About Us

We’re Katelyn and Allison, and we have years of experience helping scholars navigate the messy process of writing books. We met in graduate school and became friends and writing partners. Katelyn is an associate professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas, and Allison is a developmental editor who works with academic clients. Based on her experience of writing and publishing her first book with Liverpool University Press, Katelyn created an online curriculum for first-time book authors—what she wished had existed when she was going through the process—and brought Allison on board to help run it as a summer workshop conducted over Zoom.

In the workshop’s subsequent iterations, we tested the core exercises with hundreds of projects, brought to us by authors from all kinds of situations and with a wide variety of challenges. Based on what we learned, we repeatedly revised the curriculum. The result is The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook.

The Workbook

You’re writing your first academic book. You’ve read all the advice books; you’ve written a dissertation; you may even have attended webinars on how to write your proposal and pitch your book to publishers. You know you need to revise what you have. But when you sit down at your desk, what do you actually do?

The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook is the answer. In a series of practical, actionable steps, we show you how to distill your core argument, discover an organizational schema that works, and recognize what each chapter adds to the story. We even give you a method for drafting and revising new material. By the end, you’ll have a solid understanding of what you need to prioritize, how to thread your core ideas through each chapter, and what work remains to be done. If you’re looking for a way to grasp your book’s big picture and use what you learn to guide your revision process, this workbook is for you.

At the heart of this workbook is an unconventional process of developing your book argument using what we call “book questions” and “chapter answers”: two or three core questions that receive a one-sentence answer for each chapter. This framework, as you’ll see, is a powerful tool for aligning your book’s evidence with its claims.

Workshops

Sign up for our newsletter, where we regularly announce upcoming workshops, or check out our workshops page.

Interested in inviting us to your institution or conference? Check out the institutional workshops we offer.

Free Resources

See our full list of resources on our resources page.

Or, check out our blog post categories or all blog posts.