Hello and welcome to my first post as Managing Editor of phd2published. Now that Charlotte has secured her book contract she has, partially, passed the baton on to me, so I can document my progress toward and my experiences with getting my book published. Charlotte will still be documenting her experiences of writing her first book as well as contributing other relevant posts here and there.

I thought I would use this first post to introduce myself and my plans and ideas for what I want to bring to this site:

Who am I and why am I here?

I am a social scientist, more specifically a Development Geographer and my research interests lie in the areas of international environmental governance and development planning and financing, particularly in relation to sub-Saharan African countries. I completed my PhD in the Geography Department of King’s College London in 2010 and I am now working toward securing a post-doctoral research position and, as my examiners keep reminding me, publishing!

I came to this site through twitter, I love to tweet, as you meet so many new people and find invaluable pieces of information like this site. I looked through the pages and thought while I know how to approach post-doc research through a mass of grant and job applications, how do I address the issue of publishing? I suddenly thought that I really don’t know how to go about developing a publishing strategy, this worried me.

So after many conversations with Charlotte here I am! I have highlighted six key elements from my PhD that I think would make good publications of different types but the next step is to choose journals and develop book proposals etc. I wasn’t trained in how to do this so I am here to find out how and I hope you are all going to come along with me as I start my own journey toward my first book…

So what can you expect from me …

I hope to bring my own spin and flavour to the content presented on the site. My ultimate aim is to secure my own book contract but I am also interested in other forms of academic publishing. Thus as well as continuing to bring you advice and tips from academic publishing houses and published academics I am looking to provide advice on selecting journals for publication & dealing with revisions and rejections etc.  As from my own experience, this is where many of us will dip our first toe into the water of academic publishing along with conference papers and presentations, blogging and the use of social media as well as general posts on different aspects of writing.

My academic career has been extremely interdisciplinary so expect to hear from Geographers, Historians, Political theorists and natural scientists amongst others each with their own diverse experiences. However, I am VERY keen to hear from YOU, what do you want to know about publishing? Are there any questions you’d like me to address? Be heard and contact me now. I want what I do here to be relevant to the biggest audience as we are continually told it’s all about impact, engagement and influence.

That’s enough from me to start with, i’ve got some great content lined up and I’ll be back soon to discuss the issue of journal selection.

Now where did I put that glitterball there is some dancing to be done …

Sarah 😀