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At the suggestion of the inestimable @tigerlilyrocks, I thought I'd do a thread on my thoughts on turning a #phdtobook for #TeachAncient and #classicstwitter. They're personal reflections, not unalterable laws, so feel free to pitch in, and I hope this advice can be of help!
Firstly, my CV. In 2013 I finished a thesis entitled 'Usurpation and the construction of legitimacy in imperial panegyric, 289-389' which became the 2018 book 'Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire: Civil War, Panegyric, and the Construction of Legitimacy' pubed by OUP.
I was very lucky to get postdoctoral research funding that gave me time and space to work on that project, less lucky that securing that funding took me 18 months during which I had to get a job in the private sector since I'd also just picked up a family to support. So, advice:
1) Admit that your PhD sucks. This is sooper hard. You worked on it for three years. Maybe your examiners praised it to the stars. And you’re (rightfully) proud of it. BUT, it’s a PhD, and PhDs aren’t fun to read (try checking out a few!).
They tend to be overly argumentative, weirdly argumentative, to spend pages and pages unpicking minutiae, and then to leave gaping holes where a reader might expect X or Y to be included. Mine was all of these things
Admitting this was very hard. I wanted to turn my PhD, virtually untouched, into a book, because I wanted the book to my name. My MS was rejected by the first publisher I proposed it to, who said it needed too much work.
I was *fuming*. That was also one of the best things that’s ever happened to me in academia, because it forced me to go away and rethink. I’d be ashamed to have that PhD out in the world, but I love my book.
2) Related to that, put mental distance between yourself and the PhD: My 18 months outside academia were actually really helpful. I barely thought about my research in that period, and when I came to read my PhD again, i could read it as if it was someone else’s work.
This is important, because lots of it has to go. When you’re finishing a PhD, it’s agony to shed a single paragraph or footnote (but I spent a week researching that!), and for a PhD that’s ok. For a book, it’s not. ANYTHING that isn’t contributing to the final product needs to go
3) So edit, edit, edit: I happened to pick up my physical copy of my PhD the other day, to look something up, and it made me laugh that the thing is virtually invisible beneath the hoarded mass of corrections and comments I had scrawled on literally every page.
From an initial belief my PhD could be published basically as was, I rewrote virtually every word within it, reread all my sources, recontextualised everything, lifted the lid on arguments I thought I had closed, etc etc.
Remember that nothing is going to be lost in this process (unless it’s so bad it’s not worth saving). That chapter or huge footnote you had to get rid of because it was pulling you in the wrong direction? Well, make it an article. And then you can start to see a big picture by…
4) Reimagine the project as part of a portfolio: when you write a PhD, you feel that everything you are academically is in it. So you want to get everything you know in. But now you building a proper academic career and this book is just going to be one of many things you publish
Stuff can leave your book, but still enter the wider world of published writing, and your book can draw on your own work as articles. Don’t clutter your book with all those abstruse an incidental arguments that you just HAD to make in the thesis. At the same time, however…
5) Think big: so far it sounds like everything I’ve said is about making the book *smaller* than the thesis, but my book was actually far more ambitious and expansive than my thesis (it just wasn’t cluttered with all the muck from point 3).
But I think we imagine our PhD’s as a sort of virtuoso academic performance – technical, designed to display our mastery of our discipline. In a book, however, you need to think about something that is about more than a narrow technical display of skill
A book needs to be a story in it’s own right. This might mean adding in material that you never thought to touch in the thesis, because it wasn’t part of your narrow research question.
Or it might mean working out what small part of your original project actually constitutes the heart of your message, and expanding that part out into an entire narrative in its own right. Work out what was special about your thesis, and allow that thing to grow.
For me, I had a very specific body of sources for my thesis and focused on them to the exclusion of all else. For the book, I rather worked out what was my *theme*, and then told a single story across a period of a century and a half drawing on new sources I never used in the PhD
This also gave me room to tackle much bigger ideas about my philosophy of history about how social and power structures work, and about my theory of knowledge. None of this was in my thesis, because my thesis was focused on jolly well *proving* I could read my sources.
But these parts of my book are very much my favourites, and were able to happen because I gave up on the narrow foci of my thesis and started thinking in a more expansive fashion about how what I had to say contributed in a wider way to how we think about my own particular period
6) Talk and read and talk and listen and think: expanding the mental outlook and ambition of a PhD thesis means thinking big, and to do that you need to read widely and explore the greater intellectual world.
Lots of what I love about my book (on Roman history) was born from lecture courses on Saxon England reading about Renaissance Europe and reading Chinese philosophy. It never occurred to me, when doing these things, that they were adding to the thing I was writing, but they were.
Likewise conversations over coffee with friends and intense discussions after research seminars all fed into building something that had so much more scope and ambition than my thesis, and tying my book into the wider world of contemporary debate on my period.
7) Think about your (new) audience: you wrote your PhD so two people (experts in the field) could read it. But your book will be read by who knows who, and you need to reframe it for that... (continued in a new thread 
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