Turning Your Dissertation into a Book: Common Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

As a developmental editor specializing in cultural anthropology, I often work with scholars who are revising their first book from a dissertation. In my work, I often encounter the same mistakes over and over again, so I made this blog post to help writers working on their first academic book.

Common dissertation-to-book problems include:

• Writing too defensively

• Buried arguments

• Chapters that still follow thesis structure

Why a Dissertation Is Not the Same as a Book

The postdoctoral phase can be a bit of a gauntlet—positions are often temporary, and you’ve just received your PhD (a.k.a. driving license for academia), but at this stage you probably don’t know the nuances of the conventions of your discipline, of academic publishing and writing, of how to write a book proposal and book, etc.

In short, there’s a lot to learn, spanning across several sectors (research and academic publishing and teaching and public engagement). Many postdoctoral students also receive little or no training in how to turn a thesis into a publishable academic book.

It’s unsurprising then, that I often see early first-book manuscript drafts making similar kinds of mistakes.

Problem 1: Writing Too Defensively

The number-one pattern I’ve noticed is when academic authors write too defensively. A PhD thesis is literally defended and is written for the small audience of your examiners. Through your writing, you are demonstrating that you have sufficient command (for the purposes of the PhD) of your topic, that you have interesting points and compelling arguments to make.

But a book doesn’t have to prove you know your topic in this same way. First, the authority is assumed by virtue of having a book contract. Second, there are subtler ways of conveying your awareness of key debates (e.g., through carefully thought out, oblique references to the literature – a bit like literary Easter eggs in fiction) than writing a paragraph explaining to the reader what a dividual is and why it matters for your argument (which is more like the famous infodump in fiction, especially speculative fiction).

These explainer paragraphs are often also partly about you getting your head completely around a core concept or argument for your book. And while there is a place for them in an early draft, they should be used judiciously and only occasionally in your final manuscript. They are similar to the scaffolding on a house.

Literature review sections are usually the worst offenders here. If you do decide to include a literature review (and this is often a section that can be taken out or drastically shortened), rather than just moving between explaining several topics, one after the other, I recommend you thread in your approach carefully into the discussion so that the reader comes away with a clear sense of your unique perspective.

Problem 2: The Buried Argument

Another very common problem is the buried argument. Particularly in disciplines like cultural anthropology, where arguments develop through the field experience and may not become clear until quite late in the process, it’s very common for arguments to be lurking in the chapter material, present but not well-developed into a clear, explicit argument. This happens to more experienced scholars, too, but early-career scholars are more likely to be working intuitively rather than having their own systems in place for building up a chapter or journal article.

Problem 3: A Manuscript That Still Looks Like a Thesis

A third very common problem is a book manuscript that looks very thesis-like. It has number headings (2.1.1, 2.1.2, etc.) and the chapter and section titles might make clever puns, but not have much symmetry mixing titles and titles: with a subtitle, for example. Same goes for sections. Some chapters might have a section labeled Introduction or Conclusions, whereas other chapters don’t. Working on making these more symmetrical, thematically coherent, and discoverable (through their including words people are likely to search for online) can make a book much easier to navigate.

Do You Need Developmental Editing for Your First Academic Book?

These are just a few tips, drawn from my experience as an academic developmental editor specializing in cultural anthropology. If you’re in the process of turning your dissertation into a book and aren’t sure whether your manuscript is still too “thesis-shaped,” I offer developmental editing for early-career academic authors. I can help you clarify your central argument, reshape chapters for a book audience, and identify where structural revision will make the biggest difference.

If you have any questions, or want to book a developmental edit, get in touch.