An honest guide from someone who’s done it, and learned the hard way what to do differently…
If you’re finishing an Ed.D., or you’ve just defended, you’ve probably had at least one person suggest you should write a book. It might have been a friend or family member watching how much work went into your dissertation; maybe it was a committee member; maybe it was just you, sitting there with your bound copy, wondering how to get the guts of the dissertation out into the world.
If you’re already finished with your Ed.D. and you’re now wondering “should I write a book,” the answer is: probably, yes.
And if you’re wondering “should that book be my dissertation itself, sent to an academic press?” the answer is: almost certainly no.
I’m going to explain why, along with everything I wish I’d known earlier. Here’s the short version:
I’m saying all of this as someone who’s been through it. I have an Ed.D. and I wrote a trade book based on my doctoral research, signed with a traditional publisher, watched the book get priced out of the audience it was written for, and spent five years fighting to get the rights back. I now self-publish — including the rerelease of that same book, on my own terms, coming this fall. So the guidance I’m offering here isn’t theoretical.
Here’s what I wish I had known before I trad-published my academic book.
One of the weirdest features of doctoral training is how it teaches you to underestimate your own work. After three to six years of defending and researching and getting committee feedback, and tweaking your methodology, and fitting your ideas into a narrow scholarly conversation, most candidates come out the other side convinced their research is interesting… to a very small group of experts. But for most Ed.D.s, that’s NOT true.
EdDs are often working within their practice, so the research is very much embedded in the real world. Forget your dissertation for a second, and think about your conclusions. Then ask yourself: who would care to hear about this? Those are the readers of your research: anyone who would care about the conclusion.
Think about who the readers for your research actually are. Not the five members of your committee — the people outside your institution who would benefit from knowing what you learned. For most Ed.D. research, that audience is large:
The version of your work that those people need is not your dissertation. Your dissertation was written for your committee… it has the literature review, the methodology chapter, the acknowledgments of every existing scholar’s work on the topic, and the carefully hedged conclusions that academic writing demands.
None of those things serve the teacher who just wants to know what you found and how it helps her classroom.
But what’s inside your dissertation—the actual research, the actual findings, the real insight—almost certainly does matter to those people. The job of turning that into a book is the job of pulling the useful thing out of its academic packaging and rebuilding it for the people who need it.
My research on South Asian Americans’ experiences in schools genuinely mattered to a broad readership that extended well beyond my dissertation committee. The work examined how the “Model Minority Myth” impacted the support students received (or didn’t) throughout their schooling—the kind of thing that South Asian American adults, and certainly teachers of South Asian American students, would be interested in reading about. Writing about the research in a trade book should have meant that research was now widely accessible to anyone who wanted to read it.
This is the part that almost nobody in your program will tell you, probably because most of your professors have Ph.D.s, and the framing of what a doctorate “should” lead to is shaped by their trajectory, not yours.
Statistically, Ed.D. graduates do not go into tenure-track academic positions.
Most Ed.D.s are already working, or return to working, as practitioners: K-12 administrators, principals, superintendents, instructional coaches, central office leaders, consultants, nonprofit leaders, state and federal education staff, teacher-leaders. Ph.D.s in education are more likely to end up on tenure tracks, but even they face a shrinking job market where academic publishing is less and less tied to meaningful career outcomes.
This matters because the entire mental model of “I should publish my dissertation as an academic book” is built around a tenure-track career. Academic monographs are currency in the tenure economy. Outside that economy, they are mostly INVISIBLE.
A K-12 superintendent with an academic monograph is not meaningfully more hireable or more influential than one without. A consultant whose book is stocked in eleven university libraries (and nowhere else), with books priced at $100+ each, has not actually built a platform or reached his desired audience.
If you are on a tenure-track Ph.D. path in an R1 education school, an academic book may very well be the right call, and the advice in the rest of this post doesn’t necessarily apply to you.
But if you’re an Ed.D., which statistically means you’re already a practitioner or headed back into practice, then the right book for you is almost certainly not the book your program implicitly assumes you’ll write.
What does build a platform for an Ed.D. education practitioner? Content that real practitioners actually read! It could be a book assigned in teacher preparation programs or that district leaders hand to their incoming principals. It might be a book a parent can grab at the library. It might be a book with ideas that get cited in Education Week or EdSurge or the local paper or a policy brief.
What most academic writing guides won’t tell you is that traditional publishing isn’t “more real,” academic publishing tracts aren’t fair, and academic books don’t generally do numbers. So, here are some things to know right out the gate.
Getting an academic or traditional publisher to take your book doesn’t mean your book is any more “real” than if you self-published. All it means is that one of the publisher’s acquisitions editor thought your book might sell, or fit a slot in their catalog, or could be assignable as a course text. It doesn’t mean it’s automatically GOOD, it doesn’t mean the book will automatically find readers, it definitely doesn’t mean your career will magically change. It just means that for the aforementioned business reasons, a publisher decided to take a small bet on your book.
Traditional publishing contracts and in particular academic press contracts (especially for first-time authors) are NOT. FAIR. DEALS. FOR. THE. AUTHOR. A sample offer might include:
Academic publishing operates on thin margins with a small buyer base. The economics don’t support generous author terms. Their offers benefit THEM, and the author takes on the majority of the risk (and marketing work) while collecting peanuts on the revenue.
Which leads me to my next point…
This is probably the thing that’s hardest to swallow: most academic books don’t sell.
The average academic monograph sells under 500 copies in its lifetime and many don’t break 200 total sales. And that’s not a failure of individual books, it’s literally the structure of the market.
If you sign an academic publishing contract imagining your book will reach “the field” in a meaningful way, you’re very likely going to be disappointed.
This is worsened by the reality that academic publishers price your book as a textbook, and don’t expect to sell massive quantities. They expect to sell fewer books at a higher price.
In my own contract for South Asian American Experiences in Schools, I wasn’t able to set the price for the book, which meant the book was priced exorbitantly high (as academic books often are), which meant the research was locked behind a tall paywall; abnd while universities used pre-allocated funds to purchase copies, regular people—the kind I wanted to reach!—were not reading the book, because it was $100+ for a hardcover and $50+ for a paperback.
→ You can read the entire story of how I fought for rights reversion here!
On my end, this also meant less net sales, which I couldn’t move the needle on because the price was so high.
When most people hear self-publishing, they think of one of two things: either Amazon-filler books with cartoon covers, or the “publish anything for $9,500” vanity press scams that prey specifically on academics and first-time authors. Neither of those is what I’m recommending.
Real self-publishing — the kind where the book looks and reads indistinguishably from a trade-published book, is well-edited, well-designed, and findable by readers — is a legitimate and increasingly respected path. I’ve done it across genres now (fiction, nonfiction, children’s books) and my self-published work sits in libraries, bookstores, and on syllabi alongside trade-published work.
For an Ed.D. specifically, self-publishing gives you:
The tradeoffs are real too, and worth naming: you will need to do your own editing (or hire one), your own design (or hire one), your own launch, and your own marketing. You won’t automatically be in university libraries — you’ll have to pitch your way in. Some academic reviewers will take a self-published book less seriously, though this is changing quickly.
The audience you actually want to reach doesn’t actually care where the book was published. They just care if it’s useful.
But for a practitioner-scholar whose audience is teachers, administrators, policymakers, and parents, none of those tradeoffs are deal-breakers. The audience you actually want to reach doesn’t actually care where the book was published. They just care if it’s useful.
Here’s a short self-assessment on whether you should turn your Ed.D. dissertation into book—answer these four questions honestly.
1. Who would read this book if it existed, and do I actually care about reaching them?
If the only readers you can imagine are your committee and a few scholars in your subfield, don’t write the book. Write journal articles. Books require audiences outside academia to be worth the work.
2. Am I willing to rewrite the dissertation, not just reformat it?
A trade book from a dissertation is a 6-to-18-month rewrite. New structure, new voice, new framing, often new chapters. If you want to take your existing dissertation and publish it as-is, you’re not ready to write a book yet. You’re ready to revise your dissertation.
3. What outcome am I actually after?
Be specific with yourself. Career mobility? Speaking opportunities? Consulting work? Impact on the field? Income? Different goals lead to different kinds of books. “I want to feel like I have a book” is not a good enough reason. A book will not, on its own, make you feel any particular way, and it’s a lot of work to find that out.
4. Am I willing to build an audience for the book over time?
This is the part most first-time authors underestimate. Books don’t sell themselves. The Ed.D.s whose books actually get read are almost always the ones who spent a year or two building a newsletter, a blog, a conference presence, or a consulting practice alongside the writing. The book accelerates a platform you’ve already started. It rarely creates one from nothing.
If you answered honestly and you’re still a yes on all four, then yes, you should write a book. Probably not the dissertation you already wrote, but a real book, for real readers, on the subject you actually spent years of your life studying. Your research deserves it, and so do the people the research is about.
If this post resonated (especially the section on traditional vs self-publishing), I write about self-publishing here and sometimes in my newsletter.
If you’re curious about my own academic-publishing journey, Brown Voices: South Asian American Experiences in Schools is being rereleased this fall under my own imprint, after a five-year fight to get the rights back. You can read more about the rerelease here or sign up for the newsletter for updates and the eventual preorder link.
One last thought: if you’re an Ed.D. candidate, please know your research matters, and the people it’s about deserve to read it!! Don’t let a predatory contract or a misaligned publishing path keep that from happening.
