Writing an academic book is an intense journey. We spoke with authors from the OUP – DSA book series about their experiences from the shift of turning a dissertation into a cohesive manuscript to the daily struggle of actually getting the words down. 

A thesis or dissertation, unfortunately, isn’t automatically a book. It requires fundamentally rethinking the scope and having the confidence to make a bigger argument. Matt Barlow was encouraged by his editor to broaden his perspective beyond his initial research in his thesis. This encouragement he said helped him find confidence in the value of his ideas.

Samuel Brazys‘s book was an evolution of his dissertation project but his core mission was linking two separate academic discussions: “…the aid literatures and the trade literatures don’t really speak to one another all that much, so… I always thought these two streams were pretty interestingly linked, especially in the Global South…” The book became an effort to promote a new way of thinking about how aid and trade “either do or don’t work together,” extending beyond the original, narrower focus.

Finishing a book requires a reliable daily habit. Several authors suggested treating the writing process like a job. For Naomi Hossain, the philosophy is simple, if demanding: “You just have to sit down and bloody do it.” She stresses that like exercise you have to get into the habit of writing regularly. “Basically it is stamina, you know, you just have to keep going.”

Samuel Brazys found that a structured routine overcame self-doubt and lost momentum: “I also tried to treat it like a job for a while – at the same time every day, sitting down, closing my email, not worrying about anything else. Once I did that, it finally started to move, and that’s when I realized, okay, this is actually going to get done.”

Ben Radley also realized that the sheer volume of material required more than scattered hours. “I needed to give longer, concentrated blocks of time to it, so I could really become immersed in it with as few distractions as possible.”

Samuel also found success in just taking “a step forward every day,” explaining that sometimes that meant “writing 200 words that I ended up deleting the next day, but it still meant I’d kept the habit going, and that was really important for actually finishing.”

Arranging a large volume of data and ideas into a compelling, coherent structure is often an iterative process that continues well into the project.

Ben Radley’s experience was to trust the process (even when overwhelmed) and articulated this challenge by invoking the famous comedy sketch: “There’s a great line from the English comedian Eric Morecambe… ‘I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order’.” He described this as a “continual struggle” and that the structure of his book was “in flux right up until the end.” His solution was to “simply carrying on and getting it done.”

For Samuel Brazys, the desire to bridge the aid and trade literatures created an inherent structure for his book. By focusing on this intersection, the entire book was organized around the underlying logic of showing how previously separate components could be cohesive.

The most valuable lesson for any aspiring author is that the first draft is not meant to be perfect; it just needs to exist. This mindset is crucial for maintaining momentum and escaping the paralysing loop of endless editing.

Naomi Hossain succinctly captures this reality: “Writing is revising, writing is editing. You know, you have to have something to work on.”

Samuel Brazys found it was “really easy to get caught up in that loop of ‘is this good enough?’ or ‘should I rework this section again?’” To break free, he focused on simply getting the actual words down: “…just getting something down on paper every day, not worrying too much about whether it was finalised, but just taking a step forward every day.”

While discipline is essential, sometimes it’s the personal, less conventional advice that keeps the writing brain working. Naomi Hossain advises protecting your “good morning brain” that is, the time of day when you are mentally at your best and to “don’t spend your ‘good morning’ brain on email.”

She also has a clear prescription for beating writer’s block and mental fatigue: “I also think it’s quite useful to get a dog and go for long walks. I find that helped with my writing… There’s nothing like a good walk for clearing the head…”

Matt Barlow relied heavily on a schedule to avoid getting obsessed and “getting bogged down in endless edits.” He found it helpful “to plan what I was going to do on which day and write, and then I try and stick with that, because if not, you just end up in there all the time.”

For more information on writing for the DSA OUP book series, listen to our talks on getting published, and read interviews with the authors. Editors and authors from the DSA OUP book series are often at the annual conference, in 2026 taking place at University College Dublin.