by Jakob Horstmann
“The basic components of success as an author remain the same.” Do they?
Ten years ago, when I started teaching workshops on how to get published for early career academics, the world of academic publishing looked and smelled very different from today‘s. Back then, the courses revolved around long sections on how to write a book proposal, what to put into a cover letter to an editor, or how to speak to a publisher when accosting one of their representatives at a conference book stall.
Now, there’s long segments about Open Access, self-marketing with the help of social media tools, and online submission platforms for journal articles.
The digital turn defined the publishing industry
The digital turn that has defined the publishing industry just as much as any other facet of life requires academic authors to adapt their practices both in the day-to-day and with view of their mid-term publication strategy.
When back in the day the idea of using Social Media to promote scientific research seemed positively flamboyant, today easily 80 percent of my workshop participants have stories to tell about their most successful tweet or that great contact they made by replying to someone else’s thread on Instagram at a virtual conference.
In a similar vein, I used to spend way less time speaking about the ins and outs of open peer review platforms and the merits of digital Print-On-Demand publishing models during an era when many academics still regarded e-books with a mixture of suspicion and awe.
But while the industry and the ways in which to operate within it have indeed changed significantly, from an author’s perspective the fundamentals of successful publishing have, gratifyingly, remained the same: Know what your text wants to achieve; and have a strategy in place to get there.
To many participants, beginning a course on the practicalities of academic publishing with this type of meta-level reflection can seem counter-intuitive. After all, shouldn‘t we first know how these blasted English comma rules work and how a journal article abstract is structured before going over all the various different options of what and how to even propose to which press?
Well, no – because the details of the former all directly depend on the outcome of the bigger-picture reflections that need to happen long before one puts the provervial pen to paper. Because which of the, unfortunately, several legitimate sets of comma rules to apply and how exactly to shape an article’s abstract is down to the discretion of whichever publisher and/or journal one chooses to submit to.
What is my text trying to achieve
And that decision, for better or for worse, cannot be made without some reflection on what a text is trying to achieve. If an author is pressed for time, submitting to the highest-ranked journal in the field is rarely a good idea; those with long-term aspirations to work abroad need to take into account what is being read in their destination country; and for those looking for the elusive ‚impact‘ it might be worth looking closer at OA avenues than one otherwise would.
This thinking about publishing from the strategic top-down rather than the details-first bottom-up often comes as a small revalation to workshop participants – who, of course, still have to suffer through excruciatingly daft examples of commas after antecedent sub-clauses later on (‚Although it is full of fibre, Ryan Gosling does not want to eat his cereal.‘).
As much as we embrace the many changes that the digital turn has meant for both the publishing industry and academic career arks, the basic components of success as an author remain the same: Know your readership, research how to get to it, only then get to the details. This used to be true over a cup of tepid pre-pandemic conference coffee, and it’s true now via Zoom.
About Jakob Horstmann
Jakob Horstmann works as a journalist, editor and independent consultant for international publishing in Germany, the UK and Eastern Europe. Previously, he worked as an editor at Zed Books in London. For budrich training, he mainly gives workshops on writing and publishing in English.
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