Via Leiter Reports, 5 conseils donnés par Thom Brooks pour se faire publier avec succès :

Secret n°1 : trouver le bon ton

The key to success is to find your voice and connecting with the public. When you write for a journal, your audience is unknown: They will be people with an interest in the general area, but they may lack the specific expertise you bring to a topic. You cannot assume they will have the same perspectives on the relevant literature and they will be unknown to you. Writing for such an audience is a different practice (and experience) from writing for classmates and for assessment.

Secret n°2 : l’importance du sujet

In addition to finding your voice and writing from an appropriate point of view, there is a second important secret behind publishing success. This is focus. No matter how clearly you can write (itself a major bonus), you will never find publishing success without constraining your writing within a particular focus. A publishable article is about a clear problem and limits its entire discussion to addressing this problem. Arguments or discussions that address the main problem less than 100 percent should not be exiled to footnotes, but omitted altogether: If your article is about x, then don’t discuss y also. For example, if your article is about a misreading of a particular argument, then do not write about anything else — such as other misreadings — that is not directly relevant.

Secret n°3 : le refus est la norme

Publishing might not be as highly prized as it is if it was easy for everybody. I believe following the secrets to publishing success outlined here may help make publishing more likely, but rejection is the norm. It is an old publisher’s tale that for every article accepted, about seven are rejected. This sounds about right. Most reputable journals have acceptance rates of 20 percent or less. The end result is that it would be foolish to become upset or too surprised from a rejection as the vast majority will be turned down.

Secret n°4 : obtenir un contrat d’édition pour un ouvrage

An excellent book contract is not just about ideas, but also its marketability. Let me first say a few words about this market. Academic publishers regularly remark to me that the difference between academic publishing and trade (or commercial) publishing is that academic publishers have far lower expectations of sales. This is because academic books are not often the stuff of New York Times bestseller lists and blockbuster movies. Sales for most academic books are 500 copies or less: only 5 percent or fewer books sell more than 1,000 copies. (On average, textbooks almost always sell best.)

Secret n°5 : se faire publier prend du temps

The fifth secret is that publishing takes time … and probably more than you might think. More than once I have had an eager young scholar ask — when submitting an article — if the paper would appear in print six months from today. The answer is very clearly “no;” the peer review process itself may take this long in extremes.