Publishing a thesis or an academic book
You have a finished dissertation, a committee that passed it, and no publisher. Self-publishing it is straightforward enough now that production is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what document you are publishing, and that decision comes first.
A thesis is not a book
They are different documents, written for different readers, to satisfy different tests.
A thesis is written for three or four examiners who must be shown that you are competent, exhaustive and aware of everything published before you. Every hedge, every survey of prior work, every methodological justification is there because leaving it out would have been a fault.
A book is written for a reader who chose it, owes you nothing, and will stop. That reader has not agreed to be shown your competence. They came for the argument.
Publishing the thesis unchanged is the most common mistake in academic self-publishing, and it is visible from the first page. The literature review that satisfied a committee is the chapter a general reader abandons, and a book that opens with forty pages of other people's work has spent its only opening on somebody else.
What a revision involves
Three moves, in this order.
Decide who the book is for. Specialists in your subfield, scholars in adjacent fields, students, or interested general readers — these are four different books, and you cannot write one that serves them all. Every later decision, down to whether a term needs glossing, follows from this one. Pick, and write it down where you can see it.
Lead with the argument. In the thesis the claim arrives after the ground has been cleared. In the book it goes near the front, stated plainly, and the evidence follows it. The chapter order that proved your rigor is rarely the order that carries a reader.
Cut the apparatus you wrote to prove competence. The exhaustive review becomes a few paragraphs placing the argument in its conversation, with the rest moved to the notes. Methodological defense that pre-empts an examiner's objection either goes to an appendix or goes. Hedging that was scholarly caution reads as a lack of conviction to someone who paid for the book.
None of this is dumbing down. The argument keeps its full weight; the scaffolding that held it up during construction comes off.
Know what your field counts
Self-publishing an academic work trades one thing for another, and you should be clear about both sides.
You get speed, control over the object, and no acquisitions committee deciding your subject is too narrow. Whole categories of worthwhile scholarship — regional history, technical reference, work with a small but real readership — exist because someone published them without a press.
What you do not get is the imprimatur. In most fields, peer review and the name of a university press are what hiring, tenure and promotion committees are trained to read. A self-published monograph may be counted as a book, counted as nothing, or counted as something in between, and that varies by field, by country and by institution.
So find out what yours counts before you choose, and ask your department rather than the internet. Ask your supervisor, and ask someone who sat on a hiring committee recently. If a press placement is what your career needs, spend the year submitting. If you have left the academy, or the work is aimed at readers outside it, that consideration evaporates and the only question is whether the book reaches them.
Be careful of anything marketed at new PhDs that charges a fee to publish the thesis as it stands — see Paid publishing services: how to tell a deal from a trap.
In the Interior Formatter. Scholarly books are built from parts: front matter, a contents generated from your real chapter structure, notes, appendices, a bibliography and an index. The Formatter builds front and back matter from fields and outputs a print PDF with fonts embedded, plus an EPUB 3 from the same source. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
What the object needs to be taken seriously
An academic reader assesses a book's seriousness before reading a sentence of it. The checks are quick and unforgiving.
- Citations in the convention of your field, applied consistently. Which convention you use matters far less than that you never depart from it. Citations and bibliographies in a printed book covers what changes when notes become pages, and Keeping track of your research covers the record that makes a late citation check possible at all.
- A real index. Not a word list from a search function — an index built by someone who knows what the book argues, with subentries and cross-references. For scholarly nonfiction it is the difference between being cited and being skimmed. See Does your nonfiction book need an index?.
- A bibliography set with hanging indents, alphabetized and typographically consistent, so the eye can run down the author names.
- A copyright page, with the edition, the year, the rights statement and your ISBN: What belongs on a copyright page.
- Your own ISBN, so the publisher of record is your imprint and not a service — Do you need your own ISBN?.
- A cover that does not look like a template. Academic covers are restrained, not plain, and the restraint is deliberate: Why template covers look templated.
Three production facts that bite long books
Page ceilings are real. A KDP paperback runs 24 to 828 pages. A long monograph with full notes and an index can reach that, and the answer is either a larger trim, tighter settings, or two volumes: Long books, page limits, and splitting into volumes.
The gutter grows with the page count. Total inside margin by pages: up to 300 needs 0.5 in, 301–500 needs 0.625, 501–700 needs 0.75, and 701–828 needs 0.875. A thick book whose inner margin was set for a thin one has text disappearing into the binding. Margins and gutters has the rest.
Footnotes constrain pagination; endnotes do not. A footnote must land on the page that cites it, so the page has to give up body lines to hold it, and dense note pages set awkwardly. Endnotes float free and let the pages set evenly, at the cost of making the reader flip. Decide on reader behavior, not on tidiness: Footnotes, endnotes and the reader's patience.
The repository question
If your thesis is deposited in an institutional repository, it is published in a sense that matters to some publishers, and it can affect what a press will take or what an embargo requires. The rules differ by institution, by funder and by country.
That is a question for your graduate school or research office, and they will answer it in a day. Ask before you commit to a route, not after.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Citations and bibliographies in a printed book · More: Does your nonfiction book need an index? · Footnotes, endnotes and the reader's patience · Long books, page limits, and splitting into volumes · CIP data, legal deposit, and the library end of publishing