How to Get and Put Publications on Your CV

MLA: Take Aways from My “Academic Rigor Mortis” Talk
This is the handout version of the take aways from my Thursday talk (5:15 pm) at MLA.

Take aways:
1. How do you get publications? You look at what you teach, what you know, and you write that. Find places where other people can benefit from your ideas.
2. Look at what you have presented at conferences. While conference writing should be written in a more casual register, the same work, in a more formal academic voice, should be viable somewhere.
3. Do you have a thesis or dissertation that hasn’t been published? What can you do with it? Don’t think that just because you wrote it a while ago, or decades, that it doesn’t have something useful
4. If you are having to make your salary piecemeal, as I was, yes, you can get paid for texts. I made $5,000 for my first book. That’s all I will ever make from it, but it was a very hefty price for work I would have done for free. (Don’t tell my publisher.)
5. What happens when you write something that is rejected? Find something else to do with it.
6. Keep a list of what you have submitted, where, and when. This is easier when you are just beginning and becomes harder when you have more works in the pipelines.
7. Keeping a list of what has been accepted also lets you cycle through publications.
8. If you are adjuncting or think you might be moving, get a stable good email address and USE that one.

How to identify works in progress on your CV:
“In Press”: the manuscript is fully copyedited and out of the author’s hands. “Forthcoming”: a completed manuscript has been accepted by a press or journal.
“Under contract to . . .”: a press and an author have signed a contract for a book in progress, but the final manuscript has not yet been submitted.
“Submitted” or “under consideration”: the book or article has been submitted to a press or journal, but there is as yet no contract or agreement to publish.
from the American Historical Association.