How to Convert your Ph.D. Thesis into a Self-Help Book

It is great to be a Ph.D. scholar; being pursuant, I know how enlightening it is. The life of 3-5 years packed with learning, research, and writing create wisdom that you share with the world through journals and theses. However, the knowledge you create is restricted to the academic arena and is referred to by only a few researchers with the same subject interest. But what if your knowledge and discoveries can help many people in the world? How do you take your insights to the masses??

CONVERT YOUR THESIS INTO A BOOK

Popular books like…Why we Sleep…Peak…Indistractable…A short history of nearly everything tells us how useful research insights can be for your readers.

But how can you convert your thesis into a book? To understand this, first, know that your topic might be similar, but with a book, your readers will drastically change, so even if you include insights from your work as they are drawn, you will still require to dig deeper into the psychology of readers.?

START WITH WHY; as Simon Sinek says…you need to know why you are creating a book out of your thesis. What insight could possibly be so important that you want the masses to know about it? How can that insight help your reader? And to your discoveries already explored, you will have to make another discovery - Why would your reader be interested in your insight?

From Thesis to Book...

Let us take an example. Suppose you researched employee development to find out the major competencies that can create the best leaders in people working in the corporate arena. You used the 67 competencies identified in the Career Architect Planner and found that a few can be put on the top of the list as they show the highest causal relationship with leadership behavior. This is your insight. Now, think, how will this insight help your reader??

Suppose your reader is a training manager. How do you think the insight will help a training manager?? Perhaps, a training manager can propose training programs for leaders by picking up topics from your list of top competencies.?

Now, why would your reader take your advice and do this? At this point, you will have to take another research step. Your research only discussed the causal relationship between constructs and helped you suggest topics to include. You can add your practical knowledge of creating training programs to it and give your reader a framework for building a leadership development program using the competencies you identified.?

So, your conversion steps would be

1. Identify the best insight from your book
2. Discover how the insight would help your reader
3. Find out why your reader would be interested in your insight
4. Add practical knowledge to your book that can help a reader take action based on insights

At this point, you will have a concrete book idea ready for conversion.

Your next steps would be…

1. Decide a tentative title (It will motivate you even if it is not final)
2. Write an introduction by adding your thoughts to the background you discussed in your introduction chapter of the thesis. Make sure that your introduction clearly states why, identifies the reader, key insights, benefits, practical implications, and briefly summarizes the content of your book.?
3. Convert your key insight into a chapter by introducing them as theory, and to this theory, add explanations for simplification. You could use stories, examples, simplified models, your own observations, etc., to create this effect.
4. From the next chapter, move into the details of your theory and your practical lessons. Expand on your model, examples, case studies, and reasons.

Continue with the rest of the book and cover everything your thesis offered with additional examples, stories, examples, and explanations from the non-academic arena.

Step 9: Conclude your book?

Once your key chapters are over, flip back to your second chapter of the book and start reading it. Make sure that you read it like a reader and make notes like a real student. Once you are done with your notes, turn them into a conclusion chapter but make sure that you present the chapter not as pointers but as the end of a story or the journey of your reader. Remind the reader of key insights and the benefits they can provide.?

Step 10: The Last Step?

Review your thesis to check if you missed anything important to add to the book. Also, copy the references you have at the end of your document and paste them to the end of the book to create a reference section. This is important if you want your readers to know how hard you have worked to produce the book they have in their hands.

#selfhelpbooks #phd #thesistobook #books #writerpoojadubey #becomeanauthor #author