Continuum Philosophy News

Writing the perfect student guide or textbook

Writing a student guide or textbook can be a challenging task for any academic who is more used to writing research papers or monographs. The style, structure and content of a book written for an undergraduate audience need careful thought. It is important to strike the right tone, be concise and accessible, avoid unnecessary jargon and ensure your text is clear, logical and easy to navigate. For a textbook, you might also consider including additional pedagogical features, such as study questions, case studies, activities, further reading and other resources. With all that in mind, we have put together some short guidelines for anyone embarking on writing a student guide or textbook - I hope you will find these useful:

Download Author Guidelines_Student Guides

Download Textbook Author Guidelines

If you are writing a book for any of our student guide series, you will also find series-specific guidelines on the series pages of this blog:

Continuum Contemporary American Thinkers

Continuum Philosophy Dictionaries 

Guides for the Perplexed 

Key Terms in Philosophy

Reader's Guides 

Starting with  

Revising your PhD for publication

We are very often asked about what a publisher looks for in a book project that is based on a PhD dissertation. Many (although not all) PhD projects can lead to excellent and important monographs, but obviously certain revisions are required before a dissertation can be considered suitable for book publication.

Revising your PhD for book publication will necessarily involve some adaptation of the content and style of your dissertation. It is important to remember that the aim and emphasis of your book manuscript should be to make an original contribution to scholarly dialogue (rather than proving that you deserve to be awarded a PhD). Your primary goal in revising your dissertation should be to make every element of the manuscript focused, essential and succinct.

We have put together some specific guidelines for authors revising their PhD dissertations for book publication. These guidelines are available here: Download Author Guidelines_Revising your PhD

Guidelines for Authors

Our guidelines for authors submitting manuscripts to Continuum are available here:

Download Guidelines for Authors August 2008

If you have any queries at all, please do not hesitate to contact either Sarah Campbell (scampbell@continuumbooks.com) or Tom Crick (tcrick@continuumbooks.com). If you are submitting a manuscript for a specific series, remember to check the series page on this blog for any additional series-specific instructions.

Series information

As you may have noticed, I have now created series pages for all the major Continuum Philosophy series that we are currently publishing in. They are listed down the left-hand side of the blog. These pages are designed to provide information and guidance for existing and would-be authors, as well as our readers. They include series descriptions, guidelines for authors, information on how to submit a proposal, and details of published and forthcoming titles.

If you have any queries or comments regarding any of our series, please do not hesitate to contact me: scampbell@continuumbooks.com