Publish Not Perish

Jenn McClearen, PhD
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Publish Not Perish is the podcast for scholars who want to write more—without burning out. Host Dr. Jenn McClearen shares practical tips, honest reflections, and real stories to help you make steady, meaningful progress on your writing with more ease, clarity, and joy. www.publishnotperish.net

  1. Sep 4

    How to Manage Feedback on Your Book Project | Ep. 51

    Writing a book means making thousands of decisions alone, about argument and structure and which sentence earns its place, and then one day the reader reports arrive and several other minds enter a room you thought was yours alone. Even when that feedback is generous and clearly meant to help, it can still knock you sideways, because a book is an entire architecture, and someone suggesting you rethink the structure or add an entire set of literature is much bigger than a line edit. In this episode, I talk through why that disorientation is a normal, even predictable, part of the process and why giving yourself a beat before diagnosing what the feedback means is not procrastination but genuine preparation for the work ahead. Once we’ve sat with the feeling of it, I walk through the system I actually use to make sense of a stack of reader reports: sorting comments by topic (argument, literature, evidence, methods) and then again by scale (minor, medium, major), so you can tell the difference between a bookshelf issue and a load-bearing wall. I also get into the harder, less discussed skill of deciding what not to revise, and how keeping a simple tracking document, noting the concern, your decision, and your reasoning, becomes part of the intellectual labor rather than an administrative afterthought. My hope is that this episode gives you a concrete way to hold onto your authorship even while taking feedback seriously, so you can strengthen the book without handing it over entirely to everyone else’s preferences. As a bonus for today’s episode, here’s a guide on how to think about and work through the revision process for a journal article. Even though the guide is focused on articles, you’ll see many of my major revision processes apply, whether it’s a shorter or longer form project. https://drive.google.com/file/d/167u8HSnk9-UMpGFDiV-mMeGrC-VR1ASu/view?usp=sharing This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

    How to Manage Feedback on Your Book Project | Ep. 51

  2. Aug 20

    Navigating Academia With the Brain You Actually Have | Ep. 50

    I signed up for a certification in neurodivergent-inclusive coaching because I wanted to understand my clients better, but I learned so much about myself in the process. Since childhood, I’ve known I was dyslexic, but the training provided me with fresh insights into the patterns of my attention, working memory, task initiation, and energy, deepening my understanding of why I resonate so strongly with my clients who have ADHD. More importantly, the course sharpened something I’ve believed since I started Publish Not Perish: a writing strategy is only useful if it works for the brain that actually has to use it, not for an imaginary academic who sleeps well every night, teaches without depletion, and can produce on command. Much of the training centered on executive function: capacities like task initiation, planning, working memory, emotional regulation, and flexible thinking. Looking at academic work through that lens makes a lot of writing trouble that seems mysterious or moral become specific and workable. Three days of avoiding a document probably doesn’t indicate laziness or poor discipline. The task may be too big, your capacity may be depleted, or the stakes may feel so high that starting becomes difficult. Each problem calls for a different response. In this episode, I talk about what this training taught me about neurodivergence, writing, and my own brain, and why you may not need another productivity system so much as a better understanding of what produces friction for your brain and what lights it up. Ps. Much of the definitional information I share in this episode comes from the course Neurodivergent Inclusive Coaching, which I took with the organization In Good Company in 2026. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

    Navigating Academia With the Brain You Actually Have | Ep. 50

  3. Aug 7

    Stop Planning for Time You Don't Actually Have | Ep. 49

    A few weeks ago I published an episode about treating your writing plan as a Google Doc and not a PDF. The rationale is that just because you plan to write that chapter draft in four weeks doesn’t mean you can predict everything that can get in the way of that plan. While I still hold there is no crystal ball for planning writing projects, I do think there's a common planning mistake that I see many academics making: we plan without taking into account what is actually on our plates and instead plan in some sort of ideal void that is free of the rest of our responsibilities. It’s a sort of amnesia that forgets the hiring season, the grading spike, the invited chapter we agreed to months ago, the family visit, and the always, already hectic semester rhythms. As a result, we often make writing plans without all the data we need, and when those plans collapse, we feel behind and ashamed that we have failed the plan. In this episode I walk through what it looks like to plan from a fuller view of your responsibilities, starting with your work calendar and the service commitments that look tiny on paper and enormous in the nervous system, then the writing obligations beyond the book that draw from the same intellectual and emotional reserves, and finally the parts of your life outside work that have their own seasons of less quiet, less privacy, and less energy. Once you can see all of it at once, you can scale the work to the conditions you are actually writing in, which might mean rereading the chapter and revising ten pages rather than finishing the whole thing, or leaving yourself a clear memo so that future you can re-enter the manuscript without having to excavate it. And if just revising ten pages makes you feel like you’re not being ambitious enough, remember that scaling your writing plans is what actually allows ambition to survive your actual work life and life life. Related Content: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

    Stop Planning for Time You Don't Actually Have | Ep. 49

  4. Jul 24

    The Case for Ordinary Writing Sessions | Ep. 48

    There’s a fantasy that circulates with writers, including academic writers, that writing has to feel meaningful, or clear, or inspired before it counts. Today I want to trouble this notion and instead present what I think is a more realistic version of what actually happens in a writing life. Much of your writing days will be insignificant, banal, or feel like you are going in circles. Yet, when one writing session becomes the referendum on whether years of work on your book or article were worth it, the work is buried under all that weight, and we start requiring impossible conditions before we’ll let ourselves begin to write. I talk through why “I don’t feel like writing” and “I can’t write today” are two different sentences, even though we treat them as the same one, and what it looks like to let a session be ordinary instead of steeped in ceremony. To be clear, I’m not arguing that anyone should push through exhaustion, grief, or genuine distress, because there’s a difference between dealing with life stress and managing feelings about writing. I’m talking about the smaller, more common friction: boredom, the dread of opening the document, the sense that we’re not ready or clear enough yet. You don’t need inspiration to write. Instead, inspiration comes through the act of writing itself. I walk through a few ways to shrink a writing session down to something you can start before you feel like it and why repeated, unglamorous contact with a project does more for it than waiting for the beautiful, spacious afternoon. I hope you find my musings useful! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

    The Case for Ordinary Writing Sessions | Ep. 48

  5. Jul 16

    Your Writing Plan Is a Google Doc, Not a PDF | Ep. 47

    Earlier this week, I wrote about that specific mid-July stomach-drop: the moment you glance at the calendar and realize the semester is closer than the version of you who made summer writing plans in May could have ever imagined. And the writing you’d hoped to finish by now isn’t as far along as you’d hoped. If that feeling found you, this episode is a continuation of that conversation, though it takes a different angle. Rather than offering steps for getting back on track like the newsletter did, I want to shift how you think about the plan itself. This is the plan you built back when summer still existed as an idea rather than a lived, complicated season. What would it mean to treat your summer writing plan less like a verdict on your seriousness as a scholar and more like a rough draft that has room for growth? I’d contend that your plans weren’t wrong so much as incomplete. They didn’t account for how depleted you’d be after a punishing school year or the wedding and the visiting in-laws and the kid suddenly home from camp sick or the way “revise the chapter” turned out to be an entire ecosystem of rereading and restructuring rather than just one task. In this episode, I make the case for treating your writing plan like a Google Doc instead of a PDF: something easily editable, something that absorbs what you’ve learned about your actual capacity rather than something you failed to live up to. If your plan has gone quiet, this one’s for figuring out what it’s trying to tell you. And no, it’s not that you failed the plan; it’s that the plan didn’t account for your actual summer. If you need help rebuilding that plan for what’s left of the summer, my 1:1 Writing Strategy and Structure Program could be your next step. Related Content: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

  6. Jul 9

    Why "Originality" Is an Overblown Writing Goal | Ep. 46

    “Originality” is a small word carrying an enormous amount of weight in academic writing, and I think it causes a lot of undue angst. We’re told our dissertations need it, our articles need it, our books need it, and somewhere along the way that reasonable expectation curdles into something much heavier, the sense that we need to produce an idea that has never existed in anyone’s mind before ours. In this episode, I want to push back on that definition and offer something I find far more workable. Scholarly originality is more often achieved by building on existing ideas that emerge through relationships, applying a familiar theory to an unfamiliar archive, or noticing and bringing to the forefront a pattern that everyone else has ignored. A topic no one has studied is not the same thing as a contribution, and a well-trodden topic can still hold real insight if you’re asking a sharper question or reframing the stakes. Give the episode a listen, and see whether relation, rather than invention, gives you a little more room in your quest for originality. Related Content: https://www.publishnotperish.net/p/reframing-the-desire-to-write-profoundly This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

    Why "Originality" Is an Overblown Writing Goal | Ep. 46

  7. Jul 2

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing, Part 2 | Ep. 45

    Last week I talked about the hidden curriculum of academic book writing: the professional knowledge scholars are expected to have but are rarely taught directly. We covered why a book is a different genre than a dissertation, how to think about press selection as a question of fit rather than only prestige, and what a book proposal actually needs to do for the editor who receives it. You can listen to that episode here: This week I turn to what happens after the book enters the publishing system, which is often where even very accomplished scholars start to feel unsteady. An editor expresses interest, and then things go quiet. Reader reports come back contradicting each other. You are asked to revise, but it is not always clear which feedback deserves your full attention and which reflects one reader’s preference for a different book entirely. A lot of what I want to do in this episode is slow the process down so it becomes legible. Academic publishing timelines are genuinely long, and without a basic understanding of why, ordinary delays can start to feel like evidence of something: that the project is wrong, that you misjudged your readiness, that you are not really a book writer. Part of what the hidden curriculum costs people is the psychological load of interpreting silence without any framework for what silence normally means. The other thing I spend time on is peer review, and specifically the skill of reading feedback rather than simply surviving it. Reader reports are not verdicts. They are one or two people’s encounters with your manuscript from their own location in the field, and your job as the author is to interpret them strategically: to find what is genuinely pointing to a problem in the manuscript; to distinguish that from a reviewer asking for a different book; and to make revision decisions that strengthen your project rather than dissolve it into someone else’s. Revision, I argue, is less about fixing and more about design—the work of shaping the reader’s experience across the whole manuscript, which requires you to hold onto your own authority over the project even while taking feedback seriously. The overarching theme running through both episodes is that when professional knowledge is distributed unevenly, confusion is perceived as inadequacy. The goal of these two episodes is to give you a little more of the map — not so that publishing becomes easy, but so that you can stop experiencing its difficulties as proof that you were never ready. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing, Part 2 | Ep. 45

  8. Jun 25

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing Part 1 | Ep. 44

    There is a moment in many academic book projects when the writer realizes: I don’t actually know what game I’m playing. You know your field, your archive, your argument. You’ve written a dissertation. You may have published articles and given conference papers and mentored students. And then someone says, “You should send a proposal to a press”—and suddenly a whole new set of questions opens up that no one ever taught you how to answer. In this episode, I dig into the hidden curriculum of academic book writing: some of the professional knowledge scholars are expected to have, even though it is rarely taught directly. I focus on the front end of the process, starting with why a book is not simply a bigger dissertation, moving through how to think about press selection as a question of fit rather than just prestige, and arriving at what a book proposal actually needs to do. This episode also makes an argument I care about: that not knowing any of this already does not mean you have done anything wrong. The hidden curriculum is not hidden equally from everyone, and turning uneven access to professional knowledge into a private story about your own inadequacy is one of the most predictable and most damaging effects of a system that relies on knowledge it does not consistently teach. Next week in Part 2, I turn to what happens once the book enters the publishing system: peer review, revision, and timelines that shape how academic books are received and evaluated. The hidden curriculum does not end when an editor expresses interest. In some ways, that is when the next layer begins. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing Part 1 | Ep. 44
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About

Publish Not Perish is the podcast for scholars who want to write more—without burning out. Host Dr. Jenn McClearen shares practical tips, honest reflections, and real stories to help you make steady, meaningful progress on your writing with more ease, clarity, and joy. www.publishnotperish.net

Information

  • Creator
    Jenn McClearen, PhD
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Jenn McClearen
  • Show Website
    Publish Not Perish

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