Ten tips for writing your first academic book

So you’re an academic researcher with something to say that can’t be captured in the shorter form of a journal article. You’re ready to write your first book, but you’re not quite sure how to go about it.

In recent times I’ve written or co-authored books on school librarianship, reading engagement, and data analysis.

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Here are 10 quick tips that I picked up during these experiences on the academic book publishing journey. These tips are focused on sole or co-authored research-informed works rather than edited collections or textbooks.

1. Find the right publisher with the impact and audience you need. Academics can’t just publish anywhere for our books to count toward promotional opportunities. We need to consult academic book rankings. There is no one universally approved list, and the set of rankings you should use varies depending on your discipline. If you are not sure who the well-regarded book publishers are in your discipline are, you should ask a senior colleague and/or look at where influential academics are publishing in your field. Do not publish with vanity publishers.
2. Write a strong book proposal. Most academic publishers will have a proposal form for you to follow, and this will include situating your proposed work among competing texts, and probably providing at least one sample chapter. Give enough detail for the reviewers to be able to evaluate the quality of your work. They need to see that you’ve read deeply in your field, and that your book is both novel and relevant. However, don’t be afraid — you are not completely locking yourself in. If you want to add minor additional material or take a slightly different direction once you start actually writing the book, publishers are usually okay with this.
3. Level up on your attention to detail. You’ve probably published at least one academic journal article if you intend to write an academic book, so you will be know the level of rigor academic writing demands and the challenges of the publishing journey. Managing a more sustained work can be arduous, and I suggest referencing carefully as you go, and using consistent font and formatting to avoid last minute fiddling. Don’t paste a direct quote into your book with the intention of paraphrasing it later, or you may wind up accidentally plagiarizing.
4. Avoid self-plagiarism. On the subject of plagiarism, you will usually be writing a book in an area in which you have previous publications, so you need to avoid self-plagiarism. Yes, you will draw on your previous work. No, you can’t reuse your previously published work verbatim (or paraphrased) without citing the prior source. Text recycling is highly problematic. If you’re planning on pasting huge chunks of your PhD thesis (which has been published in an online repository) into your first book, you might want to consider removing your thesis from the repository and/or putting it under embargo.
5. Manage your overlapping content. Even if your book has been designed to have stand-alone chapters, you want to avoid repeatedly introducing concepts in-depth, as it will make your book very repetitive as a sustained work. You can manage your overlapping content by flagging for the reader that they can find the in-depth details in a previous chapter. For example, rather than repeating the method of a study in every chapter of my recent book, I wrote “further details about participants and method can be found in Chapter 1 of this book” (p. 41).
6. Don’t assume you need to pay for indexing. It’s really not that hard once you get the hang of it. I paid for it on my first book, and then felt like an idiot when I did it manually for my second book and saw how easy it was.
7. Seek endorsements through your networks. You’ll probably be asked to find esteemed academics willing to endorse your work to enhance its marketability. Good news! You don’t have to have actually met a person in human form for them to agree to endorse your work, however you do need to provide them with enough sample material to decide if your work is worth endorsing. It’s a nice idea to provide your endorsers with free copies of the book.
8. Work with people you know will deliver. Your first book is probably not the time to experiment with a new collaboration, or work with previous collaborators who were not reliable. If you know that co-authors have issues with time management, this is probably not going to end well for you unless you’re willing and able to invest time and effort to keep them on track (which may or may not be possible, depending on the nature of their issues).
9. Give yourself time to do it properly. If you can, factor in your book writing plans into your whole-year workload plans, and consider aligning leave applications with meeting book milestones if necessary.
10. Identify your end users in academia and beyond. While many academic publishers do not offer royalties (but will instead give you a small, one-off payment on publication), you still want people to read your book so that it can change what people think and/or do. Consider its implications for professional associations, communities, governance, industry, the general public, and any other potential end users. Then promote your book through media and social media connected with these spaces.

I hope that you find these tips helpful. You can follow my research on Twitter: @MKMerga or on ResearchGate.