The Thesis Whisperer is a “not for loss” blog which is maintained by me (Dr Inger Mewburn) in my own time, with my own money.

Maintaining a free, quality blog, year after year, is not cost free – I must buy equipment, books and, sometimes, expert help. I work full time, so being able to throw money at problems is critical to keeping the whole show on the road. If you want to help out and keep Thesis Whisperer on the air, here’s some ways you can help.

The best way to show your love for the Thesis Whisperer is to consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon. Patreons get a special video post or blog extra every two weeks – that’s double the Thesiswhisperer goodness for only $12 a year!

Don’t like Patreon? I get it. People often write to me when they finish, thanking me for all the work and asking how they can contribute. I have set up a PayPal money pool to take small donations if you feel you want to say thank you with a contribution.

Or you can buy something I recommend on Amazon. My highly recommended page contains links to various books and products I use in my work. Income from this affiliate marketing pays for my book habit. Books will be reviewed on the Thesis Whisperer, so it’s a circle of life thing.

Or you can buy a book!

“How to be an academic: The Thesis Whisperer reveals all” is a collection of my writing about academia published through NewSouth Press. There’s a rather nice review on the Australian Review of Books and you can also read a review of the book from the Campus review. 

I requested that the price be kept as low as possible because I am well aware that many PhD students – and working academics for that matter – are on low incomes. At the moment it’s around $10 AUD on Kindle.

If you’d like a paper copy, you can buy it from a number of places. The  paperback edition can be purchased direction from the NewSouth website (they can deliver internationally), or from Amazon in your country or from Booktopia.

If you live in Australia, you can purchase it from the co-op bookstore on your campus or other good retailers, like Paperchain or Readings.

You can also buy the original (really cheap) book of the blog.

The first Thesis Whisperer book “How to tame your PhD” is available from Amazon on ebook for $5.99 US (around 4 pounds sterling and $7.50 Australia); a price point carefully calibrated to match the cost of a cup of coffee and a piece of cake in Australia. This book is explicitly designed around the ‘pain points’ of writing a PhD thesis. It’s a short book, around 25,000 words, but contains what I think is the most pertinent advice for actually producing your thesis or dissertation in the shortest time possible. There is only one post in this book that is re-published in “How to be an academic”. The two books together are a good representation of the back catalogue of the blog.

I believe in the advice in this book – because I followed it myself. I did do my thesis in 3 years while working two days a week for most of it – and won my faculty award at the end. On those two days I wasn’t doing my thesis I taught PhD students. This experience deeply informed my teaching style. I believe that a thesis can be written in 3 years and that it doesn’t have to kill you.

If print is your thing, there’s a paperback version available from Lulu.com for $14.95  (around 10 pounds sterling and $17USD) – a price I hope will fit into most PhD student budgets.

You can download ‘Tame your PhD’ from the US Amazon store here.

If you are in the UK, you can find ‘Tame your PhD’ in the UK Amazon store

I have put “How to Tame your PhD” on Amazon without digital rights management (DRM) so that you can convert it into any format that suits you using a program like Calibre. I would prefer people not to pirate it, but I suppose they can if they want to.

But I hope you wont.

Co-authored and edited books

I assisted in the publication and editing of the “Postgraduate Study in the Australia: Surviving and Succeeding” which is presently only available online.

If you’re interested in my more ‘serious’ academic work, check out the upcoming book I have edited with Deborah Lupton and Pat Thomson. The Digital Academic: Critical Perspectives on Digital Technologies in Higher Education. Published through Routledge. For a taste of the book here is a book chapter I wrote about PhD student blogging with Pat Thomson.

I’m currently writing a book with my excellent colleagues Shaun Lehmann and Katherine Firth of the Research Voodoo blog. The book is called “Writing trouble: why it happens and how to fix it. A practical guide for academics and graduate students”. We have a writing trouble mailing list to keep everyone informed on the progress and offer sneak peeks.