Today’s podcast episode is inspired by a workshop I recently ran for mid-career faculty at Rutgers University. The topic was the challenges of writing your second book.

They asked me to run this because most book writing advice—and let’s admit, job advice in general—is geared towards helping junior faculty.

This makes sense in a lot of ways because junior scholars have the most to learn about the rules, both written and unwritten, of publishing and of their institutions that will move their careers forward.

But by the time you get tenure, there’s an assumption that you have it all figured out and the mentorship often stops or at least gets pared back significantly.

And if you’ve managed to publish a book during that time, the expectation is that you will definitely be able to do it again. Why wouldn’t you?

Today, I’m going to talk about the reasons why that’s not necessarily the case.

I’ll also give you a reflective exercise to think through ways to make the process of writing your second book more manageable.

And for those of you who are working on your first book and think that this topic might not apply to you, you’ll still get value from taking a sneak peak into what’s in store for you in the future!