Asking someone in the final throes of the book production process for advice on academic publishing is asking for trouble. My non-serious reply would be "Run! Flee for your life!" But, slightly more helpfully, I would recommend acclimating yourself to the peculiar features of academic publishing, beginning with its specific temporality. Who knew what waiting a year to hear back from a press as to whether they were even interested in pursuing a manuscript would feel like? You won't wait that long to hear back on an article submission, most likely, but it will still feel unreasonably long. Use professional meetings to meet editors, introduce your work to them, and (judiciously) gauge their interest level. If someone is expecting, or...>>
Academic Publishing
I had coffee recently with one of my dissertation students. We talked about his workload. He reads a book a week for our independent study, in preparation for writing the dissertation proposal he will defend in May, and he probably reads twice as much for the intensive theory seminar in which he is enrolled. He is also preparing to take comprehensive exams over Thanksgiving break. And he is, of course, a teaching assistant. He is responsible for three sections of a large introductory class, each holding twenty-five students. That makes seventy-five students in all. We talked about a lot of things that day, but publication, not surprisingly, never came up. I got my first publication opportunity in graduate school. It...>>
Why publish? This is a strange question with which to frame a response to a graduate student request for advice on "how to publish." But given Ashley Dawson's astute comments on the "increasingly cutthroat character of the downsized, outsourced corporate academy," and Anna McCarthy's warnings over the time and workload pressures that graduate students face today (which, for different reasons, applies equally in the UK), I think it is worth taking the question seriously precisely as a step toward successfully publishing as a graduate student. Publishing is, of course, the best way to disseminate your research, but that implies that you've sufficiently developed your thoughts, findings, even new questions to contribute to that circulation of ideas in public that publication...>>
The increasingly cutthroat character of the downsized, outsourced corporate academy means that individual drive and determination are essential for success. Ironically, though, I think that the single strongest factor behind success in publishing is collective organizing.I say this because of my own experience at an elite university where there was little advice given to graduate students on how to get their work published. Senior faculty members at this school were generally academic stars and as a result had the power to evade their responsibilities as teachers and mentors. Junior faculty, for their part, were desperately struggling to publish their own work in a pretty hostile and very competitive environment. No one at my school had thought to establish an introduction...>>
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