Planning a publishing pipeline

New year, new resolutions. Whatever happened last term, whatever you did or did not manage to do is in the past.  January may be full of grading, but is usually free of teaching for the first few weeks and this gives you the opportunity to put aside some time to think about the upcoming academic year and plan (or readjust) your writing pipeline. If you have never done a writing pipeline before, then you can start now!

 Why you should have a pipeline

• Sanity – you know what you are doing.

• Purpose – you know why you are doing it.

• Permission to say no without guilt – you know you cannot say yes to yet another thing, because you have a full calendar already.

• Prevents overwork – you know that if you accept anything else, something must be deleted on a 1 in 1 out basis or you are saying yes to working evenings and weekends because we cannot invent time.

The pipeline puts all this IN YOUR FACE rather than a sort of background hum you know is there but can tune out at will. It will save you from yourself.

3 guiding principles of a pipeline

• Be Realistic. Depending on where you are in your career, design a pipeline that fits your capabilities. Be ambitious, but be realistic. You might not be ready for a €10m grant (i.e. you don’t have the publication record to support such a grant application so wont be assessed as having an appropriate track record). Build your CV commensurate with your grade and skills, whilst planning any upskilling you need to move to the next level.

• Be Strategic. Decide on your goals (specific to what YOU want) and only accept or begin work aligned to these goals. If an offer to do something comes in but does not align with your goals, politely explain you cannot commit to x project at the moment.

• Be Responsible. Know yourself. Know how you manage your time, and crucially how long things take YOU to complete. Do not repeatedly commit to writing and then miss the deadlines because people will think you are a flake that cannot be trusted. This is not good for future collaboration, references and academia is a small world. Besides this just builds endless stress and begins to alienate you from your writing practice. Time tracking, and learning how long things take, is a key skill that most academics don’t bother with.

Organising a pipeline

There are many ways to organise a pipeline and many ways to utilise that pipeline. A publication pipeline can be used for career progression for example. You specifically plan your pipeline according to the promotion criteria in your University. In most research focused  institutions, this would mean prioritising peer reviewed journal articles (and in some disciplines, prioritising monographs) above all else. Invited chapters in an edited collection, for example, would be filler in the pipeline, but never your goal. Editing a book might be higher on the list for a number of reasons, not least your citation index. Identifying which journals you need to target for prestige / fit reasons is also important in this type of pipeline.

Many Universities now prioritise impact and engagement with the public and/or industry or government stakeholders. This is probably in your departmental and University mission statement and the promotion criteria, but impact and engagement alone will rarely be privileged without simultaneous publication. For the UK environment, the REF is always hovering in the background ensuring that 4* peer reviewed journal articles remain the gold standard.

You might not care about being promoted. In that case feel free to use your pipeline for the purposes of planning how you would like to spend your time (but don’t bitch about not getting promoted, please). Even without an eye on promotion, you still need to carefully curate your pipeline so that it builds your profile in a way that is meaningful to you. Do you want to be the expert on X? Then don’t plan a scattergun approach to research topics and papers because you were asked to do A, B, C  this year. Think about what your choices say about who you are as a researcher.

Planning Process

Planning is key to happiness in writing and I encourage people to set aside an hour or more each Monday to plan the working week and once every few weeks check in on their longer term plan.

I like to plan in 3 month segments since this fits the academic year and I am programmed after all these years to think this way. As it happens, alongside teaching and other duties, this is about how long it takes me to do draft a peer reviewed article to initial submission. This does not mean I only plan for 3 months. Pipelines should be between 1-3 years (and 5 years for a job application). When I first started doing this, I used to be super optimistic and pretend I could accomplish all the things, and many of them between September-December. Clearly wrong. I never accounted for illness, holidays, general malaise I felt in February and March and was truly optimistic about how much conferencing and travel would seamlessly fit into my life and schedule (hint: it didn’t and I was totally exhausted by it). 

I have a planning template here that is free to download. This template is merely indicative and not what you should be aiming to complete in each academic year which is dependent on your specific circumstances. The principles in designing your own pipeline planner are pretty straightforward. Include the following categories:

• What?

• Why?

• Steps required (milestones)

• Timeframe/Deadline

Most planner examples miss out WHY. Why is the most important question. Why are you doing this project? What will you achieve/ gain /by doing it? What does this signify to you? How does this advance your career or build your profile in a way that is meaningful to you? You must be able to answer this in a way that is NOT ‘because someone asked me’. Don’t do that project. 

 You can plan this out on a whiteboard, or a word document, or spreadsheet.

You can of course then break down projects individually either by using a Gantt Chart or simply using Post It notes in way that breaks the project down into specific milestones. More on this type of detailed planning in a later post. 

The most important point of the pipeline is that you sit down and consciously plan your writing year, acknowledging the specific timeframe attached to each project. Once you have this outline you can backward map into your diary how many writing slots you need to complete the project. This starts to fill every day with specific slots and tasks in those slots so that you never need to wonder what you should be doing today in terms of writing. 

Want more help with planning your pipeline and then actually executing it? Check out my 12 month coaching programme that will help you to establish your pipeline and then actually execute it.

Getting published in academia: pitfalls and perseverance

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.

Creating a writing practice

Consciously deciding you are going to create a new relationship with your writing takes guts.

An enormous amount of guts.

You need a healthy dose of self-awareness, and a desire to do things differently.

Your writing practice will be your own. What works for others cannot be seamlessly transplanted onto you. You need to create something that works for you. There is no one-size fits all, but there are some common messages given in research on academic writing.

Protect and dedicate specific time. Don’t engage with things/people who derail you. Write with others. Understand how to use feedback. Understand your inner demons.

Academic writing is something that can get pushed to the margins of your day job if you let it. It is also a part of the academic job that exposes us to intense criticism, and intellectual challenge. Naturally, sometimes we want to shy away from that. But this behaviour creates a cycle of dread and unhappiness, guilt and loathing.

It should be (and is) a privilege to write for a living. It should be something that we enjoy, look forward to, even escape into from other demands of the job.

To create a writing practice that works for you, you need to spend some time consciously thinking about your own mindset, habits and challenges. There is no quick fix. It is a holistic challenge. For some, this will mean changing their thought processes about the task of writing, yet for others, it means challenging their own behaviours around writing and how they respond to the demands of others.

Creating a healthy academic writing practice is easier when you do it with others. Setting up departmental writing groups, or using social writing online, or engaging with writing retreats (or even a Writing Coaching Course!) will provide a forum that offers the structures you need to bring the joy back into your writing practice.

It can be joyful. Let’s all try to be happier writers.