What I've Learned about writing a second book

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Volumn 53, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 3-23

  Mulholland, James ^a  

^a NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Academic writing and revision; Authorship; Humanities; Professorial career; Scholarly publishing and publishers

Indexed keywords

EID: 85118377966     PISSN: 11989742     EISSN: 17101166     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/jsp.53.1.02     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. James Mulholland, 'What I've Learned about Revising a Dissertation,' Journal of Scholarly Publishing 43, no. 1 (2011): 39-51;
2. and James Mulholland, 'What I've Learned about Publishing a Book,' Journal of Scholarly Publishing 45, no. 3 (2014): 211-36, 217.
3. On academic capitalism as a partnership between education and industry to offset reduced government funding, with ensuing consequences to labour practices, see Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
4. Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson, 'The Failure of Dissertation Advice Books: Toward Alternative Pedagogies for Doctoral Writing,' Educational Researcher 37, no. 8 (2008): 507-14, 511.
5. Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 15.
6. Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space, 15;
7. and Rachel Toor, 'Scholars Talk Writing: Helen Sword,' Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 July 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/article/scholars-talk-writing-helen-sword/.
8. Eric Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 17-18 (emphasis in original).
9. Badia Ahad-Legardy and Anthony Ocampo, 'Episode Transcript: The Second Book Project,' Professor-ing (podcast transcript), accessed 17 August 2021, https://www.facultydiversity.org/podep2transcript.
10. Anthony Kaye, personal conversation with the author.
11. For an introduction to the history of perfectionism and its scientific study, see Joachim Stoeber, 'The Psychology of Perfectionism: An Introduction,' in The Psychology of Perfectionism: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Joachim Stoeber (London: Routledge, 2017), 3-16.
12. See Randy O. Frost et al., 'The Dimensions of Perfectionism,' Cognitive Theory and Research 14, no. 5 (1990): 449-68, 450.
13. Mulholland, 'What I've Learned about Publishing a Book,' 217.
14. Jerome Singerman, personal correspondence with the author.
15. Catherine Goldstead, personal correspondence with the author.
16. Lynne Withey et al., Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses (New York: Association of American University Presses, 2011), 3.
17. Lindsay Waters, 'Rescue Tenure from the Tyranny of the Monograph,' Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 April 2001, https://www.chronicle.com/article/rescue-tenure-from-the-tyranny-of-the-monograph/.
18. Bryan Alexander, Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 168.
19. Sara Grimme et al., The State of Open Monographs: An Analysis of the Open Access Monograph Landscape and Its Integration into the Digital Scholarly Network (London: Digital Science, 2019), 16.
20. Gordon Hutner, 'Editor's Introduction,' American Literary History 25, no. 1 (2013): 1-5, 4.
21. Nancy Glazener, Literature in the Making: A History of U.S. Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 17.
22. See Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-White, 'The Academic Book of the Future and the Need to Break Boundaries,' in The Academic Book of the Future, ed. Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 32-38.
23. On research as a growing component of faculty reputation, see Dahlia K. Remler and Elda Pema, 'Why Do Institutions of Higher Education Reward Research While Selling Education?' (NBER Working Paper No. 14974, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, May 2009), https://www.nber.org/papers/w14974.
24. On research and non-tenure-track faculty, see Jean Waltman et al., 'Factors Contributing to Job Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction among Non-tenure-track Faculty,' Journal of Higher Education 83, no. 3 (2012): 411-34.
25. See, e.g., Clare Porac, 'The Non-tenure Track Position,' American Psychological Association, 2008, archived 6 May 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210506133702/https://www.apa.org/careers/resources/academic/non-tenure.
26. For two views on how tenure incentivizes research, see Richard Colby and Rebekah Shultz Colby, 'Real Faculty but Not: The Full-Time, Non-tenure-track Position as Contingent Labor,' in Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor and Action in English Composition, ed. Seth Kahn, William B. Lalicker, and Amy Lynch-Biniek (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 57-70;
27. and Chiara Franzoni, Giuseppe Scellato, and Paula Stephan, 'Changing Incentives to Publish,' Science 333, no. 6043 (2011): 702-3.
28. Karin Tusting et al., Academics Writing: The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation (London: Routledge, 2019), 71-72.
29. On the REF classification system, see Research Excellence Framework, Guidance on Submissions, January 2019, 84, https://www.ref.ac.uk/media/1447/ref-2019_01-guidance-on-submissions.pdf.
30. Harry Torrance, 'The Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom: Processes, Consequences, and Incentives to Engage,' Qualitative Inquiry 26, no. 7 (2020): 771-79, 771, 775.
31. John Marenbon, 'Our Research Funding System Is Shortchanging the Humanities,' The Guardian (US edition), 5 December 2018, https://go.ncsu.edu/2v3mxj2.
32. Perceptions that wide-scale research assessment undervalued scholarly monographs also existed under the Research Assessment Exercise, the REF's predecessor: see Peter Williams et al., 'The Role and Future of the Monograph in Arts and Humanities Research,' Aslib Proceedings 61, no. 1 (2009): 67-82, 78.
33. Marilyn Deegan, The Academic Book and the Future Project Report: A Report to the AHRC and the British Library (London: British Library, 2017), 8.
34. Kevin J. Dougherty and Rebecca S. Natow, 'Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education: How Well Does Neoliberal Theory Capture Neoliberal Practice?,' Higher Education 80, no. 3 (2020): 457-78, 468.
35. Kevin J. Dougherty and Rebecca S. Natow, The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education: Origins, Discontinuations, and Transformations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 17-18.
36. For the Leiden Manifesto, see Diana Hicks et al., 'Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics,' Nature, no. 520 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a.
37. Ahad-Legardy and Ocampo, 'The Second Book Project.'
38. Carolyn Williams, 'I'm surprised there aren't more comments here! Here are a few stabs, none definitive of course. Some second books are direct extensions of the first book,' Facebook, 30 March 2021, https://www.facebook.com/james.mulholland.9659/posts/1737687283088543.
39. Martin Joseph Ponce, personal conversation with the author.
40. Gaurav Desai, personal conversation with the author.
41. See Cassandra M. Guarino and Victor M. H. Borden, 'Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?,' Research in Higher Education 58, no. 6 (2017): 672-94;
42. and MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), https://www.mla.org/content/download/3120/80834/cswp_final042909.pdf.
43. MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, Standing Still, 1, 5.
44. Miroslava Chávez-García, 'Strategies for Publishing in the Humanities: A Senior Professor Advises Junior Scholars,' Journal of Scholarly Publishing 48, no. 4 (2017): 199-220, 213.
45. Theresa MacPhail, 'On Academic Envy,' Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 June 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Academic-Envy/237094.
46. Devoney Looser, 'Writing a Book or Article? Now's the Time to Create Your “Author Platform,”' Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 July 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/writing-a-book-or-article-nows-the-time-to-create-yourauthor-platform/.
47. Benjamin Kahan, 'Echoing some of what Carolyn said above. My sense is that second books are less disciplinarily constrained-there is more room for interdisciplinary cross-pollination or antidisciplinarity,' Facebook, 30 March 2021, https://www.facebook.com/james.mulholland.9659/posts/1737687283088543.
48. Marjorie Garber, 'Why Can't Young Scholars Write Their Second Books First?,' Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 October 2004, republished in Journal of Scholarly Publishing 36, no. 3 (2005): 129-32.
49. Heather Love, 'Safe,' American Literary History 25, no. 1 (2013): 164-75, 167.
50. John Donatich, 'Why Books Still Matter,' Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40, no. 4 (2009): 329-42, 339.
51. Thomas Schmidt [pseudonym], 'How Not to Write a Second Book,' Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 March 2007, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-not-to-write-a-second-book/.
52. Emma Green, 'Advice on Writing from The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates,' The Atlantic, 27 September 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/280025/advice-on-writing-from-i-the-atlantic-i-s-ta-nehisi-coates/.
53. See James Mulholland, 'Slow Down: On Dealing with Midcareer Burnout,' Profession, Winter 2020, https://profession.mla.org/slow-down-on-dealing-with-midcareerburnout/;
54. and Virginia Gewin, 'Pandemic Burnout Is Rampant in Academia,' Nature, no. 591 (2021): 489-91.