The Manuscript Works Newsletter

Essential knowledge on scholarly book publishing that every author should have

Happy September Reader,

The theme for the newsletter this month is Back-to-School Tools, and each week I'll be sharing some of my favorite tools for getting organized and staying on track with your book publishing goals as the school year ramps up.

This week, I'm delighted to bring you a guest newsletter from Dr. Shiri Noy, author of a new book called Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized which will be published in November by the University of Michigan Press. Dr. Noy's book covers all aspects of project management for academic readers, so I asked her if she might share some specific insights into how those who are writing academic books can benefit from her methods.

Read on to find out more and get a preorder link with a generous 40% discount on the book!

Project Management for Book Writers

A guest post by Dr. Shiri Noy

Scholarly books typically draw on massive amounts of information and ideas, gathered and developed over years. This information requires organization. Whether your data draws from field notes, interviews, surveys, sculptures, videos, or beyond, you need to organize the information in a way that allows you to reference it accurately and appropriately in your manuscript. We have spent years building expertise and developing important research skills, often related to theory and method. However, we are rarely trained in the skills to manage and organize our research which is often a source of some stress and distress.

My forthcoming book, Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized, seeks to guide researchers through developing their own project management system for research. I’m an alum the of Manuscript Works Book Proposal Accelerator, where I put together the proposal for this book. I found the Accelerator so useful because it helped me not only organize my ideas but convey them clearly. A good research project management system can help in a similar way, allowing you to make your ideas, your book’s purpose, and its evidence legible to your readers.

Let me say more about legibility, a key component of having an effective research project management approach. In books especially, years of methodological details are often relegated to an appendix, and data and analytic specifics are sometimes thin in an effort to increase readability. This is as it should be. However, we are seeking to convince readers (and editors and reviewers) about the soundness of our arguments, which requires that they believe our evidence: its completeness, relevance, validity, and reliability. Therefore, our research processes and the data we collect must be legible, not only to the gatekeepers of our work (e.g., reviewers, editors, reproducibility demands) but also to ourselves.

As you work on your book, you need to know where you keep relevant information and how to find it. In Project Management for Researchers, I guide you in building a system that is legible to you, so you can do your best work: both in terms of enhancing the accuracy of your scholarship and reducing your stress levels while doing it. Below I outline three big project management challenges that book authors face and my recommended approach to addressing them.

CHALLENGE 1: Your book manuscript likely draws on a massive amount of information

Writing a book is an immense undertaking and there is typically a lot of information and experience you are drawing from. Because you have so much information to work with when writing your book, you’ll need a system that organizes this information and allows you to write about it. Your system can include writing tools such as Zotero to manage citations which I also use for managing my research notes, or Dropbox to store and back-up as well as share and store your drafts in the cloud and with local copies across different computers. These are examples of two of my preferred tools, but the by book also lists other options and walks you through how to select the ones that work for you.

In Chapter 3 of my book, I walk you through how to select the best tools and integrate them into your organizational system. Having the right tools—meaning tools that do what you need them to do that you will actually use!—and the right system allows you to write and revise without worrying about where and how you can access the data, analysis, and other components of your research that you need.

CHALLENGE 2: Writing a book involves multiple and sometimes overlapping drafts of chapters, excerpts, and the full manuscript

Writing is part and parcel of the research process, not the thing that happens after the research is “done.” As we work out what we think and and what we want to argue in our books, we often move ideas, sentences, and concepts around. I’m sure many of us have run into the difficulty of remembering where in our collection of drafts a particular keyword or concept definition is, or where we stored an image or information on a particular analysis. Chapter 4 of my book focuses on how to develop your workflow, including how to name files, organize folders, and ensure that you have a research log that has relevant information about where to find the things you need as you work on this long and complex piece of writing.

CHALLENGE 3: Writing a book involves new and different administrative information

For those of us who teach as part of our positions, we have had to learn how to organize the administrative information involved there for ourselves, our students, and our institutions. We’ve decided on our class grading system, how and where we will store and report grades, assignment content and due dates, how we’ll use learning management systems, and so forth.

When you write a book, you’ll have a whole new set of administrative information to track, including contracts, royalties, payments, promotion materials, and so forth. You will need to, as above, decide how to name, organize, store, and keep up with this information. Chapter 5 on bookkeeping focuses on helping you decide what you want to track and how to organize the kind of information that is not “of the research” but “about the research.” This might be important to report to your workplace, but perhaps also to the IRS: income that you make on your book typically requires reporting for tax purposes.

There’s so much to think about when writing a book, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. By implementing a project management system—which my book shows you how to do—you can spend less time figuring out what you have and where it is and more time devoted to enjoying the research and writing process.

​Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized, will be published in November 2024. If you would like to pre-order the book you can get 40% off by ordering directly from the University of Michigan Press and using discount code PONOV

This newsletter is coming to you from Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD, professional developmental editor and publishing consultant. I help scholarly writers navigate the book publishing process with more ease and agency. I hope you'll stick around for practical tips on writing and publishing your scholarly book, but if you'd like to adjust your subscription settings, you can do that at the bottom of this message. ​More about Laura and Manuscript Works →​

Courses from Manuscript Works

Free resources

Worksheets ​Get worksheets and a checklist to support you as you complete your scholarly book proposal using The Book Proposal Book →​

Webinar ​Get a webinar recording and revision checklist to get ready to pitch your dissertation-based book project to publishers →​

Webinar ​Get a webinar recording and custom referrals to skilled developmental editors in my network →​

More support

Manuscript Works Author Support is a private hub for ongoing support in your scholarly book publishing journey. Inside this community you'll get honest advice about publishers, peer review, offers and contracts, as well as join live Q&A sessions with Laura Portwood-Stacer and your fellow Manuscript Works authors. This community is open to alums of the Manuscript Works Book Proposal Accelerator and Book Proposal Shortcut for Busy Scholars. Find out more →

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See you next week,

Laura Portwood-Stacer ​Manuscript Works​

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