Publishing PhD dissertation as a book

Question

I have just completed a PhD by research, which I think has some merits in being available as a book (This is, of course, my personal opinion). The research cuts across several fields (e.g. sociology, public policy).

I am wondering what I need to do to take the next step.

In particular:

1. How do you turn an academic piece like the dissertation (which is written for the examiners) into a book (which is for the general public)?

2. How do I find publishers who specialise in this field?

Answer 1

I published my PhD thesis as a book in VDM verlag. It publishes PhD dissertations and working with them is quite easy. The only problem is they put a relatively high price on your book and this might reduce the sale of your book. Due to this problem, I have received no royalty from my book yet. So if you think any other publisher can do better (financially) it is better you consider another publisher. Their publishing strategy is based on printing on demand. It means they publish a few copies of you book and sell them to some big libraries around the world. Then if an individual purchases your book online, they publish it for him as receive the order.

If you want to publish your book fast and easy, you may want to use their service.

for more information about their work see enter link description here or their website enter link description here.

Answer 2

Your first question is quite tricky (to answer and to do). It depends on what you mean by "the public". A version for academics needs little change from a thesis. For students you need to consider how to highlight what can be learnt from your work. For the general general public, you'll have to start thinking about rewriting perhaps quite a bit, keeping your language accessible and building a narrative. As I am in a different field, perhaps some or all of this is already a part of your thesis.

The second question is simpler, who publishes the books that you read for your thesis?

Answer 3

As a partial answer, Springer used to publish (theoretically) outstanding PhD thesis in Mathematics in its 'Lecture notes in Mathematics' as research monograph. However I do not know how many of the published volumes are Phd thesis. Definitely a (math) thesis requires a lot of polishing and rewriting before publishing.

Answer 4

If your university does not require you to publish your dissertation as a book, I would be very reluctant to invest the time needed to get your dissertation published. I would put the PDF of your dissertation on your own website, making it available to everyone who wants to look at it. I would spend the time needed to rewrite your book on writing more peer reviewed articles. Either by publishing chapters from your dissertation, or by doing new research. I think publications are more important than a book, especially for someone like you who still has only a few publications.

Answer 5

Why do you want the book?

• For prestige?: publishers who contact you, don't do any review and charge high prices will only increase your prestige to those that don't know them (and these are probably not those you want to impress).
• For dissemination?: why not just put the pdf available (as was already recommended)?. Those who are interested will find it, those who are not will probably not buy a PhD thesis
• For money?: I doubt you will really make much out of it.

My recommendation: put it as a pdf on your website / your school's dissertation repository. If you see that lot's of people download it, consider an improved version as book.

Answer 6

After my PhD I got out of a blue email from a publisher and eventually my book ended up published and on Amazon. So sometimes the publisher scouts the theses.