I just finished signing (e-signing) my contract with Routledge: My book has a publisher!
The book got its start years ago when I was still working on my first book, Getting the Best of Your Dissertation, which I self-published and released in August, 2015. Between then and the beginning of last year, my main efforts were directed toward the book that just got a contract. For most of the last year, my efforts have been focused on finding a publisher, and now that I have one, I have to get back to the book–or at least will soon, once the reviews of the full manuscript come back.
Some good hard work lies ahead: responding to the reviewers’ concerns, reviewing the copy-editor’s work, reading the page proofs, and writing an index. But a release date in 2020 doesn’t seem all that far away right now.
One task that remains is to settle on a title. My working title had been Getting the Best of What You Read: Practical Philosophy for Effective Use of Academic Literature. That was trying to work with the title of my previous, obviously, which made better sense when I was thinking of self-publishing as a companion to my dissertation book. Routledge suggested a change, and I’m not thrilled with their suggestion, so I’m working on coming up with a new title that will suit the various people at Routledge, and me, too.
The book, as suggested by the title, is about the use of academic literature in the process of research, and it is specifically aimed at graduate students who are developing their first independent research project (which is usually the dissertation).