It was suggested to me by someone that I try to get my MA dissertation published in a journal. It's been a year since I wrote it, and have been too busy to try and get it published due to moving country, general life etc. Does anybody have any tips or advice on how I should go about this? I would ask my old supervisor, but we're now in different countries and it's very hard to get in contact with him... Thank you in advance, and sorry if posted to the wrong place!
If you are considering going on for your PhD, think VERY, VERY CAREFULLY about whether you want this paper and research and argument out there under your name. I don't doubt that it's a great paper--but three years into a PhD program, you might.
Do you have a target journal in mind? Most basically, different journals have different formatting and length rules. So you'd want to follow the ones of the journal you've chosen.
A step beyond that, you can get a sense from reading each journal about the kind of articles they prefer. Is your topic more one for Church History or Journal of Ecclesiastical History? Did you write about an author that Gutenburg Jahrbuch likes to publish articles on, or do you need to go with the Sixteenth Century Journal and cross your fingers? Like that.
Does your old adviser have e-mail? Get in contact. You'll probably want their read through before you submit, in any case, and if you talk now I bet they could help you fix in on a primary journal to submit to, and then a backup for if the first one rejects it.
Good luck!
What's the etiquette like in regards to randomly writing to somebody who would be in a good position to judge its worthiness before submitting to a journal? I would feel quite cheeky/almost disrespectful e-mailing somebody at an institution I was never enrolled in to ask for advice for free on a project that had already been completed, but if it's a common enough practice, then obviously would love to try and take advantage of an expert!