ell, it’s official: the PhD2Published method works!

We’ve had our first success story: me (Charlotte Frost PhD2Published’s founder)!

Yes, that’s right, I’m writing this blog post as someone who has signed a contract to get their first academic book published! You may have already seen me get excited about this!

Around the time I set up this resource, I wrote my first book proposal and had an instant rejection. I licked my wounds and set about learning how to make a successful pitch (which led me to establish this site – why not pass on my research?!). I then wrote draft two, which did get sent out to another publisher, but before they had the chance to reply I made a third even sharper draft (after receiving some excellent advice from Gary Smailes of BubbleCow). It was this third version that received the following response from Gylphi editor Anthony Levings: Read more

There are two questions I am frequently asked, and these concern: (1) whether or not Gylphi publishes texts concerned with periods of time outside the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and, (2) if Gylphi publishes fiction.

The answer to these two questions is succinctly provided by Seeing Galileo; which is the most recent publication due to be released by Gylphi in a couple of weeks.

It is as the name suggests about Galileo, it is also about Milton and a possible meeting between the two men. Placing the subject matter in the seventeenth century, but at the same time because of the way in which the text has been written – as a mix of biography, criticism, photography and poetry – it draws the past into the present. Read more

It would appear to the average consumer that the future of reading is already here. The Kindle and the iPad making readable eBooks a reality, but in fact a closer look will tell you that a state of transition is actually in place.

It is not yet possible, for example, to fulfil all that is possible in print in digital form. It is also not yet possible to predict which formats (and associated copy protection) will be carried forward into the future.

More important than what the current digital formats can’t do however is what they can do: things not possible in print – e.g. audio and video, and links to external websites, among others. Creating a situation where there are trade-offs associated with both print and digital books, each capable of different things. Read more

There are many analogies that could be used to describe a publisher, but one of the most apt appears to be that of the midwife/doctor/surgeon whose responsibility it is to oversee the delivery of a baby.

Surrounded by technology and a skilled team of professionals, and with the use of tools (the most important of which is knowledge), the midwife/doctor/surgeon delivers the baby into the world with as much or as little intervention as is necessary.

It goes without saying that each birth is coordinated with a number of other births that are occurring in the hospital/locale (read publishing house) at the same time. Recently, however, the frenetic nature of publishing has been on the increase as the number of multiple births (read book formats) has grown, and this is where the analogy of the hospital birthing unit starts to falter as the number of triplets and quadruplets shows no sign of abating. In fact quads have become the norm, and even sextuplets are not unusual for a publisher such as O’Reilly Media, for example. Read more

For the next month, Anthony Levings, Managing Editor, Gylphi Limited will be guest blogging for PhD2Published to give readers a better idea of how a small academic press operates…

Here’s his first post:

Academic publishing is not only one of the most technically demanding forms of publishing, but also one of the most technological as well. And yet, there appears to be an opinion that academic publishing, like all other forms of publishing, is at a crossroads where self-publishing is the obvious way forward. Read more