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

If you like what we do, you can support the Thesis Whisperer in three ways:

1) Donate via PayPal money pool or become a Patreon member.

I have big plans for a YouTube channel, but I have a day  job and need to buy in some help. If you’re interested in watching ThesisWhisperer TV, have a look at my Patreon page where I am asking for $1 a month to support my dream. When I get 500 Patreons I can get started!

Don’t like Patreon? I get it. Small donations are always appreciated, so I have set up a PayPal money pool. This income allows me to sustain the blog and buy in specialist help when I need it.

2) Buy a range of books to help you with your thesis through links I provide

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.

3) Buy my books

“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.