Show notes
With this podcast I’m experimenting with a transcript option. Substack produces a good transcript that includes all the ums and ahs. You can read it by clicking the “Transcript” button. Riverside.fm, the service I use to record the podcast, also produces an excellent transcript, which it ties to its editing capabilities. It doesn’t include all the ums and ahs but does include some. Because it combines two separately recorded tracks, it also sometimes seems to have trouble with the sequence of remarks. And it loves time codes. I’ve given the Riverside transcript a light edit and pasted it below the Show Notes. (This makes the post too long to show up in email, but you can click at the bottom to see the whole thing.)Please give me feedback on podcast formats and transcripts by completing a three-question survey. If I get at least 300 responses, I’ll do a drawing to give away five books. There’s a fourth question that allows you to enter.Virginia's Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Show Notes:Miller’s Book ReviewThe story of Joel’s current book-in-progressJoel's 2024 reading list of Classic Novels and MemoirsReview of Slaughterhouse FiveReview of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave GirlReview of Their Eyes Were Watching GodJoel’s books on AmazonPilot erasable FriXion pensVirginia’s post on listening to Middlemarch and Moby DickObituary of Moby Dick narrator William HootkinsA Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (audiobook)Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns (audiobook)aeon.coreason.comArts and Letters DailyA Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty SmithThe Fabric of Civilization backdrop a gift from Pure Country Weaverskeywords: book publishing, audiobooks, author advice, reading goals, publishing process, Joel Miller, Virginia Postrel, literature, writing, book recommendationsTranscript from Riverside.fmVirginia Postrel (00:03.118)Good morning, Joel.Joel (00:05.078)Yes, thank you for having me.Virginia Postrel (00:07.14)Well, thanks for being one of my early guinea pigs. Your Substack is called MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚. So I want to start with a question about the books that you write about. At the beginning of the year, you set out two challenges for yourself. One was every month to read and review a classic work and one was a memoir. How did you pick the books that you decided to do?Joel (00:46.274)I kind of have a running list of things that I feel I want to read or should read. And I'm almost philosophically committed to the idea that I'm only going to read books that I find interesting in some way or another. So I have to, the whim to read that book has to be there in the first place. So I keep this list and then I'm on Twitter and elsewhere and places where I just see wonderful book recommendations all the time. So I'm always adding to that list. And then at the end of the year, I look at that list and I usually share several suggestions with my readers and just say, here are 12 novels, classic novels that I'm thinking about reading. And in this case, this year I added 12 classic memoirs and I just said, you know, am I missing anything? You know, what would you recommend? And I take all that input together and you know, shake it up real good and out comes my list.Virginia Postrel (01:43.555)Right, we're three quarters through the year. What have you liked best that you've read?Joel (01:52.614)That's, it's so hard because there's so many great things. This might surprise, you know, anybody, I don't know, but everybody has read, I thought, Slaughterhouse Five. I somehow missed it in high school. I never read it, never read it in college. So I finally just said, this is the year I'm going to finally read some Kurt Vonnegut. And I put that down on the list and I was really surprised and delighted by that book.On the memoir side, I read Frederick Douglass's first memoir, his first autobiography, The Narrative, and I really loved that. There's so many great stories, though. I would say every one of the books I read in the list this year for both the novels and the memoirs have been surprising in certain ways.Virginia Postrel (02:27.676)Right, right. What is the value of setting that goal for yourself?Joel (02:53.262)Well, this is a little intangible. However, I'm fairly convinced that, and by fairly, I mean, I'm 100 % convinced that reading works that are considered canonical or adjacent to the canon, however that is fuzzily defined, is beneficial for a handful of reasons. One of them could be something as simple as just general cultural literacy.You know, walking into a group of people and somebody brings up a reference to, instance, Kurt Vonnegut, I'm, I'm, you know, in a worse position for not knowing what that is a reference to. And so it, it's just wise to, to be kind of current with things that are generally understood or respected or, or known. But then on the other side of it, there's also the kind of moral enlargement and self -improvement that can come from those kinds of books. And.Virginia Postrel (03:35.961)Right.Joel (03:52.302)That could be true for anything current too. It's just that the books that generally over time people have said, yes, this book is really valuable along those lines, tend to have been proven by time and other people's, know, vast opinions at this point to validate that. So for instance, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a really delightful and surprising novel in so many ways. AndVirginia Postrel (04:00.911)Right?Joel (04:20.108)That could be just as true for a modern novelist to have written something like that and for us to have that take. It's just that we do have that take historically and it's been validated over the decades.Virginia Postrel (04:23.972)Right, right, right. So I see behind you, have a lot of books. And are they well organized or are they just like, well, I kind of know this one is got an orange cover and it's in this general vicinity.Joel (04:47.992)Yeah.Well, they're mostly well organized. They start off better organized on this side, which you can't see, but this is a shelf of a whole wall of mostly history and anything related to it that is time specific is chronologically filed. So I've got a lot of overview stuff up top, but then it moves historically from, you know, the ancient world into the modern world. And I've got you know, authorities that were writing at their times filed chronologically. So I know, you know, the arguments Augustine are having are relevant to the time that he's writing. And so I have those histories all together with, you know, his work, for instance, or Montaigne, you know, during the Renaissance and things like that, early modern era. Behind me, get, you know, more into these are more like business books and things like that, that I have for professional reasons. And then off to the side over here I have classic fiction mostly.Virginia Postrel (05:51.234)So one of the reasons, aside from enjoying your Substack and kind of knowing you more as an online friend—I don't think we've ever met in person—one reason I wanted to have you on the podcast was that I've found that whenever I write about publishing, readers are very interested.Joel (06:13.891)Yeah.Virginia Postrel (06:17.56)because it's kind of a black box to most people. And my readers tend to be people who read a lot and are interested in books. And they're very curious about how books get published. So one, you've spent much of your career in publishing. And first of all, could you explain a little bit about that? And then we'll talk about some specific questions that people have.Joel (06:20.12)Yeah. I've been a writer and an editor now most of my professional life. And I started off in journalism and from there moved into publishing. So in 2001, I went to work for an imprint that later was absorbed into some work at Thomas Nelson. And when that happened, that was in 2003.When that happened, I became a Thomas Nelson employee. that point, I was a senior editor and I edited and acquired books. And then I eventually worked my way up to a publisher of that particular division that I was involved in, along with a few other imprints. And then, over time, my job, you know, continued to change and evolve. eventually became VP of acquisitions. So my primary job at that point was to acquire new authors and then edit some portion of those books that I brought in depending on workload and relationships with the authors.Virginia Postrel (07:46.83)Right. Right. And was Thomas Nelson owned by HarperCollins throughout that period or was it acquired during your tenure?Joel (07:56.619)It was acquired after or near the end of the time I was there.Virginia Postrel (08:01.76)Okay, yeah, yeah, because, yeah, for those who don't know, I associate Thomas Nelson with publishing Bibles, partly because I once upon a time, as people have read my post about my life, I worked in a bookstore when I was a teenager in Greenville, South Carolina, where we sold a lot of Bibles. But they are a religiously oriented imprint. But I think a lot of the things that happen in book publishing the same, more or less the same way, regardless of what the specific niche of the imprint is. So when you're talking about acquiring a book, deciding to publish it, how does that process work?Joel (08:55.192)Well, it can work a handful of ways. are sort of like, there's a standard track that a project might run down. this, yeah, the standard track would be that an author works with an agent, they develop a proposal and that proposal gets shopped to a handful of publishers. You know, some agents work like where they'll blanket a whole bunch of people. Most agents work a little bit more strategically than that. They're going to identify four or five different houses where they think it really will fit the best. Usually they have relationships with those editors already. The acquiring editor at that other house, at the house. Maybe not, but they usually have some kind of relationship. And then they'll pitch the book. On the publisher side,Virginia Postrel (09:26.936)Right.Joel (09:50.478)They'll receive the proposal and it could be one of 20 or 30 that come in that month that the particular team is looking at. And they'll sit down and usually have some kind of internal conversation as an editorial team. Like, do we think that this is a strong project or not? And then usually there's some kind of check with the sales team and the marketing teams to find out.Virginia Postrel (10:10.319)Right.Joel (10:17.846)What is the possibility for this book in terms of what's the, the size of the reach of this product? Because every book is really fundamentally just a unique product. And the question is, how do we, what kind of, what kind of market is there for this book? And if there's agreement that there's a good market for that book, and there's a handful of things that go into making that decision, they'll go ahead and make an offer potentially on that book to that, to the agent, which the agent will then, you know, run the traps on and then they'll come up with a deal.Virginia Postrel (10:46.51)Right, right, right, right. So what determines what, well, first of all, what is a proposal like? Because this is another thing I'm often in the position of looking, advising would be authors on their proposals and I send them mine and they're usually surprised at how long they are.Joel (11:10.528)Yeah, they're, they're long. They can be very long. you know, I think I just mentioned a second ago that a book is like a product. And I think if you think about a book proposal, like a business plan, that's actually a very advantageous way to think, because what you're trying to do in a book proposal is sell a concept or a story or something like that to a publisher. And you're fundamentally walking into an area where the publisher is going to absorb the majority of the risk.And that risk is going to look like tying up editorial time and the team's bandwidth on that project. It's going to look like getting covers designed. It's going to look like time spent with marketing and time spent with salespeople. It's going to look like the real physical costs of having it printed. There's a lot of skin in the game that the publisher has, including risking their financial, the investment of an advance. And so.Virginia Postrel (12:06.622)As an author, I find this idea that the publisher is taking all the risk, or most of the risks—I find I understand why the publisher thinks of it that way—but it's a joke because the author is spending years of their life working on this project.Joel (12:24.01)Yeah, you are 100 % right. one of the, I'll come back to the risk assessment part of it in a second, but one of the hardest things actually about publishing is that publishers and authors have to come together to get aligned around a project when their interests are fundamentally different. And that's tricky because for the author, like you just said, you've invested all these years. I'm working on a book right now that I've now been working on over 10 years.Virginia Postrel (12:35.02)Yeah, right.Joel (12:56.09)And it'll finally be done in January and I have a publisher ready to publish it. I've got a contract. Everything is all finally buttoned up and it's going to happen. But I am the one who have, who have spent all these years who have done all, who has done all the research and all this kind of stuff. I'm heavily invested in this book being a success. And the publisher is theoretically also invested in that book being a success, but in a much, much different way becauseThe publisher has a list of books that they're shepherding into market during a certain season. And they're a little bit like a, like a baseball team. They don't have to have every pitch be hit in order to get guys on base and run and score home runs. They just need to have some. And so their interest is in their list. My interest is in my book. And sometimes those align with each other and sometimes they don't and authors really do sometimes feel a lot of frustration and alienation from their own publisher when a publisher can just see a book's not getting traction and they stop working it, you know, or they move on to something else. And there can be a lot of frustration there for sure.Virginia Postrel (14:08.024)Yeah. And also for—and I'm sure this is related to the list—for the publisher, there's a very small window where they pay attention to that book at the right. And and then they move on to the next book. And for the book to be a success, the author has to continue to pay attention to the book. And the the other thing is, I think.Joel (14:29.464)That's correct.Virginia Postrel (14:35.342)would be authors need to understand that they have to do a lot of the marketing for the book. That the publisher, yeah, go on.Joel (14:43.18)Yes. You know, yeah. So publishers have a lot of things that they do on the marketing side that are very valuable and would be very time consuming and difficult for somebody that didn't know what they were doing to learn it and just step in and do it. Including things like creating copy that will go out to all the retailers, getting ads placed for the book and things like that. So there are several things along those lines that a publisher does to kind of grease the skids for the market to find the book in the first place. But it's really up…
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