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151 & LIVING A PUBLISHING LIFESTYLE 9 A publishing lifestyle is not simply a lifestyle developed early in your academic career and then abandoned once you have secured tenure. A publishing lifestyle involves constantly seeking to make a serious contribution to your field of academic endeavor, from first appointment to emeritus status and beyond. This means that it is not an “added extra” to life, or something that you have to think twice about before undertaking , or behavior to be turned on or off at will. A publishing lifestyle is an intentional lifestyle that believes that—all of the vagaries and jokes regarding the scholarly world, publishing included, aside—the individual scholar who is dedicated to an academic field can and will be making a regular and steady contribution to the development of learning and understanding. This contribution is not judged in terms of publicity, pseudocelebrity appearances on the television or radio, citations in the popular press, or popular-level publications. It is determined by the serious research and writing that genuinely advances knowledge. Those who sell out for popular appeal soon become the tired hacks that they seek to emulate, but serious scholarship is beneficial not only for its own time but for other times as well. It endures long after the lights have faded, the print has blurred, and the channel has been changed. Such serious scholarship endures longer than the very scholars themselves and becomes the foundation for a subsequent generation of scholars who themselves are pushing the frontiers of knowledge even further forward. This is not an idealized picture of scholarship, because we all know that along the way there are various abortive attempts, questionable motives, and some wrong dealing. What I am speaking of is the scholarship that stands the 152 Inking the Deal test of time, even if it is not recognized in its own time, and becomes the intellectual foundations of continuing intellectual endeavor. I wish here to identify four principles of a publishing lifestyle that I believe will help to ensure its continued success for the one who practices it. These four include (1) setting goals, (2) the rule of five and one, (3) the “never say no” principle, and (4) avoiding the paralysis of overanalysis. Setting Goals When I had my first academic position, I wanted to be sure that I did not fall into the trap that so many young professors do, of spending so much time on course preparation that I let my research go cold. I had invested a good number of years in developing my primary subject expertise, and I wanted to be sure that I was able to have the most enduring kind of impact on my primary field as I could while my research was still fresh and I was still able to say a number of things that had not been said in the field before. I realized that I would have to exercise discipline, especially in these early days of my career, if I was to be able to fulfill the general goals that I had for my contribution to my field. As a result, I set a number of specific goals for myself. There were two goals that focused on my publications. One was to start a pattern of getting books published on a regular basis, and the other was to start getting articles published in major and significant refereed journals. In these early stages, I figured that if I paid attention to these two dimensions, other areas would work themselves out, such as giving conference papers and the like. As it turned out, they did. In the early stages of my publishing career, I went about publishing my dissertation as quickly and straightforwardly as possible. It was more difficult to set goals for myself regarding publication in journals. What I finally stumbled upon was to establish a pattern that fit my particular area of primary research interest but that might not fit with other fields. However , it gives a good idea of the kinds of goals that you can set and the time frame in which to accomplish them. My primary field of research activity and interest is a field that draws together scholars from all over the world, but in particular from North America and Europe. So I decided that I would select what I considered to be the premier journals in my field in the Western world. I selected one journal published in the USA by the premier North American...

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