if you advertise a meeting as a "how to turn your dissertation into a book" roundtable panel, I expect the people speaking at the roundtable to be editors, you know, book people. Not grad students. If I had known it was basically a chance for a bunch of grad students to read their prospectuses aloud and get some feedback from the audience, I would have blown it off and gotten my actual work done.
Unless the "your" in the title actually referred to the presenters' dissertations, not mine?
7 comments:
UGH! FWIW, I went to no such meetings - ever. I just read every book about it that's out there, most notably the Germano book From Dissertation to Book. Just get your hands on a copy of that and avoid any such meetings in future!
are you kidding me? dude.
Wow. That's bad. (And oddly self-important, right?) Like Dr. Crazy, I trusted to Germano--in fact, if I recall correctly the only "how to turn your dissertation into a book" event I went to was one featuring him.
Bwahaha! That's just silly.
I never read Germano--never heard of him, in fact--but it can't hurt, right? (And you know that he at least got ONE book published, right?)
Publishing is always changing rapidly, and publishers are nervous right now about what the shaky economy will mean for their budgets. I think that talking to acquisitions editors about your book project in detail is also a great way to go--since they're the people who will ultimately either greenlight your project or turn you down. Getting a sense of what the decision-makers are looking for isn't a bad idea.
Historiann.com
Seriously???
(grr, my comment earlier did not post!)
Historiann, I've actually seen Germano speak (not MLA --- so it must have been another conference? huh.) and he is very smart and funny. He was the acquisitions editor for Routledge for a very long time, and now he's at... uh, somewhere. I forget. But it would have been nice to compare his general remarks to those of other editors ... if editors had _been there_ at this bait-and-switch workshop. Gah!
EW! Sounds like a dreadful "roundtable." I hate roundtables. For some reason, when I read THAT word, all I can think of are knights and kings, lords and ladies.
Anyway, I hope your roundtable at least had some free snacks and drinks.
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