The ‘publish or perish’ mantra is familiar to all academics and postgraduate researchers. Arts of Publication is aimed at these readers. The text emerged from a 2004 symposium on academic publishing, and sheds considerable light on this fascinating and frustrating field.

In the foreword, John Byron declares that an important challenge facing scholarly writers is to ‘ensure that their work gets out there in forms that are likely to have a detectable im-pact on their peers’ and also appeal to a ‘wider readership’. The various contributors (most of whom are academics) explain how this can be achieved. They refer to issues such as online- and self-publishing, writing for journals, and converting a doctoral thesis into a book.