Last night, I spent several hours looking at part of my personal research library on trade and university press books. These are often written for specific career trajectory stages: author expertise, their cumulative research program, their collaborative research teams, what institutional resources they have preferential access to and control over (the resource-based view of strategy), and what external networks they may have (such as publicists, publishers, social media networks, generative AI tools and platforms, professional bodies, and academic networks).
This is what emerged from several hours of desk review and in browsing book shelves:
1. Early Career Academic books are written in the first 5 years since the author’s conferral date (given by the university) of their PhD. The book may be a PhD adaptation (that needs to be rewritten to reflect a book monograph format, the publisher, and a broader readership), it may be an expansion beyond the PhD’s “original contribution” to now include new research, or it may be an entirely different project altogether. Jathan Sadowski’s Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2020). The usual book manuscript word count is about 60,000-85,000 words.
If the academic pursues a PhD-to-book monograph project then there may be a closer fit with either a major university press (Cambridge or Oxford in the United Kingdom; and examples like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, or Cornell in the United States), or a mid-tier academic press (usually owned by a publishing conglomerate) that has a larger backlist (Routledge and Springer come to mind).
Some academics in the Humanities and the Social Sciences also now opt to write on books on contemporary issues for smaller pressses in more regional markets (like Black Inc in Australia). Bloomberg Academic and Polity have emerged as being very popular choices. The usual manuscript word count is about 70,000 words.
2. Mid-Career Academic books are area / field focused in terms of demonstrating a sustained “original contribution” that embodies their expertise. These are usually published by a major university press and often in a particular series or with a specific editorial team. The goal is to advance debate and the state of play in an area / field of research.
This often helps to facilitate promotion in the Boyer model of the institutional academic career to the Professoriate: the hardest career stage in the traditional, hierarchical ‘command and control’ structure of academic staff. There is also some overlap here for academics who are able to game academic publishers (as an arbitrage form) to be fast-tracked to becoming a full Professor.
An example of this kind of project (actually by a more senior academic) is Benjamin J. Cohen’s International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). The usual manuscript word count is between 97,000 and 115,000 words for a PhD-to-book project, or 155,000 words for a major study (that reflects a significant personal and institutional based investment in a cumulative research program).
3. Professoriate books are career peaks and major capstone studies that define quality in an area / field for many years. Major university presses dominate this niche due to the specific target audiences involved (which overlap with professional associations like the International Studies Association and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations), and due to the high research, development, production, and pre-publication costs involved in an individual project (which may be $AUD300,000 or even more for a major funder financed project).
Both the Mid-Career and the Professoriate books usually depend on national and international competitive grant funding for the individual research projects that the book monograph ‘falls out’ of. Two major examples in international relations theory and military history are Beatrice Heuser’s The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Richard Ned Lebow’s A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). These book monographs are examples of projects that were written at Distinguished and Emeritus Professor career stages. The book manuscript word count is between 150,000 and 235,000 words—and may be even as high as 335,000 words for a truly foundational study or a major edited collection of contributors on a specific topic or research field.
4. Trade Presses: Several different career trajectories converge on trade presses: the Professor who becomes a public intellectual and who jumps (with an agent’s help) from a (more niche) university press to a trade press (like Random House or Simon & Schuster in the United States), or the ambitious Mid-Career Academic who decides for translational research purposes to engage directly with public and social policy audiences.
A different pipeline is the academic who combines a journalism / media background; my past coauthor Ben Eltham illustrates these synergies very well, including in his cultural industries and trade union advocacy based work. Albert Palazzo’s The Big Fix: Rebuilding Australia’s National Security (Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2025) exemplifies targeted policy intervention in a public debate. Some people specialise as being the very effective boundary-spanners and the backroom operators between academia, government, business, and community / philanthropic / mission-based (transnational) networks. An accessible book is a credibility building and positioning based marketing tool that can open up consulting and networking opportunities.
The veteran journalist Annie Jacobsen has had major hits with Nuclear War: A Scenario (London: Penguin Books, 2024) and Biological War: A Scenario (London: Penguin Books, 2026). This has opened up Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) licensing opportunities: Denis Villeneuve has optioned Nuclear War: A Scenario for a film adaptation, and Jacobsen has built over her influential career a niche in defence and national security reportage that reflects how the job crafting involved (much as the late Anthony Bourdain did as a chef, for example). Some books will become truly influential: Peter Thiel with Blake Masters’ course notes for Stanford University on entrepreneurship which became Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (London: Virgin Books, 2014) is an exemplar.
There is a career pathway here in terms of the scope, scale, and the depth of book monograph published research. However, there are important access and socio-economic dimensions as well that both challenge and undermine the surface veneer that we live in a meritocratic world. We clearly do not. Elite university libraries for example are filled with top-tier elite university press books that you don’t find in smaller institutions that rely on smaller publishers like Praeger or Rowman & Littlefield, for example.
All of this is also now being disrupted by data centres, the rational herding into compute for Generative AI platforms, and the transnational stratification of global labour markets, and supply / value chain networks. Finally, most book monograph content is now likely to be pirated, and to end up in the Internet Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, or another shadow network—thus directly affecting royalties payment amounts. Thus, overall compensation for authors will continue to derive from other project activities. I’ll see you for drinks in the Cayman Islands in a few months’ time when your conflict arbitrage profits get marked to market.