How to Write a Book: First Monographs

Demystifying the First Book!

Jul 07, 2023

The second ‘How to Write a Book’ workshop was such a pleasure to run, and that was entirely down to the wisdom and kindness of our guest speaker, Dr Laura Varnam (University College, Oxford), and the brilliant questions posed by attendees. Many thanks to all involved!

Laura has written a hugely helpful blog post on her experience of writing her first book (as well as many other helpful blog posts that I highly recommend! I’ve written up the key points that arose during our discussion below.

So what is a first monograph, anyway?

Most first academic monographs are books based on a doctoral thesis, though they have almost always been substantially revised (as Laura said, it’s ‘often a thesis, but in a different form’). However, not everyone ends up turning their thesis into a book—sometimes a thesis is better off being published as a series of peer-reviewed articles, or broken up into an article or two plus a book. It all depends! If you’re unsure what form of publication would be best for your thesis, try talking with your supervisor, one of your examiners, or a trusted mentor about what your best options are.

Some first academic monographs began life as a side project during someone’s doctoral studies, but became that person’s Next Major Project. But ideally, your first monograph should cover a subject area in which you’ve already made a name for yourself via conference presentations, shorter publications, and intensive research.

But how do you go about transforming your thesis into a book?

Oof, this feels like it should be a PBP post of its own. Until I get around to writing that post, take a gander at William Germano’s tiny-but-mighty tome From Dissertation to Book, which was recommended to me by my first book’s editor!

In my opinion, the key difference between a thesis and a book is this: when you’re writing your thesis, you have something to prove (essentially, that you have made yourself an expert on your chosen topic); whereas when you’re writing a book, you have a story to tell. The former is a massive, multi-year homework assignment; the latter incorporates the results of that homework assignment into a larger narrative.

The first thing you should do is see what suggestions your supervisor, examiners, or mentors might have for you. What do they view as the particular strengths of your thesis? Do they have any recommendations about how to expand (or narrow!) your scope?

Take some time to reflect on your own, too. If you were re-doing your thesis project from scratch, what would you do differently? Encourage yourself to think big—and Laura recommends you go out for coffee and talk it over with a friend. And when it comes to how you tell the story of your book, you might bear in mind something Laura quoted from Twitter: ‘A book poses questions. Each chapter offers answers.’

When should you try to publish your first book?

That’s really up to you! In my case, I spent my first postdoctoral year working a full-time job in a museum, which left me no time to revise (or even think about) my doctoral thesis. And that was fine! It gave me the distance I needed to come back to it later, and was eventually published about five years after I completed my PhD.

When Laura finished her DPhil in 2007, she went straight into a full-time teaching job, and her demanding work schedule and total lack of research leave left her with almost no time to work on her first book. She had to be strategic about carving out time to work on it. It also took a little more time because it was originally considered by one press that gave her very polarized reports from reviewers, though some of the suggestions she received inspired her to rethink the scope of her first book. (For PBP posts on finding a publisher for your first book, see here and here.)

Laura ultimately ended up working with the wonderful Manchester University Press, to whom she submitted her manuscript in the summer of 2016. She revised it over the course of the following year, and it came out in 2018, by which time it had changed a lot from where she began in her thesis.

Bottom line: it takes as long as it takes. And it’s absolutely fine to take some time out to recover from PhD-ing before you tackle your first book project! If anything, it can help you look at it from a fresh perspective.

What was the hardest part about writing your first book?

Laura’s answer was very clear: finding the time. And I have to say I agree with her! (For further proof, see this post I wrote for ‘The Professor Is In’ exactly 10 years ago.)

The shift from doctoral study to postdoctoral professional life can often be a jolt, particularly when one realizes how little time is available for research and writing! But try to map out your writing schedule around those times of year when you have more free time, all the while being as realistic as possible about the amount of work you can squeeze into those periods.

During your busy periods, try to make the most of whatever little snippets of time you can keep for yourself. You may be surprised by what you can achieve in a mere half-hour here or there! But always leave yourself breadcrumbs when you set aside your work at the end of the day (‘The next steps will be a, b, and c.’).

Any words of advice for writing your first book?

Laura has a post-it somewhere in her office that reads ‘HOLD YOUR NERVE’. And I think that’s a brilliant thing to bear in mind throughout the whole process! So much of writing is about overcoming fear—fear that you might have nothing to say, or that you might not be able to write as well as you hoped, or that you don’t know what you’re doing. Remind yourself that you are a bona fide expert in your book’s topic!

Laura also recommends that you not be surprised if you end up wanting to do a big rewrite at the end of the project. If you think you can really ‘see’ your book at that stage, don’t be afraid to make revisions!

Finally, talk with people. Talk with editors about the do’s and don’t’s of first books. Talk with friends who have recently published their first book, or who are in the process of writing their own. Peers can be a wonderful source of support and feedback, and you can always agree to swap chapters (or even entire book manuscripts!) to help each other out.