Dear writers,

I have always been a prodigious consumer of advice. There is a seemingly endless array of advice on any given activity in the form of books, blog posts, opinion pieces, and social media, among other genres and formats. Academic writing, grant writing, and creative writing are no exception. Add in advice on the academic job market (or lack thereof), alt-ac careers, and academic publishing and the advice industry can be rather deafening. Amongst editing professionals, it is similar—new opportunities for professional development, business strategies, and ever-more content marketing proliferate everywhere you look. 

 In the case of academic writing and publishing advice, there has been a shift from “advice” to “how-to.” Crucially, many of these publications reveal the hidden, or actively withheld, rules, processes, and ways of being, that dominate academia and structure academic publishing. I’ve become fascinated with this body of literature as a self-portrait of an industry in transition (or, perhaps more accurately, in variable states of crises) and have been working on a longer text about the intellectual history of academic writing advice—someone commission me please!—asking how this literature reflects the industry shifts that have occurred in the almost two decades between books like William Germano’s now classic From Dissertation to Book (2005) and Katelyn E. Knox and Alison Van Deventer’s recent (and sure to be new classic) The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook (2024)?

But even the best advice has a way of piling up. Over the past few months, I’ve found that authors have been writing to me for help in part because they have acquired such a large quantity of information—multiple rounds of feedback from colleagues, peer review reports from interested presses, endless information from various sources about the ins and outs of academic publishing—so as to be unable to make much progress on their manuscripts, or at least not at a pace that aligns with their personal goals and professional requirements. 

And so, in the summer spirit of July, I’m here to ask: what if you don’t need any more advice? Or, at least, not right now. Yes, there is some irony in me (a professional advice and feedback-giver) giving advice about not seeking out advice, but hear me out. As the handful of books mentioned above would indicate, there is a distinction between advice, instruction, and feedback. Advice offers a proposal for how to do something based on the advice-giver's personal knowledge and experience, instruction provides a specific framework of action, and feedback gives you information on something you have done from a distinct perspective. So, ask yourself: what kind of information do I need to get where I want to go?

Until next time,

Emily