Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The Realities of Publishing a Scholarly Book by Bart Ehrman One of the emails that I get all the time is from authors who have written a book or hope to write a book, who want to know how they can get a publisher to take a look at it.
[00:00:16] The short answer? It ain't easy.
[00:00:19] Often the inquiry comes from someone who wants to publish a book for scholars to convince them to take a different view on a matter of scholarly importance.
[00:00:27] How does someone get a publisher to publish a book like that?
[00:00:32] People don't like to hear this, but if you don't already have scholarly credentials, then an academic publisher will almost certainly not, or at least extremely rarely even consider your manuscript. And having the credentials for a first time author almost always means having done advanced graduate level education in the field.
[00:00:52] I know a lot of authors who think it's not fair that they can't get their books published just because I don't have a PhD.
[00:00:59] I get that it must be hugely frustrating. But the problem is that word just getting a PhD isn't like buying a rare item that you've hunted for a long time on the Internet.
[00:01:10] A PhD requires years, years of rigorous, full time, mind changing, intense labour. It can be very difficult to know what it's like if they haven't done it, and I can see how it might seem elitist and snobbish. But academic publishers are widely agreed among themselves that it's very rare indeed for someone without a PhD to be qualified as an expert in an academic field.
[00:01:34] It does happen on occasion, but it simply cannot happen by reading books, even lots of books, for a few years. Getting the PhD is not like that at all.
[00:01:44] Most of the people who ask me about getting their book published on the historical Jesus, on the writings and the life of the Apostle Paul, on the apocryphal Gospels, on some theory theory they have about the beginnings of Christianity and so on. They don't have a PhD and frankly from what I can tell, they don't know what it takes to get a PhD. They've read a lot of books and they now think that they are ready to write their own. But it doesn't work that way.
[00:02:08] The PhD program that I taught in for decades was and is in many ways fairly typical. Here's what it took and still in fact takes to get the PhD in New Testament and early Christianity at UNC Chapel. Hillary first it's very difficult even to get admitted into the programme. Some years we had maybe 20 applicants and we could admit only one or two students who applied almost always had a two or three year master's degree in the field already.
[00:02:37] Before applying, we rarely admitted someone without an MA already. To be considered for admission, applicants had to be able to read Ancient Greek and preferably at least one other language, Hebrew, Coptic or Latin, for example, just for us to consider their application. Often they already knew German or French already as well.
[00:02:56] They also had to have high GPAs and high GRE scores, and this was before they even started.
[00:03:04] Once they were in the program with us, they were required to take four semesters of graduate seminars. Three seminars a semester, three seminars. Might not sound like a lot, but the work required for each seminar was massive.
[00:03:17] In addition to seminars, they have to develop and add languages.
[00:03:21] We required all students in New Testament and Early Christianity to have at least two ancient languages such as Greek and Latin, and we urged them to have a third such as Coptic or Syriac.
[00:03:31] And then they had to be able to read scholarship in both French and German. So virtually everyone in the program had five foreign languages and many students actually had more.
[00:03:43] After their two years of seminars, assuming they've passed them all, they prepared for their PhD exams.
[00:03:49] We had five written exams, four hours each taken over a two week period.
[00:03:55] First, they had to take an exam in their primary research language. Usually that was Greek, though sometimes students would choose Coptic or Latin.
[00:04:03] For the Greek exam which I administered, students needed to be able to translate on site without a dictionary any passage I chose from the New Testament or the Apostolic Fathers to be able to parcel all forms and to answer detailed questions about the syntax.
[00:04:19] Second, the students took an exam in the history and literature of early Christianity, covering topics for the first 200 years. For this and all their exams, they had lengthy bibliographies of books and articles on the topic that they had to master. Some of the books and articles had to be in German and French.
[00:04:36] Third, an exam in the Greco Roman religions that would be the non Christian and non Jewish religions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
[00:04:45] Fourth, there was an exam in some outside fields such as Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, literary theory, something else that they chose. And fifth, an exam in the narrow field that they planned to write their dissertation on, such as the use of magic in Antiquity or demons in ancient literature, or Pauline studies, or Apocryphal Gospels, whatever.
[00:05:06] After they took their PhD written exams, there was an oral exam in front of the five person committee who had read the written exams and spent two hours drilling the person on his or her answers.
[00:05:17] After hopefully passing exams, the student had to prepare a dissertation prospectus laying out what they wanted to write a dissertation on why this project needed to be done. It had to be original research, developing a thesis that no one had argued before, how they planned to go about doing it, and so on.
[00:05:34] Devising a prospectus usually took months.
[00:05:37] Once they got that approved through another oral exam, the student wrote the dissertation.
[00:05:43] Almost always they devote full time to it, and normally it took two to three years.
[00:05:50] Once the dissertation was completed, then there was an oral defence before a five person committee of experts where the student again was drilled rigorously about what he or she has written. Only if that defence was passed was the student then awarded a PhD.
[00:06:06] This is what it took and takes and what it means to be qualified in the field.
[00:06:11] Most of our students devoted six or seven years of full time work on getting their degree, and that's after having spent two to three years working on a Master's degree.
[00:06:21] When publishers of scholarly books look at book proposals before they even look, they want to know if someone is qualified. And this is why, without this kind of insanely rigorous training, someone simply doesn't have and can't have in virtually all instances, the qualifications to produce new scholarship.
[00:06:42] And so when someone asks me, as often happens with some incredulity in the voice, if it's true that without a PhD, their book proposal for a scholarly book probably won't even be considered, really, they ask.
[00:06:53] I just have to tell them that, yes, that's probably the case.
[00:06:56] If you haven't been through this process, you simply can't imagine that you have the scholarly credentials to do what someone who has been through it might have. It's just the reality of the case.
[00:07:08] Scholarship is a precious commodity and it's expensive and it's not easily achieved and it needs to be protected.
[00:07:15] And this massively guarded system is how it's protected.
[00:07:19] Anyone can post anything they want on the Internet, but not anyone can publish anything they want with a scholarly press.
[00:07:27] At the same time, most people who ask me about getting their book published are more interested in reaching not scholarship, but a broad audience.
[00:07:34] They have a book they want to see in Barnes and Noble. I'll say something about the qualification qualifications for that in my next post.
