In Your Dissertation Is a Treasure Chest, I asked you to open the chest once: 10 minutes, two columns, every chapter matched to what it could feed, and one line starred. If you did it, you are now holding a page with more possible publications on it than you had last month, and you may feel worse rather than better. That is a fair reaction. In that post, I quoted Germano’s (2013) warning that what can make revision anxious is “having too much plastic” (p. 9). Beside that line in my reading notes, I wrote the same warning from the coach’s side: be careful not to overwhelm clients with too many options. Today’s post is how I keep the list from doing that.
What most new PhDs do instead of choosing is inherit a route. A mentor said article, so it is an article; the field expects a book, so it is a book. I have to count myself in that. When I went back through my documented dissertation-to-publication engagements, from August 2023 through January 2026, all had gone to journal articles and none to a book. I think articles were the right call for every one of them. But in each case the output was assumed before the work began, and nobody, including me, stopped to test it. It worked, but it was never tested, and an untested default is not a method. So the real question is not whether you have too many options. It is what choosing the best path for you looks like.
The way out is a bounded choice. Germano (2013) says that turning a dissertation into something more, done well, “means first taking stock of what one has and what it might become” (p. 6). What this sentence does not say is when taking stock ends, and that is the part I add. We open the dissertation treasure chest once, in a single inventory with an end point, and the end point is a commitment: one piece, and we plan the next steps toward that goal, putting the others on the back burner for the time being. Without that end point the “plastic” can overwhelm a new graduate with too many directions to choose from. Everything can still change, so nothing has to be decided, so nothing is. Four steps, in order, get you from the open dissertation treasure chest to the commitment and workplan for the first piece.
Four steps, in order
1. Inventory. Name everything the dissertation could plausibly support. This step is wide on purpose and time-boxed, and it is the only one where everything is on the table. The page from the treasure chest exercise is a first inventory. When I do this for a client, I read the whole dissertation before we talk and map the possible articles. The unit I list is a question the dissertation can answer on its own, for its own reader. Sometimes that is a whole chapter; sometimes it is one finding or one table.
2. Appraise. This is where most of the list falls away, and it should fall away on evidence about your field, your role, and your timeline, never on your anxiety. For a client, that evidence is concrete. I pull recent articles from the journals the work could go to and build a journal ladder for each piece: a first choice and real backups, ranked before anything is submitted. Each article needs its own question and its own reader. A possible dissertation to publication pathway for a journal article that has no actual available scholarly journal that publishes that kind of paper is something you can quickly move on from once you see that reality, and that is a very different feeling from dropping it because it scares you and the journal is top tier.
3. Choose one. Commit to a single first piece and schedule your time around it. This is the step that answers “what do I do Monday.” The choice stays yours. In a recent strategy, I laid out three ways a client’s pieces could be sequenced: lead with the strongest paper, lead with the one that could be submitted soonest, or draft two at once. Each came with three lines, what goes first, what you get, and what you give up, and the heading over all three read, “Your call. All three approaches are valid.” I meant it. That habit comes from my Motivational Interviewing training: a choice is only a choice if no is a real answer.
4. Sequence the rest. The pieces you did not choose are parked, not discarded: written down, in a rough order. This is the step that makes step 3 bearable, because choosing one piece feels like losing the others until you can see that they are kept. It is the same principle as naming the rounds of revision in advance (first round, second round, final review), so that several passes read as the process working rather than as failure. In a Strategy Session, the parked order lives in the written map: the strongest target journals and presses for your work, in what order, and what each will take. Six months later, picking up a parked piece is the next step on a plan, and you do not have to decide all over again.
Try this: three lines for each candidate
Take the page from the treasure chest exercise, the inventory with one star. If you skipped it, write down the three things your dissertation could most plausibly become, one line each, without opening the dissertation. Keep the three strongest candidates and cross out the rest for now. “Strongest” means the ones you could finish soonest with what is already written, which may not be the ones you most want to write.
For each of the three, write three lines:
- What goes first: the piece, and the venue if you know it.
- What you get: the reader, the credential, the speed.
- What you give up: what waits, and for how long.
Give yourself ten minutes, timed. Then circle one. That circle is step 3, so say it out loud, to someone if you can. Under it, list the other two with a rough order and a rough month for each. That list is step 4. Keep the page.
What this exercise skips is step 2. Nothing here tests your three against your field or against what the journals have published lately, which is why the circle may move once it is tested. Done alone, the exercise gives you a choice. Done with someone who has those journals’ recent issues open, it gives you a tested choice.
That tested version is what a Publication Strategy Session is: the four steps, done with you. It is a focused 75-minute call plus a written Publication Pathway Map of the strongest target journals and presses for your work, in what order, and what each will take. It is $197, fully credited toward any coaching package you book within 30 days. And if you are still asking whether your dissertation should become articles or a book, that is exactly the question the session is built to answer.
Warmly,
~Jennifer
Reference
Germano, W. (2013). From dissertation to book (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.