Aspiring academics are told that they must publish or perish.  And yet they are often given little advice on how to do this, and the need to write—and to finish what one writes—is constantly pushed aside by the unrelenting pressures of teaching, coursework, comprehensive exams, administrivia, family life, or one’s day job.  Here I offer some tips about how to survive when your livelihood depends on your ability to write and to publish what you write.  I hope this guide will be useful to our grad students who may be wondering what they have to do in order to be able to forge a career in philosophy or a similar academic discipline.

It is tough getting papers published; in philosophy, for instance, the acceptance rate for top journals is typically less than 10%.  Even if your work is brilliant it may take a long time to find a home.  Here are some pointers that are relevant and helpful in beating those odds (though there is no “effective procedure” that guarantees publication):

1. Insert yourself in the conversation.  Follow the current literature in your field or subfield very closely, and try to show how what you have to say is (at least in part) a response to it.  This certainly does not mean that you should not try to be original or buck a trend, but try to be relevant and aware of what others in your area are saying.  The more specialized your field, the more closely you should follow this advice.
2. Do your homework.  You must know what you are talking about.  As the British WWII boffin R. V. Jones (1978) put it, “Do not think what you want to think until you know what you ought to know.” 
3. On the other hand, you must have the confidence to say something.  Yes, do lots of homework (it is absolutely necessary), but sooner rather than later take an intellectual risk, and speak up.  In my view, philosophers and scientists are in general too reticent, too cautious. 
4. You have to be very persistent.  Everyone has heard the stories about famous authors whose books were rejected innumerable times before finally turning into best-sellers.  It can take years to get even a very good paper published, let alone a book.  If you believe you have something to say, don’t easily give up trying to say it.    
5. You must have a thick skin.  Do not allow yourself to be daunted by the often-scathing criticism you will get from referees and editors.  Sometimes the criticism is appropriate, in which case you must swallow your pride and learn from it.  Sometimes (often) it is not, and you must simply ignore it and carry on. 
6. If a paper is rejected, do not rewrite it unless you feel that you have a compelling reason to do so.  Send it out again as soon as you possibly can.  Papers that are not circulating on the market have 0% chance of acceptance anywhere.
7. You must write a lot of stuff.  Writing has to become a part of your life.  As the ancient saying goes, nulla dies sine linea (no day without a line).  This is a corollary of the persistence rule above.  I’ll bet you can write 1000 words a day of emails and text messages.  If you put down 1000 words a day on your thesis or book you’ll have a working draft in three to four months.  But as the well-published science fictioneer Fred Pohl (1978) put it, every day means every day.  It may sound as if this would take supererogatory dedication in the face of the endless demands of daily life, but that is what the professionals do.  They set a quota (either in time, words, or pages) and train themselves to stick to it.  This gets easier as you gain in experience and score a few publication successes, for there is a magical synergy between self-confidence and self-discipline. 
8. You must finish what you write.  Many academics are brilliant first-draft writers, but flag when faced with the hard work required to turn a first draft into publishable copy.  Tough it out; get it done, where “done” means “submitted and published”. 
9. “There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.”  There is much truth to this old aphorism; good writers must be good editors of their own work. However, you can reach a point of diminishing returns in which any further revisions to a paper would be what artists call “overpainting”.  It is a matter of experience to know when you have reached that point.  Eventually you must stop polishing that paper or book, and send it out. 
10. You should have several projects on the go.  I think of my writing desk as a sort of assembly line, with papers, lectures, op-eds, books, and the occasional review or grant application in various stages of completion.  Moving from one to another often fosters creativity.  But again, at a certain point, a particular item will be almost as good as you can hope to make it given the finitude of life.  Then you must put your head down, ignore all the other projects, and get the thing submitted. 
11. Since it takes months or often years to go from submission to publication, you need to always have several pieces of work under review at once. 
12. We are all more likely to get a project done when faced with a deadline.  If no external deadline is imposed, set your own.  You won’t always make your own deadlines, but it helps to give structure and focus to your work. 
13. The next point may seem too obvious to mention, but for many of us it does need to be mentioned.  Let’s suppose that you have waited months to get a paper back from a journal, and then the gods of publication smile and you get a revise-and-resubmit (probably more common than outright acceptance).  Get your revision back as soon as humanly possible.  The same advice applies to page proofs, indexes, or anything else that could keep a production editor waiting.  Always keep the ball on their side of the court.  
14. If you are given a revise-and-resubmit, do exactly but only what the editor asks you to do.  Do not take it as an opportunity to reconsider your whole approach to the problem.  Save that for the next paper. 
15. We all know the PhD candidates who can’t get their theses done because there is always one more book or major paper to study, one more section to write.  Sometimes this happens because the candidates are not getting good advice from their supervisors.  But often writers do not finish their work because they cannot be convinced that they need not cram everything that must said about their subject into one document.  An important part of the skillset of an effective research writer is to know what problems to set aside for next time. A research paper often needs to make no more than one point, but it needs to make it very thoroughly and clearly.  Put the next point in the next paper.  A PhD thesis needs to make perhaps three or four major points; don’t try to say more unless your supervisor or committee specifically tells you to do so. 
16. You must learn the technicalities of professional writing, such as manuscript preparation, proofreading, copy editing, citations, and the relevant software, just as an artist must understand how to mix her paints or choose the best brush for the task at hand. 
17. Now is the time when you should get one of the professional style manuals, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, the style guide of the Modern Language Association, or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and actually read it.  (I particularly recommend CMOS, since it is so thorough.)  All of these manuals have web pages that are quite good enough for undergraduates, but you are not an undergraduate any more.  
18. You must come to care about what it takes to write well.  I won’t give a lot of advice about style here, except for two suggestions.  First, good writers are wide readers.  Study the works of writers you particularly admire and try to see how they did it.  Second, learn to read your own writing critically and attentively.  Listen to what it sounds like in your head.  Does it scan?  Could someone else follow it?  Flow, clarity, timing, apt choice of words—these are the touchstones of good style. 
19. In general, you must cultivate professionalism in your writing.  An effective academic must be, among other things, a professional writer.  Take pride in your identity as a writer.  Strive to be damned good at what you do.
20. Should you only write papers, or should you try a book?  You need to write and publish some papers first, until you get your legs under you.  Some famous philosophers only published papers, some only a handful.  But you can do things with books that you can’t do with papers.  A few philosophers (such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger) kick-started their careers by writing notable books.  The nice thing about a book is that if you want to expand on an interesting point, you can just write another 10,000 words.  But don’t forget Rule 8!
21. Beware of predatory journals, which sprang up like weeds with the advent of on-line publication.  See Scam journals and OMICS fined $50 million.  If you have any doubts about the legitimacy of a journal, ask your advisors or colleagues.  There are also fake conferences, which sometimes promise publication in a dubious “journal” in return for a large registration fee. 
22. You’ll notice that I have not said much here about how to actually have something interesting to say in all of this writing that you are furiously sending out.  Most of the above is merely practical advice about how to survive in the slow-moving shark tank that is the world of academic publishing.  But how does one learn to do sound, insightful, creative philosophy?  There is no recipe for becoming as smart as Wittgenstein, but there are some things that can increase your chances of having something to say.  First, you do not do original work by striving to be original.  What you do is strive to see your way through a question on your own terms, and then express it as honestly and as clearly as possible. Cultivate your perception of an issue, without any concern for what you think you should think, and you will automatically be original.  Second, listen or feel for the nibble.  The neuroscience of creativity is still not well understood, but experience (mine and others) shows that much of our creative insight is generated subconsciously.  Steep yourself in your subject, and something will begin to speak to you, often in a very soft voice, like a fish nibbling on a line.  Tease that voice out into the open.  In my own phenomenology, it often takes the form of a dawning recognition that a certain point is obvious, but how that voice speaks may be different for others.  Learn to listen for your voice.  This may sound too New Age to be taken seriously, but it works.

I have not always followed all of these rules myself.  But to the extent that I have been successful in getting my work published, it had a lot to do with following these rules, with Rules 7, 8, and 13 being the most important.  (I am not good at Rule 1, since sometimes I like to amuse myself by starting a whole new conversation.)  Eventually, with experience, you will come to write your own list of rules, but these will help you to get off the ground.  Best of luck!

A Few References

There are innumerable handbooks and guides on writing, which I won’t try to list here.  I’ll mention just two items that happen to have been especially helpful for me. 

Frederik Pohl, “Four Pages a Day,” in The Way the Future Was:  A Memoir.  New York:  Ballantine Books, 1978. 

Robert J. Sawyer’s account of Heinlein’s Rules for Writing. 

On the value of personal knowledge, as opposed to opinion, see R. V. Jones, Most Secret War:  British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 (Coronet Books, 1978).  Jones was quoting (on p. 115) a friend, John Crow, of King’s College London. 

I have benefitted from personal advice from Peter Alward (or Master Peter as I sometimes think of him in connection with writing).  Thanks, as well, to Karl Laderoute for helpful comments.