Once you’ve written a bunch of articles on one major topic, think about how you can convert them into book chapters. Where do you begin editing? What will change in your chapter versions? First, let’s examine the differences between articles and book chapters. Here is a trifecta of factors:
1. Target readership, audience, or niche: Their interests and sizes differ. In general, the journal’s readership is often narrower than the audience for your book, especially on research topics. It will also be considerably smaller. Your chapter should aim at a readership size larger than your family and at least equal to or greater than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You need a large pool of people who will buy your book. Otherwise, your annual royalty will not even fill your gas-guzzling SUV once.
2. Writing style: The scholarly, serious, stuffy, academic style of most journals requires that you stay on the straight and narrow writing path; your chapter style can be the same or considerably different, depending again on your readership. The book is yours; the article is the editor’s. BIG DIFFERENCE. You can increase interest in “serious” content by adding graphics, cartoons, famous quotes, pictures, and maybe even humor. This is YOUR baby. Make it yours by using your imagination, creativity, and God-given writing gifts.
(Personal Note #1: My first 8 books followed the traditional route; the last 5 smashed that mold with humor. Inserting humor into any book can be risky. Almost all books, even those on humor and stand-up comedy, are written seriously. I used humor in my book on faculty evaluation strategies (Thirteen Strategies to Measure College Teaching), which included chapters on the research literature on each strategy, scale construction, statistical item analysis, score interpretation, and other heavy-duty topics. This book also cited 550 references. Early reviews of the book manuscript were very negative, not because of the content, but because of the humor. It was considered inappropriate for a topic so important and serious to administrators and faculty. Since there were other serious books on scale construction and evaluation methods, why should anyone bother to read my book? I needed to address the three topic criteria described in the last 2 blogs. The content had to be structured differently from previous works and the writing style needed to be more user-friendly, especially on technical topics. I took my lumps and early rejections and decided to make the book mine. I wanted a funny section on “factor analysis” that everyone might understand and enjoy reading. End of Bloated Note.)
3. Length: Articles have maximum length requirements; chapters do not, within reason. Chapters provide a lot more flexibility to add material such as the above. (Secret Writing Strategy: I ALWAYS write the serious content for an article or chapter first. Once the meat is complete, which is usually adequate for journal submission, I go back and look for opportunities to add humor or visuals to the chapter version. The humor in my chapters is an add-on to the content. It may be used to exaggerate or amplify specific concepts, theories, or processes or to bring to life really deadly, boring material. That will increase the length of the chapter. End of Secret Kinda Note.)
Consider the preceding trifecta of factors as you review your articles. Who is going to buy your book? What will distinguish it from all other books on the topic? What writing style are you going to use? What additions to the article will make it more interesting or palatable to your readers?
To those of you who are writers, please let me know any suggestions I’ve missed or what you have found useful. As writers in academe or out, we could use all of the help available. Our careers are on the line. Other techniques will follow in future blogs.
The next blog will deal with assembling your "chapter-articles" into a book.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
As a follow-up to my previous blog, I would add one more criterion to the list for Picking the right topic: (c) Fill a need and want in your niche. That can greatly improve the salability of your book. What information does your target audience need and want? The trick is to match your expertise, passion, and your niche’s need on the topic. That magical match will produce a book that’s credible, salable to your audience, and fun to write.
Now let’s move on to the next strategy:
2. How to Create Chapters Quickly and Easily: Writing chapters from scratch or even a detailed topic outline can be excruciatingly painful. Where do you begin? As I’ve said elsewhere, “It’s like eating one of those dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. Once you forklift your filet of T-Rex off your grill, which is the size of Wyoming, where do you take your first bite? Tough decision.”
Fortunately, as academicians, we’re not only required to write books, but also journal articles, chapters for edited volumes, research reports, wedding invitations for our daughters, and parking violations. So we have plenty of writing practice. Here’s the SECRET STRATEGY I’ve used for years (Are you ready? Getting excited? Bet ya thought blogs couldn’t be this much fun!): convert your published articles into chapters. There it is. It takes the guess work out of what to write because you already wrote it. Ah Ha!! Some of you may already do that. As most pastors say, “Let’s unpack this a bit further.”
Here are a few issues to consider:
(a) Write articles on related topics: Most of us generate articles and research publications that follow one major theme or passion of ours. They should hinge together under a common head or rubric. (Personal Note: For example, over the past decade I was passionate about testing new teaching techniques to connect with this Net Generation of students. Almost all students hate statistics, but this generation had other characteristics that made stat more challenging to teach. My research and articles focused on these techniques: humor, music, videos, and improvisation. I also did keynotes and workshops for faculty and administrators on those topics, plus continued to test the effectiveness of the techniques with keynotes to student audiences in the U.S. and overseas. Do you see where I’m heading with this? Me neither. I’m just rambling in the longest “personal note” in history. End of Bloated Note 2.)
(b) Why use articles? Articles test the criteria stated in my previous blog. Does your article contribute something new or better than what exists? Does it fill a need? The review process will answer these questions. Your work also goes through the rigor of peer review, with detailed feedback from reviewers, maybe rejection, maybe resubmission after revision, maybe submission to another journal, and copy editing before publication. After this beating is over, you usually have an article that is appreciably better than it was originally. Given the length of the journal review process, this could take 2–5 years for a bevy of articles to be ready for book conversion. Keep in mind you’re still scoring field goals with these articles or chapters. The book will be the culmination of all of that work, that is, the touchdown. (Note: This is football season, right? You can expect football analogies and metaphors. Watch out!)
(c) Start hinging your articles: Find that rubric that draws your body of work (articles) together. Think about that hinge as you begin to write each new article. You may also write pieces that have nothing to do with that hinge for different reasons. (Personal Note: This will be shorter that the bloated one above. As you may have guessed from my article topics above, my hinge is: “How to NOT Get Whacked by Your Institution!” Haha. A little hinge humor. The topic is: “Teaching Strategies for the Net Generation.” Among the 30+ books on the Net Generation, is there a book on this topic with the content I have chosen? No. Is there a need? No. Does anybody care? No. I hope I’m kidding. End of Semi-Bloated Note.)
These paragraphs should get you started. The next blog will be “How to convert articles into chapters without violating copyright.” Stick around for my next installment.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
