Why Does It Take So Long to Publish Academic Books?

Today, I assembled all of the chapters of the Dave, Phil, and Steve book, and it came a day after someone asked Phil on the old social media site why it took so long.  So, a timely question for a still timely book (we hope).  It is also a fair one, as this book has taken longer than any of my other projects.  It took me eight years to turn my dissertation into a book, but much of that time was focusing on other stuff (job hunting, moving, learning how to teach, moving again, pumping out articles since my tenure case was going to rest more on articles than books) and not on the actual book.  My second book came out seven years after my first, and that is a bit deceptive since I spent one of those years in the Pentagon doing no research except one trip to Budapest.  My third book came out six years after the third. My fourth, a spinoff of the third, came out two years later, and it might have been a year faster if not for one picky reviewer who wanted me to cite his unpublished work.  This book, my fifth!, will be coming out nine or ten years after my previous book, depending on the vagaries of the academic publishing process (see below)

I have two sets of answers to this question--some inherent in the academic research and publishing enterprise and some specific to the project. Let's dispense with the dynamics that were specific to this project before I discuss why it takes so long to publish any academic book.

Just to remind folks, the book compares 15 democracies to assess what role their legislatures play in overseeing their armed forces.  Spoiler alert!  Not as much as most would expect!  The cases include countries in five continents (no African cases, no Antarctic ones). 

This book:

• Did I mention 15 countries?  Yeah, that's a lot.  Medium n research (where one does case studies over a number of cases) is no joke.  One of us visited each country (except those where we reside) at least once and a few we went back a few times (Germany and Japan for me, UK and France, I think, for Phil).  That took time, and we had to do that either during sabbaticals, during summer breaks, or squeezed in where we could.
• 
  One of the challenges of doing 15 countries is that we didn't team up and visit the same ones together.  So, we very much had the classic problem represented by this cartoon.  It took us some time to figure out our results.
• There was a pandemic.  Yeah, that.   Phil has small kids, so he was severely impacted (Ontario did perhaps the worst job in Canada of managing the pandemic and its impact on schools).  Dave faced a variety of challenges at his workplace (National Defense University) and at home due to the pandemic.  I was generally in a state of distraction for the first year or two of Covid, not because of family problems (Hollywood Spew handled the pandemic on her own and did so brilliantly. We could worry from afar, but her situation did involve me on any kind of regular, interruptive basis)
  
• This project coincided with our launching of the CDSN, and I cannot lie and say it did not affect the attention I put into this project.

So, yeah, this was not a speedy project, but few academic books are super quick.  Why?  Let's go through the steps.

1. Come up with a researchable idea.  This can be quick, but even the best ideas take longer than the shower than inspired them as one has to figure out the question, what the answer might be, whether it has already been asked and answered (our aim is to generate new knowledge, not just repeat someone else's project--replication is a thing but it won't get folks tenure, fortune, or glory), whether it is feasible, and whether one can do it (it might be feasible by somebody but not by the specific scholar due to skill/time/money limitations).
2. If it requires some funding, then one needs to apply for a grant, which can take a significant amount of time.  In my experience, it takes several months to write a good grant and then several more to get the results.  In Canada, for the social sciences, the main funder (SSHRC) has a deadline of October and then informs us of the results in April.  So, the grant process can take about nine months if one is successful on the first shot (I have tended to be successful on the first time around but not always).  
3. The research.  To do a serious, book length project requires some serious work, whether that is dwelling in the archives, building datasets, traveling to one spot for an extended period of time, or, like us, visiting a number of places.  And we have to do this while balancing the other parts of professing--teaching, service, engagement, etc. (For a more recent and exhausive and thoughtful version of the "what do profs do," see Paul Musgrave's take).  Most of the research for this project was done over four years.  This is why I tell folks to publish their dissertation work, as throwing away 2-4 years of research is a really bad idea even if one is tired of one's dissertation.  
4. The writing.  Sometimes it comes easy, sometimes not so much.  One can write while doing the research, and then revise afterwards, but it still takes significant time.  Unlike the research, we often can only be done during breaks from teaching, one can write the results while doing the other prof responsibilities.  But that depends on one's teaching load, class sizes, teaching assistants (or not), and so forth.  Again, this is why summers are so important and why profs flip out when asked what they are doing with the summer off.  When collaborating, the writing takes both less and more time.  In this project, we each wrote up the cases that we had studied, but so I didn't have to write the British or Nordic cases.  But then we had to put in a lot of work to revise so that it looked like one person wrote the book, not three (we shall see if readers agree), and we had to do a lot of writing/revising for the jointly written stuff--the intro, the theory, the conclusion.  
5. The submitting.  We had to contact a number of publishers, asking them to consider the book, they would then get back to us.  In general, the next step is for a publisher ask to see it, then they have to find reviewers, and then the reviewers have to read it and give their views.  This general takes between three months and a year (yes, it can take a lot of time).  The editor then communicates the reviews and then .... hopefully tells us to write a response letter.
6. For my first and third books, the reviews were positive, so I/we just had to write a letter explaining how we will incorporate the feedback into the revisions--a plan--and then that plan would go to the editorial board.  It might take a month or two or three (I forget) for the board to get back and say they will publish the book.  As long as the reviewers are not too demanding, these revisions might just take a couple of months.
1. Ah, but the reviewers may not be that happy.  For my second book, the first press sent out an examination of the international dynamics of ethnic conflict to at least one comparativist, who wanted a very different book, one looking at the longer dynamics rather than a snapshot of 1990s dynamics.  Since that was not something Bill nor I were willing to do, we had to move to another publisher, so that review process took another several months.  For my fourth book, one of the reviewers again wanted a different book, a more traditional, academic, theory-focused book with, ug, more lit review.  My intent was to tell the Canadian public about what we could learn from the Afghanistan war.  So, the editor asked me to revise and he found another reviewer.  So, that added something like six months.  Did these delays make for a better book?  In the first case, no, as the book didn't change much as the primary review was quite unhelpful.  In the second case, somewhat.  I have generally found article rejection to be more productive, leading to better work, than book rejection.  But that is just my experience.
   
7. Once the manuscript is accepted and sent off to the publisher, it will then take about a year before the book is published.  Part of the time is spent copy-editing, which is desperately needed.  The proofs always come back at an inconvenient time and a short fuse.
8. Then the book is done and it is time to promote it

 Let's do the math: a year to get started (to come up with the idea, to get the grant), at least two years to do the research, one year to write and revise, six months if one is lucky in the review process, and one year to publish: 4.5 years.  For this book, we finished just outside the money the first year we applied for a grant from SSHRC. They tell you where you ranked in the competition, and we were exactly one spot out of getting funded. The next year?  We finished first.  So, that delayed the book by a year.  We then got the money and started traveling--from 2016 to early 2020.  My last bit of fieldwork was a bit of follow up in Berlin in January of 2020 to get a better array of interviews with legislators.  Phil and Dave had some plans to do more fieldwork, but the pandemic ended those plans.  Phil and I did do some zoom interviews to finish up the Canadian case.  So, four years of research.  The writing took, gasp, three years essentially with much of the progress made last summer as we all had "free" time at the same moment so we could revise, send to a co-author, get some revisions quickly, send to the next co-author, get some more revisions and accepted changes, and then back to the first co-author.  

So, that would be eight years thus far from 2015 to 2023.  2024 is for hopefully getting through the publication process. Wish us luck for a speedy, positive experience so that the book is accepted this summer/fall, which would mean a publication date of 2025.  Which would mean ten years from the start and nine years from my last book.  

Good thing I am a full professor and don't need this book for promotion.  It does go to show that there is a hell of a lot of pressure to get a book done at places where one needs a book (and usually a good book at a good to great press) to get tenure.  As mentioned above, this is possible only if one is building from one's dissertation, where much of the research and writing has been done.  In my case, I added a case study (Yugoslavia) which had started and "ended" while I was working on the dissertation and then learning how to teach in my first job.*  And I added some quant work as mixed methods was starting to become the thing, and I had discovered folks had collected data that I could use (thanks to Ted Gurr and the folks at the Minorities at Risk project).  

Anyhow, this could all be read as a rationalization for why it took so long to write this book, but I think it is also a handy example for understanding why academics don't pump out books as fast as Robert B. Parker did in the old days.  We are faster than George RR Martin, so there's that.

 * Never study a moving object.  While I thought much about the Yugoslav case while writing my dissertation as the country broke apart the month I defended my dissertation proposal, I could only really study it once the war ended in 1995.