Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Timothy Mennel on Publishing

August 24, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, academic publishing, Publishing, second book, trade publishing, University of Chicago Press, University Presses, writing Leave a comment

Continuing our roundtable “How NOT To Write Your Second Book,” Timothy Mennel, an executive editor of University of Chicago Press, looks at how the second book differs from the first.

Tell me if this sounds familiar, either for yourself or for scholars you know: “So my plan is to complete my dissertation by next May. After that, I’ll be on the market. I’ll take whatever job I can, but my focus is going to be on getting a book contract from a university press, speeding through the peer review process, and getting the leverage I need to move to an R1. And then I can start my real work. The second book is where I’ll do what I really want to. And it will be trade. I’m tired of writing just for SHEAR.”

Now, what happens, of course, is that the dissertation takes three years to finish, the job market is worse than anyone could have imagined, the peer-review process is brutal, but the book does finally come out. And no matter what else has happened—that dream of doing what you really want to, which often is framed as writing that second book as a trade book, lives on. Continue reading →

Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Kathleen DuVal, “Treating Your Second Book as a Job”

August 22, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features, Uncategorized Tags: academia, Publishing, second book, writing Leave a comment

We continue our roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book” with a post by Kathleen DuVal, Gray Distinguished Term Professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.

If you are reading this, you probably have a goal for yourself that in a certain number of years from now—say ten—you won’t be saying to yourself or others, “I don’t feel any closer to finishing my second book than I was ten years ago.” But you probably also don’t want to be saying, “All I have done for most of my adult life is to try to work on a book every spare minute, or feel guilty about not working on a book.”

In hopes of keeping either of those from happening, I suggest thinking of the second book as a job. I mean that in two ways. First, (if you really do want to write a second book) researching and writing it should feel like work that is part of your job, work that you have to do. But second, this book should feel like part of your job in that your job is just part of your life, alongside the other important pieces of your particular life. Continue reading →

Roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book”: Introduction by Emily Conroy-Krutz and Jessica Lepler

August 21, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, Publishing, second book, writing 1 Comment

This week we are privileged to feature a roundtable that was organized by Emily Conroy-Krutz and Jessica Lepler and presented at SHEAR’s 2017 conference. It was such a wonderful discuss that it deserved a broader audience. We are grateful that they all agreed to share their remarks in blog-form. Today we feature Emily and Jessica’s introduction, with individual contributions posted each day between now and the weekend.

How do you start a new book that’s on a wildly different topic from your last book? Or written in a different style? And how do you write a book while teaching new preps and serving on committees? What if you’re also raising kids and caring for aging family members? If a book could be articles, should it be articles? In a packed conference room on a hot Saturday in July, five incredibly generous, funny, and thoughtful scholars shared their tips and tricks for “How Not to Write Your Second Book,” and the laughter and nods around the room suggested that the comments, questions, and conversation spoke to concerns that are widely shared among mid-career scholars and that had sparked the creation of the SHEAR Second-Book Writers’ Workshop (2BWW). Continue reading →