Turning your Dissertation into a Book - Some Lessons Learned

Turning your dissertation into a book - some lessons learned

Before this resurgence into blogging, my last post was in February 2009 just after I completed and submitted the manuscript for my book  Women's Spiritual Leadership in Africa and I thought its time to talk about some of the lessons I learned working on it. You see, this book is based on my dissertation research Tempered Radicals and Servant Leaders: Portraits of Spirited Leadership amongst African Women Leaders. Here follows a few of the lessons I learned from this experience.

First of all, plan with the end in mind.

If you know you would like to turn your dissertation into a book, then the topic selection, sample/population, even methods ought to help you prepare a study that will have an audience wider than your three or four committee members.

Granted, my topic selection was based more on my positionality as an African woman in the US, my past experiences with/of leadership and my personal/political goal of telling a more positive and celebratory story about African women. But in the end, to be able to find a publisher willing to take a risk on a 'untested', 'junior', emerging scholar, the topic has to be of interest to a sufficiently wide audience. Imagine my surprise when I noticed on Ohiolink Electronic Thesis and Dissertations yesterday that my dissertation has been downloaded 2080 times (upto 9/2011)! That number does not include any downloads through Proquest. It probably helps that it is freely available on the web through Ohiolink...meeting another of my goals, to provide materials to African students and readers who do not have access to Proquest and other subscription databases.

Second lesson I learned in turning the dissertation into a book was to realize that, very few publishers would be willing to publish the dissertation in its normal form. As such, it took a couple of years to rewrite a lot of the material for a wider audience. You see, dissertations tend to have a form and structure that is aimed specifically at academic audiences. There are a lot of redundancies, the format aims at demonstrating a certain logic to research design (i.e. how the study was conceptualized, what literature supported it, the methods utilized, the results found, and their implications). Even though in certain respects, my dissertation was slightly different from most traditional dissertations (such as, chapter 4 - results - was actually several chapters, some focusing on individual portraits of women leaders, others describing the common themes that emerged from the data), I still needed to reconstruct it, remove the redundancies, expand some of the chapters, and completely remove some chapters to appeal to a wider audience.

Finally, on the advise of my mentor Professor Judy A Alston (Ashland University), I milked that dissertation for all it was worth before publishing the book.

For those whose trajectory includes joining the academy as professors, where 'publish or perish' will be a reality, the dissertation needs to serve as your research agenda, at least for the first few years. As such, you want to publish as much from it before it turns into a book. Otherwise, once the book is published, it becomes more difficult to derive journal articles from the same material. When constructing the dissertation, as mentioned above, chapter 4 (results) was split into several chapters. Some of those - on servant leadership, tempered radicalism and spiritual leadership - were turned into articles with some editing and rewriting, but the heart of each chapter was left intact.

For those whose trajectory is the practitioner world, you may want to publish your dissertation into a book and also, write articles for practitioner journals or magazines for your particular guild. Either way, after spending all that time working on a dissertation, milk it for all its worth!

Comments, feedback and questions welcome!