Self-Paced Dissertation-to-Book Boot Camp
Enrollment in the Self-Paced Dissertation-to-Book Boot Camp ended permanently in March 2023. A more expanded, in-depth version of the exercises can be found in The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook, forthcoming with Chicago University Press (Oct. 2023).
NOTE: Enrollment in the Self-Paced Dissertation-to-Book Boot Camp ended permanently in March 2023. A more expanded, in-depth version of the exercises can be found in The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook, forthcoming with Chicago University Press (Oct. 2023). In the meantime, for the same type of immediate support, enroll in my co-author Allison Van Deventer's hands-on Book Audit, which walks you through the same critical exercises.
Get dissertation to book guidance from someone who’s not only a published author, but who’s successfully helped dozens of other tenure track academics transform their dissertations into cohesive and engaging books.
The process for demystifying the dissertation-to-book process is based on the system I created, developed, and revised by mentoring more than 50 authors of first books just like you, over three years.
MEET YOUR GUIDE
Katelyn Knox
Katelyn is an associate professor of French at the University of Arkansas, where she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, music, and culture.
When she was working to turn her own dissertation into a book, she struggled to get a handle on her book’s overarching arc and throughline. So, she did what any good academic researcher does: turned to the existing literature.
She pored over books and articles offering advice about everything relating to publishing a first academic book. While this information helped her understand the process her book would go through at presses and what she would need to do when preparing her book proposal, nothing helped her understand what she would need to do on a more fundamental level: how could she ensure that her book was coherent? What would she need to think about when it came to her book’s structure? What would make peer reviewers pause? What did she not even know to ask herself because she had never written in this mode before? Was her material significant enough for a book? .
She muddled her own way through the process and developed a few techniques that made the act of transforming her dissertation much more streamlined, eventually completing her own first book, Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France (2016).
Going through the process of writing and revising her first book without actionable resources, however, left her wishing she’d had something to help her think about the critical dimensions of her book--those things editors and peer reviewers most cared about--much earlier. Had such a resource existed, she could have been spared a lot of stress and overwhelm and gained much-needed confidence in her project much earlier.
So, after her book was published, she vowed to put together precisely those resources she wished had existed when she was going through the process herself. Drawing from the most valuable activities that helped her reconceptualize her dissertation as a book and the questions she discovered she should have been asking all along about her project (thanks, peer review!), she developed the Dissertation-to-Book Boot Camp to take the guesswork out of turning your dissertation into a book.
Ultimately, you can leave with the confidence that you've asked and answered the tough questions to get to the crux of your book, turn it into a more coherent project and develop the confidence necessary to represent it well with a strong proposal.