Turning a Dissertation into a Book

Academic and student work · 791 words · about 4 minutes to read

Iowa's university press tells authors to cut the part where they thank the dissertation committee. It also tells them to cut the review of literature, or to work parts of it into the text at relevant points. It suggests cutting a third to a half of the notes, and paring the bibliography down to sources actually cited. It asks for fewer quotations, especially long ones, because the book needs more of the author's own voice.¹

That list is short, specific, and unwelcome. It is also the clearest published statement of what changes between the two documents.

The two documents have different jobs

A dissertation demonstrates command of a field to a small number of readers who are obliged to finish it. A book makes an argument to readers who are not.

Everything on the Iowa list follows from that difference. The literature review exists to show the committee that the field has been read. The extensive apparatus exists to show that the sources were consulted. The long quotations exist because paraphrasing invites the question of whether the author understood the original. None of those readers is present in a book's audience.

What a press asks for before it sees the manuscript

The proposal comes first, and its requirements are published. Princeton University Press asks for a brief description of a paragraph or two and a fuller description of one to two pages. It asks for a chapter outline with a paragraph on each chapter, and for a list of comparable books with title, author, publisher, and year. A CV goes at the end, and sample material is welcome in place of the whole manuscript unless the press has asked for it. It asks authors to allow eight weeks for a reply.²

Two of those items are where a dissertation shows through most visibly. A chapter outline written from the dissertation's own table of contents usually describes a structure that served the defense rather than an argument. And the list of comparable books is a different exercise from a literature review: it asks which published books this one sits beside on a shelf, not which scholarship the author has read.

The revision is structural before it is stylistic

Editors Canada's Professional Editorial Standards describe the work precisely. Structural editing reorganizes material to achieve a coherent structure and sequence, with a logical progression of ideas and a narrative or expository flow. It revises, cuts, or expands text to meet length requirements. It identifies and either recommends or makes deletions and additions to make the material suitable.³

Applied to a dissertation, those standards produce a familiar set of findings. The introduction summarizes previous work rather than stating the book's own intervention. The first chapter is methodology that a book reader does not need in that position, or at that length. Chapters are of wildly uneven length because they answered different committee concerns. And the conclusion restates rather than concludes.

None of that is a criticism of the dissertation. It succeeded at its own task.

The apparatus is a production question as well as a scholarly one

Cutting a third to a half of the notes changes more than the page count.¹ Notes carry cross-references, and a renumbering breaks them. A bibliography pared to sources actually cited must be checked in both directions, so that every citation has an entry and every entry is cited.

Permissions become live at the same moment. A dissertation deposited in a repository and a book sold in shops are different uses, and the quotations that were fine in one may need clearing for the other. Cornell University Press requires that permission to use any copyrighted material, including an author's own previously published work, be obtained before the final manuscript is submitted.⁴ The University of Chicago Press states that anything an author plans to have in the book must be submitted before copyediting begins, including all art.⁵

That last requirement catches authors who planned to add an image later. There is no later.

What an editor settles, and what stays with the author

An editor can report what the manuscript is currently doing. That report names where the introduction summarizes instead of arguing, and where two chapters make the same case. It also names where the apparatus is doing work the text should do, and where a stated count does not match what is listed. Each of those is demonstrable on the page.

What the book is arguing, and which readers it is for, are the author's decisions. So is every scholarly claim in it. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished chapters, proposals, and correspondence with a press.

EditFast works on academic book manuscripts and on non-fiction at whatever level a client wants, and quotes on the whole manuscript. An author deciding where to start has one cheap test available: write the chapter outline a press asks for. If it describes an argument, the revision is a matter of cutting. If it describes a defense, the revision is a matter of rebuilding.

References

University of Iowa Press, Revising Humanities Dissertations for Publication. https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/authors/dissertations.htm ↩
Princeton University Press, Proposal Guidelines. https://press.princeton.edu/proposal-guidelines ↩
Editors Canada, Professional Editorial Standards 2024: B. Standards for Structural Editing. https://editors.ca/publications/professional-editorial-standards/structural-editing/ ↩
Cornell University Press, Author Guidelines. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/author-guidelines/ ↩
University of Chicago Press, Manuscript Preparation Guidelines. https://press.uchicago.edu/resource/emsguide.html ↩

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