You know that the student author assigns right of reproduction to services like ProQuest, right? It’s not like it happens behind the student’s back - the form you fill out is part and parcel of the paperwork that gets filled out when you submit your final copy to the school dissertation office.
Making your dissertation available through ProQuest basically means that anyone with library subscription access to the service can get a copy of your dissertation for free (in PDF form) or else pay what essentially amounts to a convenience fee for having hundreds of pages photocopied/reproduced for them. It’s a far better system than having to request a copy through interlibrary loan and waiting weeks to get it, then having to copy stuff yourself (speaking from experience). If your dissertation contains sensitive information that could be worth big bucks eventually, you can always opt to restrict access to your dissertation by not submitting to ProQuest.
And anyway, it’s not as if people don’t go on to publish their dissertations in book form and make at least a few pennies. I’d swear that half the “scholarly” type books one finds on the shelf in Borders or B&N in the history section, for example, were once someone’s dissertation. In fact, I thought that was pretty standard practice for humanities PhDs (counting toward publications that would be used in tenure reviews).
I’ve been working quite loosely in the area of computers and music, specifically the effects (if any) of the computer on popular music and the music industry. I kept changing my research question but now it is based around how musicians use computers to compose and record music in the home and the potential effects of computer usage on their music. Not too rivetting but many of the musicians I have thus far interviewed are interested in reading the end result.
I got bogged down for ages in reading technological theory which I haven’t entirely got to grips with yet.
It took me one to two years to write my book. It took another year to nail down the pictures and permissions and run the book through the publisher’s editors. I have no idea how typical that is.
I’ve written a novel (unpublished) and three theses. Something on the order of a year for each, excvept the bachelor’s thesis.
I’ve come across several books that were definitely doctoral theses in an earlier life. This is inevitably in the humanities – history, anthropology, and the like. I can’t see anyone shelling out money for my theses in physics, nor those of anyone else I’ve known.
At the school where I got my doctorate there was a several-months-long period of thesis rewriting after you’d passed your orals. Apparently a lot of doctoral students can’t write mellifluous, or even intelligible, English, and the University wanted to be sure that people could understand all those archived dissertations. For many of those students, English was not their primary language, so it’s understandable. But some born and rau=ised English-speaking Americans needed the help, too.
I’ve written two books on the birds of Panama, one conservation-oriented and the other for recreational bird-watchers. I’m currently working on a third, a new identification guide to Panama birds.
Since I do them in my “spare” time, it has taken anywhere from 18 months (the second) to three years (the first). The current one has a deadline of two years for me to produce the text.
It’s not fun (at least, until you finally hold it in your hands). It’s like being pregnant for two years.
Over the span of about three years, off and on, I wrote a collection of Star Trek short stories (set aboard another ship), as well as a ST:TNG encyclopedia before the official one came out. I sold a couple of dozen copies of each and just about broke even, but it was fun.
Writing one, and planning to go onto graduate studies, which means a dissertation.
It helps (for me, at least) to just put everything else away, get rid of all the distractions, and write–even if it’s stupid drivel, it can always be edited and rewritten later on, it’s just getting the raw material out there.
I usually try to aim for an hour a day, right now, but I type pretty fast.
I wrote a small book based on a story I made up for my son as a bedtime story. Imagine my horror when I rented Pan’s Labyrinth and noticed some striking similarities. It turns out I am not as creative as I thought I was.
I let it drop but still pull out my notebook and write a paragraph or two at a time - it’s all disjointed and one of those things that when I die the kids are going to find it buried and wonder how long grandma had been crazy. I also write better when I drink, but since I’ve been alone with the kids with the husband back on the road I haven’t been able to drink enough to write very well in several weeks.
I did a dissertation, which was a cinch if you consider getting up at 2 am every night because I realized I wasn’t writing when I was sleeping a cinch. I’ve got two novels pretty much done, needing summary and agent letters. I have a bunch of book chapters published in various places, some original and some papers I wrote which got collected with others in the field. I did get an advance on one book chapter. The book was a bit late, and it was amusing to get royalty statements with sales always < 0.
I can’t answer 1 and 2, but do you have an outline? If you’ve thought it through well enough, you don’t even have to write it in order. If it’s fiction, try writing scenes that excite you first, then you can write the connecting material. Writing the last chapter early has the advantage of letting you know what hints or themes you want to introduce, so you can introduce them naturally into earlier chapters. After that, it becomes a matter of writing so many words a day.
Even if it sucks, you’ll learn something, and can do better next time.
You might also look for a critique group. I went to one in the local Barnes & Noble. This kind of gives you a weekly or bi-weekly deadline, at least the way we did it. If one doesn’t exist, the store event manager might be interested in helping you start one, since it draws people into the store and is a center of interest.
Very aware, and that wasn’t my implication (the behind the student’s back part), but it’s more than a convenience fee on some services. Some cost $30 and upwards (I’ve seen $200, but that was a special case involving a photography thesis- most are in the $30 range) for a PDF file. There is an advantage to the student, in that any downloads can be counted as if they were used in citation indices or the like.
I’ve written five complete novels in a series set in the Shadowrun RPG universe. I’ve never tried to get them published because my version of the world is just different enough from the official version that I would have to make far too many changes to them, but they’re generally well-regarded in the Shadowrun community (I’ve got them on my website) and they were helpful in getting a freelance gig writing material for the game.
I’d like to write an official Shadowrun novel one day and I’d say my chances of that are worse than an established published author but possibly a little better than your average fan (due to my contacts among the folks who produce the game–they know I can write and they know I can hit deadlines). Still not holding my breath, though–it would be wonderful if it happened, but I’m not going to cry too hard if it doesn’t.
Co-wrote a college textbook/handbook. It took about two years to get the first edition out. Some days it was very, very hard to bear down and get words on the page. Often, my co-author/first wife and I would write a few sentences, then she’d say, “boy, the floors sure could use some washing,” and I’d say, “boy, the grass could use a mowing,” and then, although both of us hated housework and yardwork, we’d go off and do those tasks rather than face the page.
It was lucky she was doing some consulting for a hotel chain at the time. She was comped for rooms at different places around the state, and occasionally we took a weekend to get away from the distractions of home. No lawns, no dirty floors. We’d work all morning, take a break in the afternoon, work some more in the early evening, and then take a late dinner. We managed to get a lot done on these excursions, happily.
We were also fortunate in that it was adopted well enough to convince the publisher to go for a second edition a few years later. These revisions took about four months to complete. A few years later, another revision. It got to be that we were getting sick of looking at our own writing. However, usually a “fan” letter would make us feel it was worthwhile and we would be reinvigorated.
We finished the eighth edition last summer, and just a few weeks ago signed a new contract bringing in a third author to do all the heavy lifting for the ninth edition. In effect I’ve retired from a part-time job, and feel both relief and regret.
I’ve written Satan, Our Misunderstood Friend. It’s a children’s book. I still need an illustrator.*
I also need an illustrator for Stonesoup-Cold As A Stone, and Hard As A Stone.
Writing on the young adult novels Flight Of The Starmoth, The Monster’s Name Is Bobby, and My Uncle The Superhero does not go well.
Okay, it will never sell as a serious children’s book. But I think it has legs as a weird parody especially if I can get the right groups to protest it.
I’ve written thirteen on my own, and twelve with a co-author in the past 3 years, and published them with several small presses and epublishers. But we’re branching out, and we’ve recently signed a 3 book deal with a pretty respected small publisher–the first one will be our first title in mass market paperback (though Wal Mart won’t carry it–the man is keeping me down!) .
Our goal is to have something with a New York publisher by next summer. This goal would be much easier to reach if I wasn’t working on my MA, and my co-author hadn’t committed us to like six billion anthologies with one of our publishers (ok. 8. It just feels like six billion).
The key lies in the word BOOK as opposed to STORY. You have to have a story you want to tell. It has to be interesting enough to YOU that you will keep working on it for a long time. You cannot write a book just because you want to write a book. You have to have a purpose for the story. Most of the stories I write are because I find there’s nothing out there that suits my interests all that well, so I make up my own stories. I suspect that’s true of a lot of writers. Of course, writers vary. Some may be able to pound it out by the numbers, especially writers who have gotten enough financial reward to make it easy to do so, but for most beginning writers, the story has to be compelling enough that you would write it for nothing, as most end up doing anyway.
Written, yes. Published, no. Currently I’m going through a pretty thorough re-write in preparation for paying to have it published at iuniverse.com.
I had been kicking around the idea in my head for a couple of years before I actually started typing. From beginning to end, it took about four months of doing a few pages here and there as time permitted.
Join the club. I have an 8-book series with Random House and we can’t crack Wal-Mart. We can barely get Target to give us the time of day (sometimes they carry the books, sometimes not). And my sister (co-author) has 2 silver Newbery medals, so it’s not like she’s a piker. The Man really stinks.
Did they give you a reason? Ours was graphic sexual content, which is ridiculous, because they’ll carry other romance novels and I know our sexual content isn’t any more graphic than, say, Harlequin Blaze.
Borders insisted the publisher change our cover, even though they had already done a lot of expensive promo with the first cover. Jerks.
