The publishing process in academia - getting your article from your first ideation to printed - can be a tricky and sometimes tortuous path. If you search ‘how to get published’ there is a lot of great advice out there - including my How to Write and Publish a Journal Article Course - about choosing the right journal (making sure you have fit) and ensuring you have a lot of robust feedback before sending out the manuscript. This is excellent advice. But it doesn’t describe the publishing journey nor does it demystify what a brutalising experience it can be.

Advice tends to imagine the writing experience as some kind of linear event: idea-and-journal-selection-in tandem; research; writing (to that journal style); submission; revisions; acceptance. This is not my experience.

So I thought I would describe my last publishing ‘journey’ to highlight some pitfalls and the need for perseverance in writing and publishing, including some common traits that make publishing more difficult.

1. Ideas that are cross disciplinary don’t fit

My last published journal article was about the rule of law and how the EU was handling the conduct of Hungary and Poland in this context. I saw a call for papers in a destination that sounded appealing (Trento, Italy). It was a political science, not law, workshop and required a novel cross disciplinary approach. Full papers were expected upfront as the promise was a special edition of a particular high profile journal. The presentation went well. It had taken 3 months to write the paper and was finished by September 2014.

It took around 12 months to understand that the special edition bid had failed and now I had to find a publishing outlet for this on my own. I had used a framework from another discipline (organisational theory). It was unlikely to get past editors in legal journals due to the framework. It was unlikely to be accepted in political science journal because there was too much law. The very thing that made my work novel, made it essentially unpublishable in any journal I could think of. I had not started off with a journal in mind, I started off responding to a call for papers with a special edition attached . I don’t think this is that uncommon for researchers, yet all publishing advice starts with journal fit.

2. Scope of idea too large

If I could write a book on this topic, I could probably convince both audiences this was a great idea, but in 10,000 words or less, it was a road to hell. The idea was too big. I needed a lot of time to explain what was happening in the real world (a lot) and the intellectual framework also needed a lot of word count. It didn’t work. It could not work in a journal format. But I persisted anyway.

3. Feedback can be brutal (9 months on)

All the feedback from my peers confirmed my worst fears. It was clunky and there was not enough detail to convince on the framework (naturally some were kinder in how they said this than others). I rewrote this. Bulked out my referencing. 18 months. More feedback. More research. Essentially the same feedback again.

4. Don’t let the noise of others demoralise you

By now many articles had appeared on this topic. I felt like it had all been done although in reality much of these contributions were nothing like mine. Particular scholars were literally building a career on the topic and drowning the airways and every possible outlet with their endless stream of contributions. This in itself was incredibly demoralising. I put it in the drawer and brooded (what a waste of time!).

5. Do you really have something to contribute? Submit.

Everything I had predicted in my article came true. So, out of the drawer it came. I sent it off to the top generalist journal. I had little hope in publication but wanted different feedback. Within 2 weeks I got desk rejected but with some excellent advice which focused on the scope - it was too big for a journal and the framework didn’t work (and it didn't fit that journal which I already knew). The journal editor was really encouraging and very polite. I did yet more work on this.

6. Resubmit

3 years. I resubmitted to a different journal I thought it belonged in. It is a very good journal and is very hard to get published in. After 8 months under review, I got 2 split reviews: ‘This is the best thing ever’ and ‘This doesn’t work for me’. So a third reviewer was sought only to say no. I got the ‘after much thought no’ email. By this time this was the hottest topic around, and was exciting a lot of political and deeply felt academic opinion. Reviewers had very strong opinions and reactions. This had become a very controversial piece that could never please everyone. It had not felt like that when I began because when I began no-one was interested in it.

7. Talk to the journal editor

I emailed the journal editor and said that I would, with permission, try to respond to the reviewers’ comments and resubmit as a fresh submission because I thought it was incredibly important and this was the right home for this piece. They agreed.

8. Bite the bullet

I took a machete to my article. I removed all trace of the framework and wrote it as purely a legal piece. It broke my soul to do so. I removed the novelty. I wrote in paragraphs about nonsense as a defence to the next set of reviewers so that I did not get accused of being ignorant of one set of literature or another. I toned down some of my opinions, or at least my language in expressing it. Six months later, I submitted it again.

9. Time lapse

I received an email saying I had two reviews, and the editor was minded to publish so could I do my best to respond to some of the criticism in the reviews.

10. More revisions

The reviews were much harsher than the first (reject) reviews. One of the problems was a lot of time had elapsed since I had put it in for review (7-8 months) and a lot had happened in the real world. Naturally the reviewers queried whether I knew what I was talking about since I had not mentioned x, y, z (all happened after submission). The reviews were done by (I suspect) a rather senior scholar whose contribution was kind yet critical and had some amazing ideas, and one was done by what appeared to be a more junior scholar (it went on for pages and was a bit unprofessional at times). Once I got over my initial recoil, both had something worth listening to, especially in terms of clarifying my ideas in certain places and of course updating with recent events.

11. The final publication

I finished the revisions and copy edited it and it is published December 2019. It is no doubt a better written piece of work in terms of the clarity of my expression, and no doubt a poorer piece of work because I was unable to do something novel and interesting with some inter-disciplinary research. The more ambitious the research, the less easily it will be published. I had to write a lot of paragraphs in defence of what someone might misunderstand or accuse me of not knowing. All of that took up word count that I could not then use for actual analysis or core argument.

This is hard to accept when you spend so much time on something. But it is part of the peer review system.

Lessons learned

Perhaps there is no ‘typical’ publishing journey. This was not typical for me. Although you can try to ensure you pick a journal first, and don’t let too much time elapse, listen to feedback, and get lots of different feedback, you will still most likely get rejected and have to try several times. It is important that junior scholars know this. I did not know this because no-one talked about it. This process can easily devolve into fear, doubt and loathing.

15 years before I had written a piece and sent it to a senior mentor. He ringed some sentences and wrote in red pen ‘these are hostages to fortune. They are true. But don’t write them’. What he was getting at was these statements (which were neither here nor there in the final analysis) are like loose threads on a jumper, waiting to be pulled by an unkind or pedantic reviewer and can be made into something much bigger than they are, leading to rejection. I had forgotten that lesson. My framework was a hostage to fortune. Once that was removed, all that as left was a difference of opinion on tone and the usual lament of not dealing with x or y in enough detail (word limit). There had never been anything wrong with the research, the core idea or the conclusions drawn from it.

Getting published is hard. It requires a lot of perseverance, an enormous capacity to absorb rejection and not take it personally, and being able to act on the feedback you are given.