Dr. Marc D. Baldwin

In focusing your marketing efforts, consider where your readers spend time. Showcase your book, your expertise, and yourself in those places your readers are most likely to frequent.

Online retailers Obviously book buyers shop at online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com. Amazon offers various tools for authors who want to gain exposure for their books, such as author profile pages, where you can let customers know a little more about yourself, and the Search Inside!™ tool.

The more material you make available to potential readers, the more likely they are to purchase your book (especially if you’re a first-time author), so be sure to take advantage of features like Amazon’s Search Inside tool, Barnes & Noble.com’s See Inside feature, and Google Books.

Facebook: That social networking site With a population of users larger than many countries, Facebook is a perfect place to promote yourself and your book. Set up a personal profile and a page for your book, create and join groups, and actively update your pages. While you’re in a social mood, set up accounts on other popular sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. With growing usage (13% of online Americans use Twitter as of 2011) and integration with Apple’s iOS 5 mobile operating system, Twitter is another platform for reaching potential readers in large numbers.

Online communities These virtual communities allow you to interact directly with people who love books. Some sites cater to a general population of book enthusiasts, such as Goodreads and Shelfari, and others are more specific, such as Figment.com, a site that is popular with writers and readers of young adult books. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Target your search. Look for online communities that are as specific as possible to your genre. Not only will you have more to contribute, but people who are passionate about a subject may participate in several online communities, and so you may find yourself developing relationships across multiple sites.

• Participate. Set up a profile page, find or start groups, join in discussions, and comment on others’ blog postings.

• Don’t focus on selling. Not every interaction in an online community has to (or should) be about promoting your book. Be yourself and make a real contribution. By participating in relevant communities, potential readers can get to know you and you can learn more about your readers and what they are looking for.

• Practice reciprocity. As you develop relationships with group members, consider asking particularly active ones if you can send them a copy of your book to review on Amazon or (if applicable) their blog. If they like your book, see if they will provide blurbs for your website or recommend your book to other members of the group. Be prepared to do the same for others. Good relationships are never one-sided.

Your local media There is a lot of competition out there for coverage in big newspapers; unfortunately, not everyone can make it into the pages of the New York Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer. However, editors of local newspapers and producers of local TV and radio shows are frequently looking for interesting stories about residents.

• Publishing a book can be a great local interest story. Send a press kit to local editors and producers, and be sure to follow up. Let them know if there’s a story idea that would be of particular interest to the community. For example, if you’ve written a book on parenting tips, and you’re heading into a cold suburban winter, offer to write a piece on fun things to do with your child at home.

• To reach local readers, also consider location-specific news sites such as Patch.com, which reports on local news and events in towns and cities around the country.

–Meredith Hale, Marketing Manager, Baldwin Book Publishing & Edit911, Inc.

To borrow a trite analogy, learning to use APA [or any documentation style, for that matter] is like learning to ride a bicycle. Once you understand the mechanics, including how to shift, balance, and stop, the rest is easy. The first step is to purchase, and actually read, an APA manual, either APA5 or APA6, depending on your university’s requirements. Granted, it is not a riveting work but essential. If the thought of reading a reference book causes chills to dance down your spine, it is likely time to seek professional help … not for your phobia but for editing your work.

Based on many years of editing dissertations, I can offer a few essential points that candidates frequently overlook. The top fifteen below may be helpful:

References:

• All references in the text must have a comparable listing on the reference pages and vice versa. Each mention of an author’s name must have an identical spelling for each use.
• Et al. is Latin for ‘and others’; thus, it applies only to three or more authors of the same work. All authors [unless a number in excess of six] should be listed for the first in text citation; if the citation is for two or three authors, all names should appear in each citation.
• All direct quotes in text must have a page number (p.). Page numbers are not required on paraphrased material.
• If referring to the same author in closely connected sentences, it is not necessary to use the author’s date in subsequent citations.
• If websites have no author, begin the reference with the title of the material you retrieved and use that information as the in text citation.
• Listing databases [Ebsco, LexusNexus, etc.] as a source of retrieval is not required on the reference page. The website address is required.
• If you are using APA6, it is not necessary to use a retrieval date on websites.[Retrieved from http://xxxxxx]
• If you are using APA6, locate the doi number, if available, on periodicals. Add it at the end of the citation without a period. [doi: xxxxx]

Writing Style:

• Eschew passive language but tread lightly. It is not enough to employ an active verb if the subject of the sentence is incapable of the implied action [anthropomorphism].
• If you are creating a proposal, refer to your work in future tense; if you are writing a completed dissertation, refer to your work in past tense.
• Normally, all references to previous studies are in past tense.
• In qualitative dissertations, you should avoid personal pronouns. Although it is sometimes necessary, to employ the rather stilted phrase, ‘the researcher,’ it is preferable to using I. Qualitative dissertations offer more leeway on author referents but ‘playing’ with sentence construction can help you avoid using either I or ‘the researcher’.

Mechanics:

• Double check your Table of Contents not only to check correct page numbers but also to confirm identical wording as your text headings.
• Tables have labels at the top; figures have labels at the bottom.
• Let the computer work for you. If you are using Word, you can go to file and page setup to indicate consistent margins throughout your document. The paragraph tab under format can produce clean margin indentations and create a hanging indent for those pesky references. Under the insert tab, you can indicate page breaks, which rid your work of widowed headings and subheadings.

To keep your bicycle and your dissertation running smoothly may require additional maintenance. In the case of your dissertation, this means discovering whether your university committee or graduate school has exceptions to APA and tweaking your work accordingly. Normally, the exceptions relate to spacing and specific required headings within each chapter but, occasionally, there are exceptions to tense selection or other peculiarities.

This should provide a starting checklist for your work. But it’s no substitute for the manual. So if you’re a grad student or scholar, pick one up and enjoy it! Joke. It can be pretty dense reading, but that’s the name of the academic game.

It’s your third year in the doctoral program. You’ve taught like a god. You’ve written seminar papers that have made your teachers weep (in a good way). And you’ve logged more time on airplanes and in hotels than in seminar rooms. The world is starting to know you and your ideas.

You’ve passed comps or prelims.

What do you do now?

Pat yourself on the back. You’ve taken your warm up laps, and now it’s time to get ready for the marathon that’s ahead of you. It’s no secret. But nobody seems to know it. Unlike law school or med school, academic grad school is really two programs.

There’s the coursework, which you’ve aced.  Right? That’s all great stuff, but it’s over and you’re on your own now. You’re doing your own stuff. This is the FUN part of graduate school. You’re basically a baby professor at this point.

Now, what most of the dissertation books don’t tell you about this part of graduate school, the dissertation stage, is one little word:

Entrepreneurship

What, you may ask, if you’re in the sciences or, god help you, the humanities, does dissertation writing and scholarship have to do with MBA stuff. That’s the stuff you didn’t want to do.

The short answer:  Everything. From here on out (and you’ve already been doing it in coursework, teaching, and conference presentations) everything is about pitching and selling ideas.

Everything.

Does the thought of selling really make you queasy? Get over yourself! Ideas mean nothing if no one wants to read them.

The dissertation phase is about pitching your ideas to your advisor, your committee, and, if you get lucky, fellowship committees.

So, get ready to sell!

It’s time to write the proposal: the truly condensed version of your dissertation. It’s short and sweet. Usually, it’s about five to ten pages. So, how do you write the proposal?

First off, this is one of those chicken or egg kind of questions. You have to enough to write the proposal. But you won’t know enough to write the whole dissertation. Generally, what you want to do in the dissertation proposal is to  frame a question.

You need to be very bold here. Make arguments and assertions, the bolder the better. You also want to present a pretty clear outline of what you intend to do in the dissertation itself. Obviously, you’re in a weird situation here. You don’t know a lot. But you know some things. It’s best to err on the side of audacity. Make your arguments as bold as possible and as clear as possible.

You need to know the current state of your discipline quite well. That’s a given. And you have to announce to the world what you want to do. How are you going to be making a new intervention in the world of scholarship that you know well? That’s what people are going to want to know. What’s new and or exciting about what you want to write?

Start off with a one paragraph argument.

This first paragraph should state what your argument is and probably what you’re basing this argument on. Who are the major players in the field, and how is what you’re writing addressing gaps or problems in their work?

Then write your sub-arguments and conclusion.

Each paragraph that follows (and these can be huge, whopping big paragraphs) can list your sub-arguments. Then, after that, you have to propose a conclusion to what you’re writing.

The secret about a proposal

Would you like to know a little secret about the proposal?

It’s generally pure fiction.  What you really write about in your dissertation may or may not conform to what you’re writing about here. That’s just the way things are in this world. But you absolutely do have to write this proposal.

You’ll submit it to your advisor and your committee members and everyone will sign off on it. And then you can get started. Now, you may or may not get full buy in from your committee. Generally what I found is that most of your committee members really won’t care one way or another about what you write. They’re too busy writing their own stuff. So, you can generally sneak your own writing in under their radar.

Score a Fellowship

Do a very good job on the proposal because it can serve as the basis of fellowship proposals. And, baby, you want a fellowship.

Why?  Because if you get one of those puppies—anywhere between about twenty thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars, you can have a very nice year. You can go wherever you want to write the dissertation. Imagine writing on a beach somewhere down in Mexico.

Fellowships are your friend. And they also mean that you don’t have to take time out to teach those pesky undergraduates unless you really want to.  They can also set you up for being published, and they make you look like a good candidate for a job. So, do everything that you can to win yourself a dissertation fellowship.

OK, let’s say you’ve written a killer proposal. Your committee says, “My god, this is the next big thing.”  And of course I knew you could do it.  You edit the proposal slightly and win yourself a fellowship. You’re in like Flynn.

What do you do next?

Why, you have to write the dissertation, of course—which we’ll start tackling the next  installment.

DR. WILLIAM SAYS: Expect lots of reading and writing.

You may read a book per week per class, and have to discuss it in depth, or even turn in a paper each week.

Learn the basics of how to dissect a book’s content and get a quick overview of its thesis.

My history professor wheeled a cart full of books into class one day, a different book for each student in class. He handed out the books and announced, “At the end of this hour, I want you to turn in a one page book report on this book!”

Talk about a crash course in how to get into the content of a book without actually reading it.

This is what I learned from that experience:

• Read the basics first
• Start with the summary on the back cover
• Peruse the table of contents and chapter titles
• Scan chapter titles and subheads
• Read the forward and introduction
• Then move into reading chapter one or the first page of each chapter.

You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about a book and its thesis from these basics.

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DR. DAN SAYS:  there’s a veritable litany of suggestions that people will give:

• Work hard
• Make good use of your time
• Socialize
• Find a balance
• Find a really good coffee shop/Indian restaurant that delivers, etc. etc. etc.

These are all excellent pieces of advice, and I encourage you to take them all to heart.

That said, though, I would recommend treating grad school like college (unless you had one of those “Four-year-house-party-with-a-$50,000-cover-charge” kind of experiences) in that you should get involved.

It can be tempting to see grad school as your first entry into the ivory tower, calling you to countless hours in the library/lab, but your experience will be richer if you embrace the fullness of where you study.

Depending on your role, you will be a teacher, a student, and a researcher. In this trinity, recognize that your identity and the expectations leveled at you will be fragmented.

Sequestering yourself in one role alone can result in a soul-sucking experience.

…………………………

DR. SANDY SAYS: Just Do It!

I have yet to meet any person thrilled with the dissertation process. It is one of the most frustrating endeavors we go through to earn our credentials. And to some extent, it is designed that way! The best way to handle it is to just do it!

My dissertation topic was on professional development for educators, a relatively new specialization at that time. I was the coordinator for such programs in my school district and hoped to use my dissertation to help my colleagues throughout the state benefit more from the new state requirements for professional development.

As with many new things in one’s field, most of my professors, including my advisor, didn’t really understand what I was trying to do. The old notions of what constituted professional development were too embedded.  No matter how much research I presented on the various theories and principles that formed the basis for effective professional development, that old concept of the speaker on the first day of school and workshops on nothing particularly related to the classroom needs of teachers colored his understanding of my design.

I had reached the point of deciding to be an ABD when my superintendent came to my office for a chat. “It’s an exercise,” he reminded me. “Forget trying to break new ground. Forget everything except meeting the expectations of your advisor and committee and just do it!”

I ruminated on that for a few days before acknowledging the truth of his statements.  Then I resubmitted my original proposal, tweaked the way my advisor wanted it, and within two weeks it was approved and I was on my way.  Six months later, I received that coveted letter from the dean’s office acknowledging that I had fulfilled all requirements for my doctorate.

So when you’re frustrated with rewriting your proposal for the umpteenth time, when you can’t make your advisor understand what you’re trying to do, when your desire to make breakthrough contributions to your field get the better of you, remember that this is all an academic exercise. It is your admission ticket so that you can do what you really want to do in your chosen field. It is the beginning of the next phase of your career, not your ultimate contribution.

Take a deep breath, refocus on the goal—earning your doctorate—and JUST DO IT!

Why Not?

Are you brave and bold? I figured that you were.

Writing a dissertation, no matter what comes before or what comes after, is an intellectual adventure that very few people have the good fortune to embark upon and complete.

Will it be tough?  You betcha.

Will there be moments when you want to tear your heart out and throttle your teddy? You better believe there will be.

A Fun Adventure!

But despite the pitfalls you will encounter, you can have a really good time doing your dissertation.  Think of it like an extended once in a lifetime adventure.

And that’s really what it is.

It’s a trip, in every sense of the word (including the illegal sense).

For a year or two (and probably two) you get to roam in an area of interest. It’s yours. You own it. It’s your turf, baby.

Work it and work it good!.

What is a dissertation?

A dissertation is an entry-level professional intervention in a field of scholarly or scientific interest. Depending on the field, the dissertation could be anywhere between fifty and about two hundred pages.  We’ll talk more about how you should write in a few minutes.

But for now…..

When should you start thinking about your dissertation?

Ideally, after you pass fourth grade!

However, most people aren’t that goal driven. So, when do you think about it.? You should begin thinking about what your dissertation will look like and be about when you apply to grad school.

If you’re doing your homework (and I just know you are), you’ve picked programs based on who is there and what you’re interested in doing!

When you arrive that first week on your Ph.D. campus, you can listen to the bells tolling on Old Main for about ten minutes.

Then , after you’ve had your hotdog at the new student orientation, it’s time to get to work.

And I do mean work, man. A lot of it.