Thanks to everyone who has offered congrats on my newly published MA thesis. I thought I’d offer just a few thoughts, springboarding off of Pat McCullough’s note of congrats. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

• VDM’s focus is dissertations, theses, and research notes. I took time and got advice before going ahead with it. The reason is pretty simple— once published with VDM, which is a P.O.D. (print on demand) publisher, it is there forever. If you say something crazy, it is out there forever. I wouldn’t want to look back in 20 years and be embarrassed that I published it for all the world to read.
• If you have research notes or an MA thesis that you are thinking of publishing, VDM is a nice option in that it costs you nothing at all (unlike self-publishing), is indexed in major listings (like Amazon), and you can even make a little off the title if it sells decently. Another positive aspect is that VDM allows you to republish up to 80% of the work elsewhere.
• A small note for biblical studies folks, you CANNOT use unicode Hebrew in VDM publications. They do not note this anywhere, but trust me on this. The first run of my book was actually corrupted because of the unicode Hebrew in my text.
• As Mike Bird told me, aim higher for your dissertation than VDM. The exception is if, for some reason, you want to do absolutely no more work on your dissertation— you just want to publish as is. Or perhaps you are not staying in the guild but want to do a little something with that book you just wrote. In these cases, VDM may be a good choice for you.
• If you are thinking of publishing your MA thesis, evaluate your oral defense and reader reports closely. I felt very good coming out of my defense and had only very minor revision. Furthermore, my external reader, Joseph Trafton, is an expert in the field of the Psalms of Solomon and was very positive towards my work. If he would have been critical of my arguments, I wouldn’t have pursued this.
• Ask your thesis advisor for some advice on the subject. There name is connected to it too (as you’d probably recognize them in your preface) so they have something at stake in it too. Again, my thesis advisor Craig Evans was positive and told me to go for it.
• Because VDM publications are not subject to any peer review, you need to find 1 or 2 “peers” yourself to give it a critical read over. If your advisor or external reader was not an expert in the particular field you wrote in, find someone who is and beg them to read it for you and give you some critical feedback. In addition to my external reader/advisor notes, I had a friend who has been an editor for many years to give it a read over, as well as my doktorvater Mike Bird. Again, if Mike Bird would have raised some serious issues, I wouldn’t have proceeded with it, unless I had time to make the substantial revisions.
• Having said all of that, I hate people who take themselves too seriously. So don’t think too highly of yourself. Its just an MA thesis after all

That’s all for the random thoughts. I hope to see some more solid biblical studies theses published through VDM in the years to come.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 8:27 pm by Danny Zacharias and is filed under VDM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.