getting your phd thesis published by triarchy press

If you've recently written, or are still writing your PhD thesis, you may want to get it published. If you've been trying for a while, you've probably discovered how difficult that is.

Triarchy Press wants to help get more of the wonderful work done by PhD students into the public domain. Here are our ground-rules and guidelines.

We publish in the broad area of organization and organizations. That includes, obviously, how businesses are organized. On a broader level, it includes the way that society and government are organized, or organize themselves. On a narrower level, it includes the way that aspects of business, society and government (for example, international aid, education, health services, prisons, legal services or NGOs) are designed or organized. On a comparative level, it includes different approaches in different countries or different fields. However, it doesn't include the reproductive cycle of the Giant Madagascar Day Gecko.

We publish books which are rigorously thought-out and which, even if the product of intense academic research, have clear practical applications and implications for non-academics.

We publish books of around 40,000 words (probably less than half the length of your thesis). We pay no royalty or fee on the first 1,000 copies, but we do pay a good royalty thereafter. Realistically, we may well not sell more than 1,000 copies of your book, so you may not receive any payment from us. If that sounds mean, please bear in mind that we're unlikely to make more than a very small profit publishing your book (because of the costs of marketing and distributing your book, as well as our editorial and other overheads). However, you will automatically get a 25% share of any income we get from the sale of any rights, from any speaking engagements, etc. We will also give you 20 copies of the book free of charge. Extra copies can be bought at a 50% discount.

As well as publishing your book, we will also (if you wish) put your full, unedited PhD on our website in pdf format, so that all the additional research, bibliographic referencing and academic discourse are accessible (free of charge) to interested book buyers and others who register at our site. [If you want to exercise this option, it will widen the readership for your work. Of course, as with almost all such e-publishing arrangements, we cannot absolutely guarantee that your intellectual property rights will be respected by the less scrupulous. However, you can demonstrate that your work was published first.]

In time, new electronic formats may be developed, which would be more appropriate for storing/distributing your PhD and we will review these regularly. We also hope that the emerging collection of PhD theses may provide the core of a separate website where debate and discussion can take place around the published topics. We will try to provide an infrastructure to facilitate this.

If you think you could meet/accept the above criteria, here's what we ask you to do:

Consider whether your PhD could be turned into a document that shows, in a positive way, how practitioners of any description (managers, doctors, policy-makers, etc.) could do their jobs better.
Decide whether you can bear to edit it down to about 40,000 words using some of the methods suggested below.
Complete our proposal form.

Following are some suggestions for the editing process:

Remove all references to your PhD being a PhD
Remove any sections that are only there because it's a PhD, including the abstract.
Remove most of the signposting and 'architecture', that makes it read like an essay not a book: 'as I have tried to demonstrate...', 'as I will explain in Chapter x...', etc.
Remove those aspects of your thesis, which are, or read like, a literature review, a critical survey or an academic debate with a particular author or thinker. [Remember that readers who want this can find it all in the full version of your thesis on our website.]
Remove all, or almost all, bibliographic references in the text. [Most can be covered in notes at the end of the book. All of them will be available on the website.]
Remove most or all of your sections on your methodology and try not to use the word epistemology at all.
Remove most of the 'academically defensive', debating approach and try to make clear proposals and recommendations that practitioners can understand and use.