out tied to anniversaries: the Eisenhower centennial in 1990 and the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994 to give two examples. His biography of Richard Nixon—Eisenhower’s vice-president—also put him in position to be a commentator on the declassification of key Nixon documents in the 1990s. Both of these approaches gave these historians a lot of influence and are good examples of career management that other historians would do well to consider.
7. Nest your strategy. Your book publishing strategy should cascade down from a larger plan. It should be part of a larger publishing plan that lists the type of topic you want to examine, or a career plan that details what you want to do professionally. Don’t be surprised if you are in a job interview and someone asks you what your next project is on. It happens…a lot.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Blog XXI (21): The Mechanics of Academic Article Publishing
How does publishing work? In answering that question, I plan on explaining the mechanics of the peer review process that most academic publications use for article publicaitons. Okay, here we go.
The first step is an internal review. This process normally takes places within the editorial office of the journal. The editorial office might be the editor and a couple of grad students that have been pressed into service as editorial service. If it is a big journal like the American Historical Review, then it might be a faculty member of the host department or a member of the board of editors. The mission of the internal review is to decide if the submission is serious enough to merit a substantial investment in time and energy. The internal review is often quite important. Generally, what the internal reviewer is trying to do is to determine what type of source material you used and if it is relevant to the focus of the publication. Generally, they want to make sure that they are not getting some half-baked paper that an undergraduate had written.
If the submission passes muster, then the editor will send out the article to individuals that will evaluate the article. The ideal number of outside reviewers is three, but it could be as few as one, but if they start consulting five or six something is a bit odd. Where do editors get the names of reviewers? Well, from any number of sources. Often times, they have a list of established reviewers that they send their submissions to on specific topics. The editor might also contact an individual cited in your footnotes, since they have worked on the topic or subjects that are related to your focus. Editors are generally senior people in their fields and know a number of people. Sometimes editors also get recommendations that the authors suggest in their cover letters.
Generally, the review process should take 90 days. If you do not hear back within three months, you are within your rights to contact the editor and ask about the status of your submission. Most times it will be that the reviewers have not written their evaluation in prompt and timely manner, but journal staffs have been known to misfile items.
There are four types of responses. If you stay in the history profession you will probably get all of them at some point or another. I have. The four types are:
1. “Yes.” The article is accepted as is. This response is the rarest.
2. “Yes, but…” The article is acceptable, but the editor wants minor changes—a revised title for example.
3. “Revise and Resubmit.” This response is the most common, and is technically a rejection, but the editor is clearly interested in the article. Some significant changes, though, are required.
4. “No.” If you get this response, the internal reviewer, the peer reviewers, or the editor sees no merit in the article, or feel that it is inappropriate for the focus of the journal. These individuals are finished with their considerations of the article manuscript. If you want your paper published, you need to go to somewhere else.
Sometimes the reviewers will be off the mark. Bear in mind that they are not off the mark just because they did not give your article a positive evaluation, but if you feel the review is somehow unfair, you should feel free to contact the editor and explain your position. The editors will most likely send your written response to the reviewer and ask for their counter-response. If this strikes you as bit wishy-washy, it is because it is. The editors often are not experts on the particular topic in a dispute and want as much information as possible before they make their decisions. If you disagree, then feel free to take your article to another publication.
I have heard through the grapevine of editors sending an article out to as many as nine reviewers before rejecting the article when it gets one negative review and then rejecting the submission. I have personally had an editor reject my submission even though the reviewer gave an affirmative evaluation. Both examples are unfair examples of editorial discretion. If you want to complain to the editorial board of the publication that would be a fair and reasonable response. In many cases, these boards exist for just that purpose. Again, though, you should be prepared to seek publication in a different venue.
The first step is an internal review. This process normally takes places within the editorial office of the journal. The editorial office might be the editor and a couple of grad students that have been pressed into service as editorial service. If it is a big journal like the American Historical Review, then it might be a faculty member of the host department or a member of the board of editors. The mission of the internal review is to decide if the submission is serious enough to merit a substantial investment in time and energy. The internal review is often quite important. Generally, what the internal reviewer is trying to do is to determine what type of source material you used and if it is relevant to the focus of the publication. Generally, they want to make sure that they are not getting some half-baked paper that an undergraduate had written.
If the submission passes muster, then the editor will send out the article to individuals that will evaluate the article. The ideal number of outside reviewers is three, but it could be as few as one, but if they start consulting five or six something is a bit odd. Where do editors get the names of reviewers? Well, from any number of sources. Often times, they have a list of established reviewers that they send their submissions to on specific topics. The editor might also contact an individual cited in your footnotes, since they have worked on the topic or subjects that are related to your focus. Editors are generally senior people in their fields and know a number of people. Sometimes editors also get recommendations that the authors suggest in their cover letters.
Generally, the review process should take 90 days. If you do not hear back within three months, you are within your rights to contact the editor and ask about the status of your submission. Most times it will be that the reviewers have not written their evaluation in prompt and timely manner, but journal staffs have been known to misfile items.
There are four types of responses. If you stay in the history profession you will probably get all of them at some point or another. I have. The four types are:
1. “Yes.” The article is accepted as is. This response is the rarest.
2. “Yes, but…” The article is acceptable, but the editor wants minor changes—a revised title for example.
3. “Revise and Resubmit.” This response is the most common, and is technically a rejection, but the editor is clearly interested in the article. Some significant changes, though, are required.
4. “No.” If you get this response, the internal reviewer, the peer reviewers, or the editor sees no merit in the article, or feel that it is inappropriate for the focus of the journal. These individuals are finished with their considerations of the article manuscript. If you want your paper published, you need to go to somewhere else.
Sometimes the reviewers will be off the mark. Bear in mind that they are not off the mark just because they did not give your article a positive evaluation, but if you feel the review is somehow unfair, you should feel free to contact the editor and explain your position. The editors will most likely send your written response to the reviewer and ask for their counter-response. If this strikes you as bit wishy-washy, it is because it is. The editors often are not experts on the particular topic in a dispute and want as much information as possible before they make their decisions. If you disagree, then feel free to take your article to another publication.
I have heard through the grapevine of editors sending an article out to as many as nine reviewers before rejecting the article when it gets one negative review and then rejecting the submission. I have personally had an editor reject my submission even though the reviewer gave an affirmative evaluation. Both examples are unfair examples of editorial discretion. If you want to complain to the editorial board of the publication that would be a fair and reasonable response. In many cases, these boards exist for just that purpose. Again, though, you should be prepared to seek publication in a different venue.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Administrative Note 3
Due to computer issues which vastly exceeded my skills, I was unable to make any posts in late July and early August. To compensate for this absence, I will publish a second essay this week. Hopefully, I can return to the once a week format next week.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Blog XX (20): Article Publishing
Where you publish will significantly shape your professional reputation and your employment opportunities, but you should not publish just for the sake of publishing.
Why? Well, a recent study has show that the average history professor publishes 17 articles in a career. Now, we can quibble a little on what is and is not an article, but seventeen is not that many when you think about a career that starts at roughly age thirty and ends at roughly age sixty-five. As a result, you need to be careful and wise in what publishing venues you seek and use.
In deciding where to publish, I offer five considerations that you should keep in mind.
1. Know your audience. This advice is basic to all writing, history included. Why? Knowing you audience will shape how you structure whatever you are writing, affecting considerations like language, structure, and pacing. Such is the case even for academic writing. There are different publications with different audiences.
Allow me to share an example from my own experiences. I wrote an article about the relationship between Lyndon Johnson, president of the United States, and Keith Holyoake, prime minister of New Zealand. I always intended to published the piece in some type of academic forum, so no problem with me writing as an academic for a popular audience. I originally submitted the article to diplomatic history journals. After getting rejected from one or two publications, I sent the article to the main title in the field of agriculture history, which has the title of Agricultural History. (A major issue in U.S.-New Zealand relations in the 1960s focused on beef imports). Now, even though this journal was an academic publication that had an audience of historians, their interests were slightly different from those of diplomatic historians. I had to do some additional research and restructure the historiographical sections of the article, but I also had to restructure some of the paragraphs. Coming to a new interpretation about Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy might be a good thing, but it was probably not of much interest to historians that focused on the history of agriculture. So, know your audience.
2. Have a Target List. One of the things that I try to do to before I start writing is come up with a list of journals where I am going to send the article when I am finished. I have always tired to do this since graduate school, but I have learned that you need to have a “Plan B,” and even a “Plan G.” As with everything, you should “Go Big.” Rank you possible publications in order of their importance, pick the most prestigious and relevant journals, and submit to them in order, working your way down the list. Most journal editors will get upset if you are discussing your article with another journal while they are spending time and energy on your submission. In that sense, the submission process is a little like dating.
3. Main Journal First. An important piece of advice that I give to any aspiring historian is to publish in the main journal in their field sooner rather than later. If you are a diplomatic historian, that journal is Diplomatic History; if you are a sport historian, then it is the Journal of Sports History, and so on. You get the idea.
Why? Well, your early publications help define you as a historian. Almost all first journal articles are spin offs of the dissertation project. Getting an article published, seeds the market for your dissertation/first book. Just as important, perhaps more important, search committees are usually full of historians that have little, if any, familiarity with the field in which they are hiring, and they will take short cuts. An easy one is to look at the vitaes of their candidates and look for the people that have already published in the most important journal in their subfield. Everyone wants to hire the best possible candidate, and people will prefer the individual that is already engaging and contributing to their subfield.
What about The American Historical Review or the Journal of American History? In point two I argued that you should aim for the most prestigious journal first and work your way down, but I followed that up with piece of advice saying you should go for the main journal in your field first. This advice seems contradictory; which is it?
The advice is not that contradictory. If you can get published in either one of those journals, good for you; it will only do good for your career, but know the reasons why and the limitations of these two titles. Both journals have a good deal of prestige, but limited influence and readership. Both have basically outlived their original purposes. When each was founded, their mission made sense at a time when major history departments had a faculty of five or six people and there was little specialization compare to that which we see in the profession today. As a result, neither journal is the first read for historians of any specialization. If you are a military historian, the first journal you read is The Journal of Military History, if you are a southern historian, the first publication you read is The Journal of Southern History, and so forth. For most military and southern historians, the AHR and JAH might not even make the top ten in order to keep up with current developments in the field because neither journal is likely to publish anything on either topic.
Now, getting an article published in either of those two journals is a good thing in that the prestige of those journals cuts wide and far across sub-fields. Publishing in either one of these journals will turn a lot of heads on a job selection committee. Economic historians of colonial America will know that a religious historian of republican Rome did good in getting in The American Historical Review. The Journal of American History carries the same impact within the big community of U.S. history. Historians of the West do not often read the work of military historians writing about the U.S. Army in World War I, but they all know the status of the JAH.
4. Long Term Planning. There are two possible strategies that you can pursue. I like to call them the “double tap” and the “spread.” What distinguishes these two approaches from one another? It is pretty simple. With “double tap” you pick a small group of journals that are the leading titles in your field of history and you submit your research to those publications over and over. For diplomatic history those journals would mostly likely be: Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, The Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, and the International History Review. (Diplomatic history is unique in that it has so many journals for scholars to publish in; most other fields have far fewer titles.) The idea behind this strategy is that you focus on building up your reputation in the subfield. One thing to note, you will have to rotate. Academic journal editors are reluctant to publish the same author as if they were a staff writer, and usually prefer that a year or two have passed between publications.
On the other hand, in the “spread” approach you publish in a different journal every time. The result is that you engage with the widest element of the profession and cut across the divisions in the profession.
Both approaches have strengths, but they also have weaknesses. With “double tap” you are only known to small section of the profession, but you develop authority sooner rather than later. This approach is a particularly good one if you are still in grad school or trying to write your way out of a job you do not like. The “spread” approach establishes the stage for a bigger presence in the profession, but it takes longer for you to establish your name because you are addressing different audiences.
5. Nest your strategy. Your article publishing strategy should cascade down from a larger plan. It should be part of a larger publishing plan that lists the type of topic you want to examine, what books you want to write, or a career plan that details what you want to do professionally.
Why? Well, a recent study has show that the average history professor publishes 17 articles in a career. Now, we can quibble a little on what is and is not an article, but seventeen is not that many when you think about a career that starts at roughly age thirty and ends at roughly age sixty-five. As a result, you need to be careful and wise in what publishing venues you seek and use.
In deciding where to publish, I offer five considerations that you should keep in mind.
1. Know your audience. This advice is basic to all writing, history included. Why? Knowing you audience will shape how you structure whatever you are writing, affecting considerations like language, structure, and pacing. Such is the case even for academic writing. There are different publications with different audiences.
Allow me to share an example from my own experiences. I wrote an article about the relationship between Lyndon Johnson, president of the United States, and Keith Holyoake, prime minister of New Zealand. I always intended to published the piece in some type of academic forum, so no problem with me writing as an academic for a popular audience. I originally submitted the article to diplomatic history journals. After getting rejected from one or two publications, I sent the article to the main title in the field of agriculture history, which has the title of Agricultural History. (A major issue in U.S.-New Zealand relations in the 1960s focused on beef imports). Now, even though this journal was an academic publication that had an audience of historians, their interests were slightly different from those of diplomatic historians. I had to do some additional research and restructure the historiographical sections of the article, but I also had to restructure some of the paragraphs. Coming to a new interpretation about Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy might be a good thing, but it was probably not of much interest to historians that focused on the history of agriculture. So, know your audience.
2. Have a Target List. One of the things that I try to do to before I start writing is come up with a list of journals where I am going to send the article when I am finished. I have always tired to do this since graduate school, but I have learned that you need to have a “Plan B,” and even a “Plan G.” As with everything, you should “Go Big.” Rank you possible publications in order of their importance, pick the most prestigious and relevant journals, and submit to them in order, working your way down the list. Most journal editors will get upset if you are discussing your article with another journal while they are spending time and energy on your submission. In that sense, the submission process is a little like dating.
3. Main Journal First. An important piece of advice that I give to any aspiring historian is to publish in the main journal in their field sooner rather than later. If you are a diplomatic historian, that journal is Diplomatic History; if you are a sport historian, then it is the Journal of Sports History, and so on. You get the idea.
Why? Well, your early publications help define you as a historian. Almost all first journal articles are spin offs of the dissertation project. Getting an article published, seeds the market for your dissertation/first book. Just as important, perhaps more important, search committees are usually full of historians that have little, if any, familiarity with the field in which they are hiring, and they will take short cuts. An easy one is to look at the vitaes of their candidates and look for the people that have already published in the most important journal in their subfield. Everyone wants to hire the best possible candidate, and people will prefer the individual that is already engaging and contributing to their subfield.
What about The American Historical Review or the Journal of American History? In point two I argued that you should aim for the most prestigious journal first and work your way down, but I followed that up with piece of advice saying you should go for the main journal in your field first. This advice seems contradictory; which is it?
The advice is not that contradictory. If you can get published in either one of those journals, good for you; it will only do good for your career, but know the reasons why and the limitations of these two titles. Both journals have a good deal of prestige, but limited influence and readership. Both have basically outlived their original purposes. When each was founded, their mission made sense at a time when major history departments had a faculty of five or six people and there was little specialization compare to that which we see in the profession today. As a result, neither journal is the first read for historians of any specialization. If you are a military historian, the first journal you read is The Journal of Military History, if you are a southern historian, the first publication you read is The Journal of Southern History, and so forth. For most military and southern historians, the AHR and JAH might not even make the top ten in order to keep up with current developments in the field because neither journal is likely to publish anything on either topic.
Now, getting an article published in either of those two journals is a good thing in that the prestige of those journals cuts wide and far across sub-fields. Publishing in either one of these journals will turn a lot of heads on a job selection committee. Economic historians of colonial America will know that a religious historian of republican Rome did good in getting in The American Historical Review. The Journal of American History carries the same impact within the big community of U.S. history. Historians of the West do not often read the work of military historians writing about the U.S. Army in World War I, but they all know the status of the JAH.
4. Long Term Planning. There are two possible strategies that you can pursue. I like to call them the “double tap” and the “spread.” What distinguishes these two approaches from one another? It is pretty simple. With “double tap” you pick a small group of journals that are the leading titles in your field of history and you submit your research to those publications over and over. For diplomatic history those journals would mostly likely be: Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, The Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, and the International History Review. (Diplomatic history is unique in that it has so many journals for scholars to publish in; most other fields have far fewer titles.) The idea behind this strategy is that you focus on building up your reputation in the subfield. One thing to note, you will have to rotate. Academic journal editors are reluctant to publish the same author as if they were a staff writer, and usually prefer that a year or two have passed between publications.
On the other hand, in the “spread” approach you publish in a different journal every time. The result is that you engage with the widest element of the profession and cut across the divisions in the profession.
Both approaches have strengths, but they also have weaknesses. With “double tap” you are only known to small section of the profession, but you develop authority sooner rather than later. This approach is a particularly good one if you are still in grad school or trying to write your way out of a job you do not like. The “spread” approach establishes the stage for a bigger presence in the profession, but it takes longer for you to establish your name because you are addressing different audiences.
5. Nest your strategy. Your article publishing strategy should cascade down from a larger plan. It should be part of a larger publishing plan that lists the type of topic you want to examine, what books you want to write, or a career plan that details what you want to do professionally.
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