Books

It costs me about $3000 AUD a year to keep Thesis Whisperer alive… here’s how you can help (and benefit yourself too!)

A lot of people simply buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi when they achieve a major milestone or finish their PhD – you’d be surprised how much this adds up to over a year!

You can show Thesis Whisperer some regular love by becoming a $1 a month Patreon subscriber.

If you are shopping for books for your PhD on Amazon, you can buy something via affiliate links from my Big List of Excellent books for your PhD  

I’m the author or co-author of 10 published books. This blog is mostly maintained by these sweet, sweet royalties! Details and purchasing options are below:

Tame Your PhD: the book of the blog

If you’ve clicked on a few posts you will have seen how big the blog is. Never fear! I have compiled the best bits into a book you can own in various formats.

How to Tame your PhD helps you navigate the major ‘pain points’ of writing a PhD thesis; from thinking up a research question, to working out your discussion section and learning how to pump out 10,000 words a day. 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 – and won my faculty award at the end. This book contains my best tips and tricks. It also has a lovely new cover, designed by Sussanah Low from Wishpom.

Purchase options are:

Rich Academic / Poor Academic

Academia is no longer the stable, well-paid profession it used to be. These days it’s common to cobble together some kind of living wage from multiple jobs – most of them paid by the hour or extremely short contracts. Some people call this a ‘portfolio career’: but to us this term seems to be an attempt to put a positive spin on what academia really is for many people: an uncertain, precarious work life.

I wrote this book with my friend and colleague, Dr Narelle Lemon.

Twenty years ago, right about when we started our academic careers, a period of casual teaching and research assistant work was seen as the start of an academic career. Now a significant number of people spend entire careers working as a casual (or ‘adjunct’ as they are called in the USA). Casual academics are anything but casual about their work. We meet passionate and committed academics all the time who want to stay in the teaching and research they love but are not making enough money from it to survive. 

This short book was born of our frustration with this precarious work situation. While we are fans of collective action, in the meantime a person must eat. We’re both quite good at generating ‘extra income’ on top of our academic salaries. We use this money to attend conferences overseas, buy books, access expensive subscription services (looking at you ChatGPT and Claude), hire in help, and get the latest equipment – all stuff our universities won’t pay for. Now that we have both reached the highest pay grade in the Australian system, this extra income is big enough to cause us both headaches at tax time. As Taylor Swift would say, this is a champagne problem. We want you to have this champagne problem too!

Buy Rich Academic / Poor Academic directly from Thesis Whisperer for the price of an almond latte in South Australia – $5.37

If you fill in the feedback survey via the link inside the book, we will send you version two (if we write it) for free.

 

The Text Expander Guide for Academics

Type Less. Eat more ice-cream.

Welcome to the Mewburn-Downs guide to using TextExpander. Here’s the promise of this book in a nutshell:

Without working any harder, you can save time with TextExpander by typing less, but still producing the same number of words.

TextExpander is an app that runs in the background on your computer; always ready to insert ‘pre-recorded’ text into any application. Little savings gained with TextExpander program can add up  – we think the average academic can save a week a year.

But… Inger initially struggled to harness the power of TextExpander in her academic job. Jason brought Inger up to speed by sharing examples during tapings of On The Reg, our podcast about academic productivity. We realised that what new users need is a ‘look book’ of TextExpander snippets, just for academics. We imagined a book that contained a series of examples and use cases relevant to teaching and researching inside universities.

This book is the first version of that dream.

Buy it directly from Thesis Whisperer here for only $3.99 AUD

We hope you’ll consider buying this book even if you don’t own the software: it has heaps of handy template examples of text you need in your everyday life. Our purpose in writing this book is not to make you ‘more productive’ for your university: they get enought out of you already. We want to help you get more time for, well – you. Time you save using TextExpander can be used to eat a proper lunch; sit on a bench on campus and read a book; get some exercise; go home earlier – or whatever takes your fancy.

All proceeds from this book will go towards supporting the ‘On the Reg’ podcast operating expenses, including hosting, software and equipment.

Be Visible or Vanish: engage, influence and create impact with your research

This book is a collaboration with Simon Clews where we brain dump our collective 50 years of experience. The chapters help you tackle all the common presentation scenarios:

Assessment and exam presentations
Research group meetings
Writing an amazing email about your research
Bringing your research into the classroom (lectures)
Poster presentations
The basic 20-minute conference talk
Being the ‘good guest’ on an invited panel
Keynotes and plenary talks
Pitching for money
… and more!

  • Buy it directly from the publisher, Routledge, here.
  • Or buy via my Kindle affiliate link here
  • This book is published by Routledge and should be available via your university bookstore, worldwide.

 

How to Fix your academic writing trouble

*A new version of this book, which includes using AI, is under preparation and will be available in late 2026. 

Do you wonder what to do when your supervisor writes ‘This doesn’t Flow’ on the side of your chapter draft? How to Fix Your Academic Writing trouble was written with this exact problem in mind! This book is a collaboration with my excellent colleagues Shaun Lehmann and Katherine Firth of the Research Insiders Blog. Here’s the back blurb:

This clear and accessible guide to decoding academic feedback will help you interpret what your lecturer or research supervisor is really trying to tell you about your writing – and show you how to fix it. We will help you master a range of techniques and strategies to take your writing to the next level and along the way you’ll learn why academic text looks the way it does, and how to produce that ‘authoritative scholarly voice’ that everyone talks about. This book is an easy to use resource for postgraduate students and researchers in all disciplines, and even professional academics, to diagnose their writing issues and find ways to fix them.

  • This book is published by Open University Press and should be available via your university bookstore, worldwide.
  • Buy the book from the US amazon store here
  • Buy it from the UK Amazon store here.
  • The cheapest way for Australian readers to buy this book is straight from the publisher, see link here.

 

Managing Your Research Project: A Guide for Researchers

By Inger Mewburn, Pat Thomson, Helen Kara, Aimee Grant
 

Managing Your Research Project is a practical and accessible guide that helps researchers navigate the complexities of project management. This user-friendly resource offers valuable insights and tools for funded, commissioned, unfunded, and student research in academic settings.

Instead of advocating for a single project management approach, the book provides a variety of options, empowering readers to develop a style that works best for them. Each chapter is packed with practical tools and examples, offering easy-to-follow guidance on how to keep a project moving forward. Key topics include selecting the right project management approach, utilising effective tools, addressing ethical considerations, and managing critical aspects such as time, relationships, finances, bureaucracy, visibility, and quality assurance. While project management can be demanding, this book shows readers how to approach it so that it can be a satisfying, collaborative, rewarding experience. Along the way, the authors address the potential challenges and pitfalls of managing research projects and offer strategies to overcome them.

This book is published by Routledge and should be available via your university bookstore, worldwide.

Buy directly through Routledge here
And via Amazon here

Level up your essays

If you loved How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble and want to teach your undergraduate and Masters students the same tricks, this is the book for you! Help your students (or your high school aged kids!) write essays in the arts, sciences and professional disciplines. This book should be easy to use by anyone who wants to improve their academic results.

This book is published by University of New South Wales Press and should be available via your university bookstore, worldwide.

Buy Direct from the Publisher, or on Booktopia, Amazon Australia,

 

 

How to be an academic

Welcome to the university, where the Academic Hunger Games, fueled by precarious employment conditions, is the new reality: a perpetual jostle for short-term contracts and the occasional plum job. But Inger Mewburn is here to tell you that life doesn’t have to be so grim. A veteran of the university gig economy, Mewburn—aka The Thesis Whisperer—is perfectly placed to reflect on her experience and offer a wealth of practical strategies to survive and thrive.

How to be an academic: The Thesis Whisperer reveals all is a collection of my writing about academia: much of it was published here first and then compiled into my first book, 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. 

Buy it from Amazon in the US for $9.99.

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.

How to be an Academic (a slightly different version) has now been published in the US as ‘Becoming an Academic: how to get through grad school and beyond’ through Johns Hopkins Press! The best way to buy this version of the book is via the US Amazon store here

 

Other Collaborations

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

I’ve done only one purely ‘academic’ book – a collaboration 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.

Recommendations for books by other authors:

Your Time Starts now: a guide to achieving success in the Three minute thesis competition by Simon Clews

Your Time Starts Now! – a guide to achieving success in the Three Minute Thesis competition by Simon Clews – completely revised 2026 edition (now a free download!)

Thinking of competing in the Three Minute Thesis competition (or 3MT® as it is affectionately known)? 3MT® guru Simon Clews has written a guide to help you make the most of your precious time on stage or screen.

Now a Learning Advisor at ANU, making him a proud colleague of the Thesis Whisperer, Simon has been roaming the planet since the birth of 3MT®  training competition entrants in the fine art of getting the message of their research across in three minutes armed only with a single PowerPoint slide.

Five years ago he put everything he knew down on paper in Your Time Starts Now! (Thesis Whisperer Books) and this year has updated it completely and made the decision to give it away for free. Madness, I know, but his uncharacteristic outburst of generosity is a win-win for the rest of us. Download your free copy here.