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Re: Kill All Birds
Jan. 21st, 2019 11:07 amI submitted my book manuscript this morning. It's a week after I told myself I would do this (not to mention three weeks after the actual deadline), but better late than never.
What I ended up doing two weekends ago was sitting down with the manuscript and making a list of about a hundred small things that needed to be done. My reasoning was that, if I did a dozen of these things every day, I could be done in a week. It took about an hour to do a dozen things; so, by spending an hour a day on the manuscript for eight days, I was able to get the work done. For the record, I hated every single second of this process.
The manuscript is 52,000 words long. This breaks down to five chapters of about 9,000 words each, a 6,000 word introduction, and about 1,000 words of front and back matter (meaning the table of contents, the list of works referenced, and so on).
This is on the short side for an academic manuscript. For comparison, my dissertation was 83,000 words long. Many people turn their dissertation into their first book, but I wasn't able to do this. To make a long story short, the academic job market is shit; and, to be granted a campus interview for a full-time entry-level job, you essentially have to present a search committee with the CV and portfolio of someone who has already been working in that job for at least five years. What this means is that I had to turn my dissertation into a series of articles and book chapters while I was on the job market, which in turn meant that I had to write my actual first book from scratch. To make matters even more dire, I had to write this book while still publishing a sufficient amount of additional material to pass my yearly state-mandated performance evaluation.
So the manuscript isn't good. But that's okay, I think? If it's rejected, I already have inquires from four other academic publishers, one of which (Bloomsbury) had already drawn up an advance contract for this project before I decided on my current publisher (Palgrave). In a worst-case scenario, I may have to delay my tenure case.
In a best-case scenario, I leave academia entirely. I think about this every day, not gonna lie.
What I ended up doing two weekends ago was sitting down with the manuscript and making a list of about a hundred small things that needed to be done. My reasoning was that, if I did a dozen of these things every day, I could be done in a week. It took about an hour to do a dozen things; so, by spending an hour a day on the manuscript for eight days, I was able to get the work done. For the record, I hated every single second of this process.
The manuscript is 52,000 words long. This breaks down to five chapters of about 9,000 words each, a 6,000 word introduction, and about 1,000 words of front and back matter (meaning the table of contents, the list of works referenced, and so on).
This is on the short side for an academic manuscript. For comparison, my dissertation was 83,000 words long. Many people turn their dissertation into their first book, but I wasn't able to do this. To make a long story short, the academic job market is shit; and, to be granted a campus interview for a full-time entry-level job, you essentially have to present a search committee with the CV and portfolio of someone who has already been working in that job for at least five years. What this means is that I had to turn my dissertation into a series of articles and book chapters while I was on the job market, which in turn meant that I had to write my actual first book from scratch. To make matters even more dire, I had to write this book while still publishing a sufficient amount of additional material to pass my yearly state-mandated performance evaluation.
So the manuscript isn't good. But that's okay, I think? If it's rejected, I already have inquires from four other academic publishers, one of which (Bloomsbury) had already drawn up an advance contract for this project before I decided on my current publisher (Palgrave). In a worst-case scenario, I may have to delay my tenure case.
In a best-case scenario, I leave academia entirely. I think about this every day, not gonna lie.
