Two posts on this site, both from 2024, give the general steps for turning a dissertation into a book: Transitioning Your Dissertation into a Book: A Starting Guide and Turning Your Dissertation into a Book Proposal. Neither shows one case from beginning to end. This post is that case. In the last post I called a dissertation a treasure chest. Here is what came out of mine: two conference papers, a book chapter, a journal article, and a book, in that order, over fifteen years. None of the five was a shorter or longer version of the one before it. Each time, the writing became a different piece of work for a different reader. In the first post in this series I said that you do not revise a dissertation into a publication; you create something entirely new. Here is what that looked like in one body of research, told at the level of readers, structure, and the job each piece had to do.
The dates first. In 2011 I defended a dissertation at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, a phenomenological study of meaningful coincidence during bereavement, and presented it, under the same title, at the International Human Science Research Conference at the University of Oxford that July. In September 2025, 14 years later, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology published my article online, on the role of synchronicity in meaning reconstruction. In October 2026, one year after that, Routledge published Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss. The path was not direct. The 14 years were not idle; they held a second conference paper, on method, in 2014, a co-authored book chapter on grieving and grief therapy in 2016, several more rounds of data collection, and a working life as an editor. And the book did not begin with a proposal. It began with a cold email in the spring of 2025 asking a Routledge editor for copyediting work.
If the five are so far apart and so different, what makes them one body of work? The problem they kept working at. Germano (2026) writes that scholarly books “aren’t boxes of content”; a book is “the vehicle and repository of struggles with problems over time,” and “the scholarly book is always about problems” (p. 2). The problem under all five of mine was not what a meaningful coincidence is but what it does for a grieving person: how someone uses one to rebuild a sense of meaning that a death took apart. Each piece worked at that problem for a different reader.
What changed each time
The first changes were the smallest, and they are the ones most scholars can make on their own. In July 2011 I presented the dissertation, under its own title, to a room of researchers at an international conference at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. The title hadn’t changed, but the reader did, from a committee that had to judge it to a room of peers who had chosen to hear about it. In 2014, one part of the dissertation, its method, became a conference paper of its own. In 2016 the findings turned toward practice, in a chapter on grieving and grief therapy, written with a co-author for a book of therapists’ perspectives: the first time the work was written for people who would use it rather than evaluate it. Three pieces, none of them the dissertation, all of them from it, and each found a reader the raw or even “revised” dissertation never would have.
The bigger change, from dissertation to article, was mostly subtraction. A committee needs to see everything: the full literature, every method choice defended, every step of the analysis shown. A journal’s readers need none of that proof. Germano (2013), writing about the move from dissertation to book manuscript, describes it as finding “what can be of value to a broader readership” and “lopping off the boring bits required to demonstrate how well you know your subject” (pp. 8–9), and the move to an article asks for the same cut. What stayed was the phenomenon itself and the evidence of bereaved people’s own accounts presented phenomenologically. What was cut from the piece was the apparatus that proved researcher competence. What came in was an argument: the article’s title names four theories the dissertation’s title never mentioned, because an argument that brings four theories to one table is what a journal’s readers were being offered. I had time to really think about my dissertation and realized some new literature additions would transform my argument into something broader. A dissertation has to obey strict rules. A publication has far more room to interpret, apply, and explore.
The last change, from article to book, was mostly addition and what honestly felt like luxurious expansion to me as a writer. The audience changed again: not peer reviewers and journal readers, but bereavement researchers and professionals, grief and pastoral counselors, healthcare providers, and the bereaved themselves. The scope widened to match. Where the article made one contribution, the book gives five kinds of loss a chapter each, birth parent, pet, grandparent, parent, and life partner, and each chapter carries exercises a professional can use. Germano (2013) calls this “stretching your interesting material in ways you may not have originally foreseen,” and asks you to “imagine your subject in terms of its plasticity. Revision offers a kind of freedom” (pp. 8–9). The book let me do what the article could not: speak to a reader who would use the work rather than review it, and give each kind of loss its own space.
Even then, what I had in June 2026 was a manuscript, not a book. Germano (2013) is exact about this. The goal of dissertation to publication is many things, hopefully culminating in a book manuscript, “something that a publisher can consider, that external readers can judge and criticize, and that you can then revise further before it is edited and proofed and printed and bound. Then it’s a book, and only then” (p. 14). Between submission in June and release in October came a copyedit with thirty-one author queries across a hundred thousand words, page proofs, an index I built by hand over thirty hours, and a cover chosen from the publisher’s templates. None of that was writing, and all of it changed the object a reader holds: the pagination, the running heads, an index that is a judgment about what a reader will come looking for. I wrote about that stage in Page Proofs and an Index. It is a different phase from the active writing process and is more about collaboration with the many professionals who help move your manuscript into physical and e-book formats.
Each of these phases involved several audiences and readers that required different forms of evidence that the work could proceed. The committee needed proof that I could do the research. The two conference audiences, the chapter’s editors, and the journal each needed one contribution, and each got a different one: the study itself, its method, what it meant for therapy, its argument. The book’s readers needed something useful, and most of them never saw the study. One research problem ran through all of these phases, which is why one body of research could become all five. You can watch the reader change in the titles alone. The 2011 title names a method and a phenomenon. The 2025 title names four theories. The 2026 title is a plain noun phrase and a promise: reconstructing meaning after loss. Which of those jobs, proof, contribution, or usefulness, does your own next piece have to do? That question is the exercise.
Try this: retitle it in ten minutes
Write your dissertation title at the top of a page, exactly as it appears on the title page. Under it, write the title a reader would pick up off a shelf: the book, or the article, you could make from it. Do not open the dissertation to do this; the second title is for someone who has not read it. Under each title, write one line: who it is for, and what it promises them. Then compare. Circle every word in the first title that names a method, a sample, or a procedure. Circle every word in the second that names the reader’s need. The first set is what has to leave; the second is what has to enter. Ten minutes, timed. If the second title will not come, that is information too: you do not yet know who the piece is for, and a later post in this series takes up that question.
Here is my pair. Synchronicity and Grief: The Phenomenology of Meaningful Coincidence as It Arises During Bereavement became Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss. What was dropped was “the phenomenology of” and “as it arises during,” the words that told a committee how the study was done. What entered was “reconstructing meaning after loss,” a promise to a reader about what the book is for. Germano (2026) has a mantra for exactly this: “Don’t just write about, write for” (p. 2).
A conference paper and a chapter are pieces many scholars can make on their own, and a conference is often the right first outing for a dissertation. The article and the book are the changes most scholars cannot make alone, and they are what the Monograph / Full Pathway in my Dissertation to Publication coaching is built for: your dissertation to a publisher-ready book proposal, with companion articles along the way, in weekly sessions. If your dissertation is ready to become one of those, that is where we would start: with your two titles, and what has to change between them.
Warmly,
~Jennifer
References
Germano, W. (2013). From dissertation to book (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Germano, W. (2026). Getting it published (4th ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Hill, J. (2011). Synchronicity and grief: The phenomenology of meaningful coincidence as it arises during bereavement [Doctoral dissertation, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Hill, J. (2011, July). Synchronicity & grief: The phenomenology of meaningful coincidence as it arises during bereavement [Paper presentation]. 30th Annual International Human Science Research Conference: Intertwining Body-Self-World, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Hill, J. (2014, January). Embodied writing as a data collection technique in phenomenology [Paper presentation]. The Qualitative Report 5th Annual Conference, Fort Lauderdale, FL, United States.
Hill, J. (2025). The role of synchronicity in meaning reconstruction: Integrating synchronicity, meaning reconstruction, terror management, and shattered assumptions theory in bereavement. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678251367795
Hill, J. (2026). Synchronicity in grief: Reconstructing meaning after loss. Routledge.
Hill, J., & Valle, R. (2016). Grieving and grief therapy in the light of recent research. In R. Valle & J. Klimo (Eds.), The changing faces of therapy: Innovative perspectives on current issues, disorders, and assessment (pp. 417–448). Argosy University.