Virginia's Podcast: Virginia Postrel interviews interesting people Joel Miller on how book publishing works, why Paul Revere deserves more attention, and how audiobooks took publishers by surprise.
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.
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Show Notes:
The story of Joel’s current book-in-progress
Joel's 2024 reading list of Classic Novels and Memoirs
Review of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God
Virginia’s post on listening to Middlemarch and Moby Dick
Obituary of Moby Dick narrator William Hootkins
A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (audiobook)
Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns (audiobook)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Fabric of Civilization backdrop a gift from Pure Country Weavers
keywords: book publishing, audiobooks, author advice, reading goals, publishing process, Joel Miller, Virginia Postrel, literature, writing, book recommendations
Transcript from Riverside.fm
Virginia 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. And
Virginia 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 because
The 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 to the author how far that book's going to penetrate because a lot of what gets a book off the ground is the author's network talking about the book, sharing the book, and creating an expectation in the marketplace for how great this will be or how great it is.
And then the market responding and when the market responds, if there's enough momentum behind the audience, picking up the book, reading it, saying, this is incredible, you know, and on they go. then a book may take on a life of its own. If it doesn't take on a life of its own, even if it does, the author still has an ongoing, if they care about their book, they have an ongoing, incentive to keep flogging it, to keep pushing it, to look for opportunities to talk about it.
Virginia Postrel (15:58.852)
Right?
Joel (16:06.13)
inserting it into conversations that are happening in the public, you know, looking for ways to talk about it because the, the life of a book is in the eyeballs of the readers. And if the readers just stop noticing or, or don't care because they're onto other things, then the book dies.
Virginia Postrel (16:22.17)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned advertising, which is not something I associate a lot with book publishing, especially compared to other media. I mean, my sister sister-in-law recently retired from being in the movie trailer business and any, any film or TV show that is coming up gets a lot of marketing dollars, because there's a lot of marketing. mean, you know, there's a lot of money at stake. and that's not true for books, which have much smaller audiences for typical. I mean, if, it's somebody who's an established bestselling author, that's a different, how, how does a publisher decide when it's going to actually engage in advertising as opposed to publicity efforts or sales efforts through, you know, the salespeople talking to the bookstores kind of thing.
Joel (17:25.814)
There's a little bit of, know, every book is a unique product. And so there's almost always a unique approach to every book. Now some of it is going to end up being, you know, fairly boilerplate. They're going to do X, Y, and Z. And that's going to be standard for pretty much every book they do across the list. But then depending on how much they've invested in a book. let's say an author is what might be called an A author on the list. This is somebody that they.
Virginia Postrel (17:34.18)
Right.
Joel (17:52.706)
They have huge expectations for, they've paid a lot of money for this book. They have a huge incentive to make sure that they sell the maximum amount because this is the only way that they'll actually make their list work is if the ones that they've heavily invested on enough of those perform to their expectations. Otherwise they have, they'll end up investing in ways that won't return and they'll go bankrupt. So, and
Virginia Postrel (18:18.104)
Right, Sure.
Joel (18:21.282)
I mean, honestly, that happens a lot. Publishing is a fantastic way to lose money. So when they're busy figuring that out per book on a list, there's going to be a handful of like kind of low tier books or, know, you might call them C titles on a list that are all going to get kind of the basics. And then they're going to escalate up depending on opportunity and, just the investment the publisher already has in it. And so there's all kinds of things these days that are more open to advertising because of various social media platforms. And so you'll see more social media ads today than there ever used to be. the other good thing is, I mean, good is relative for a publisher. They love this because there's metrics attached to that. So if you have, you know, dollars you're spending, you can calculate the ROI on that ad based on, know, what you sold.
Virginia Postrel (18:56.227)
Right, right.
Joel (19:15.89)
Putting an ad in the New York Times, for instance, there's no way to know. I had an author once who insisted, insisted that we pay for placement in the New York Times to promote his book. And there were a lot of good things happening with this book. And so we're kind of like, well, I mean, it was not in our ad budget. You know, we didn't have that planned at that point, but we just figured out where to go grab the money from, which of course actually means that there were some other authors that didn't get, you know, that money spent on them. But we went ahead and placed the ad and the the book performed really well over many, many, many weeks. And the hard thing was he wanted to do that ad again, he was convinced that ad's what did it. And, you know, we're looking at it going, that ad didn't do anything, but, you know, but we got to keep investing in it in order to keep him happy and keep him going. And so there's, it's a mix.
Virginia Postrel (19:46.884)
So, so how do I get that kind of power over my publisher?
Joel (20:15.446)
Yeah, you need a book that's kind of working. It needs to be kind of running and they need to be afraid of messing it up.
Virginia Postrel (20:22.746)
Yeah, well, I have a book that's working and it and of course my most recent book, The Fabric of Civilization came out in November 2020, which was the height of the pandemic. And, you know, a November book, obviously you want people to buy it for presents. And this book was actually my first book to be published in the UK, but it was published in the UK through Basic Books, which was the US thing.
Joel (20:40.46)
Yeah.
Virginia Postrel (20:52.826)
Anyway, right before Christmas 2020, the entire United Kingdom ran out of my book. And because of the pandemic, it was impossible to get copies over there. So someone came to me and said, I want to buy this for my relative for Christmas and I can't get it. What do I do? And I asked my editor and she did a little research and she came back and said, if you order it from Amazon US, you can get it there in time. So I passed that word along. Every author I have ever met basically hates their publisher. They often love their editor at the publisher. They often love their editor, but they hate the marketing and they're frustrated. And I don't, I mean, I don't hate them—I would be happy with Basic again, even though they screwed that particular thing up, basically because they didn't have faith that the book would sell. They didn'thave enough copies over there.
Joel (21:59.576)
So the challenge with that is, and the way this functionally happens is it used to be, this is the model when I first started in publishing, this was kind of the standard model. Amazon wasn't a thing. the kind of phrase was stack them high and watch them fly, by which they meant you load in as many books as a retailer will take. And that retailer, just because of the sheer presence of that book in that store, it will get eyeballs and people will walk away with it. And if done with a great marketing campaign, a great publicity campaign, then you can drive a lot of sales. And there's some truth to that. But it's risky for the stores and it's risky for the publishers.
And over time, they have just figured out ways of making retail inventories much more just in time. And what that fundamentally means is for a publisher, to go to market with a book, instead of going to market with like 20,000 units potentially in stores, they're going to market when a book launches with maybe just 2,500 units in stores. And suddenly now if, and they may only print to that number.
Virginia Postrel (23:14.744)
Right, and partly the economics of printing have changed. It used to be that it was a really high setup cost and low per copy cost. And so therefore your print runs were larger and there've been very, I'm not sure all the changes that have taken place, but it's clearly more economical nowadays to do a shorter print run.
Joel (23:39.246)
Yeah. And so you'll end up with a print run of maybe 2,500 or 3,500 copies. And the whole thing is based on, well, let's just see what happens. If it starts to run, then we can just hurry up and print more. And it usually takes about three weeks, maybe four, to get books back in stores. And so it's worth the risk on their point, on their part. But of course, the frustration for the author is, I've got all this media lined up and there's no books in stores now.
Virginia Postrel (23:54.212)
Right.
Joel (24:06.542)
And you go to Amazon and it says, we'll ship in four weeks or whatever. And so people don't buy. And then by the time they finally get inventory back in, all the publicity for the book is over. And you may not be able to gin it up again. And so there's a tension there for sure.
Virginia Postrel (24:19.876)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a constant learning. And as you say, every book is a unique product. And so it's very difficult to figure out how this, a given book will do, partly because there are random factors. I have a friend who actually had a book come out on 9 -11 and it was, I think it was about.
Joel (24:43.288)
So many random factors.
Virginia Postrel (24:51.852)
history of advertising or something like that, you know, it's completely unrelated. Whereas Jihad versus McWorld that book suddenly started blowing off the shelves just because it had the word jihad in it. Terrible book.
Joel (25:11.18)
Right, it just happened to be something that was in the market that was close enough to whatever was happening in the universe that people said, I have to understand. And that's the book that was available.
Virginia Postrel (25:21.068)
Right, right, right. Terrible book, by the way. Don't read that book. So so you have written books on a very wide variety of subjects. I didn't realize this till I was looking into this, investigating you for this podcast, including Paul Revere, angels, the drug war, and big government. Plus, you edited a volume of primary sources and now you're writing a book on books. How do you decide what subjects are worth your time?
Joel (26:00.18)
Clearly it's not discipline or consistency. that those don't really roll into the consideration. I think my, you know, a book to me is always a worthy book for me to work on is one that I find fascinating. The subject matter somehow fascinating. And if I can convince other people that it's also fascinating and convince them to give me a contract, then I might have a book, you know? And so, over the years, like, the book on narcotics, Bad Trip, I wrote that in 2003, 2002 in that period and it came out in 2004. I just was obsessed with drug policy at the time, particularly with the Bill of Rights impacts of the drug war. And I couldn't stop thinking about it, couldn't stop reading about it and writing about it. And so I knew that I had a book there.
And then, the same was true ultimately for everything else on that list. Paul Revere, I had read Esther Forbes' biography of Paul Revere when I was a teenager or my late teens, early twenties. And when all these big books on the founders were kind of coming out 2007, 2008, 2009, in that period, I just thought, you know, the one person that gets completely overlooked these days is Paul Revere. And there's good reasons for that. He's not important in the way that a Samuel Adams or a John Adams, even more importantly, would be. But he was in the mix with those guys and represented something uniquely American at the time in a way that I thought, I got to tell this story. I got to tell the Paul Revere story. And so
Virginia Postrel (27:47.492)
So talk a little bit about the Paul Revere story.
Joel (27:51.926)
Yeah. Well, you know, if you, if you're, if your entry point into the American founding is through the founders, it's very intellectual. It's very philosophical. There's a lot of arguments that, are, are rather elevated around rights and all that kind of thing. And all very important, but there's another side of it, which is that there is the, the almost, you could call it like the Tom Paine blue collar side of it where all these random people who make up this country at that point, or rather all those, the colonies at that point, somehow have to believe all of this esoteric stuff and think that it's worth getting shot over. And they have to be mobilized in such a way. And Paul Revere kind of represents that connection point between the lofty arguments and the ideals and how they get interpreted on the ground by essentially a blue collar kind of guy.
And I loved that almost that transmission of one kind of conversation to another kind of action. And I just thought that that was really compelling, especially when you think about what kind of person Paul Revere was. His father was a French refugee who landed in Boston and was apprenticed out as a child. And so he eventually earned his right to go out into business for himself. He marries, starts a family. Paul Revere comes along as one of many kids in this family. And then of course he gets married as many kids. Married twice, his first wife dies. All along the way he represents this kind of new, this new kind of person in the world, which is an entrepreneur, somebody who is really motivated by figuring out how to scratch a business out of nothing and does that his whole life.
He died in, I think, 1818. So he lived quite a while. He lived all the way through the Stamp Act crisis and all of that. He was born in, I think, the 1730s. So he lives a very long time. He actually outlived many of his children. And all that time, he's just busy trying to make stuff happen, including getting on the front end of the Industrial Revolution. He was very interested in manufacturing and all of that. So he represents kind of a new kind of person in the world, a uniquely American kind of person. And I just thought he has a fascinating story and people need to hear it again.
Virginia Postrel (30:30.81)
Yeah, that's interesting. think, I suspect you've probably sold some books talking about it because it is interesting. It reminds me of a book I read called, I think it's called Marketplace of Revolution. It's by a historian called, I forget something, H. Breen, B -R -E -E -N.
Joel (30:47.232)
Yeah, T. H. Breen Yep.
Virginia Postrel (31:01.935)
So, all right, so you did the drug war, you did Paul Revere. You did angels, which that was an interesting one. I didn't see that one coming.
Joel (31:05.793)
I didn't either at the time. This would be like a kind of a sidestep from my typical public, persona if I have such a thing. I grew up in a Christian household and I, but it was Protestant evangelical and there was really no, there was no understanding of what angels are historically in terms of the way people have thought about them. It was just not a topic. And then I became Eastern Orthodox and angels are everywhere—in the liturgy and the artwork and everything.
And I was struck by that, that I could go from one world where they were basically a non-topic to a world where they're constantly referred to and ostensibly both the same sorts of things in the sense that they're both Christian traditions. And so I decided to kind of do a historical dive into that and just look at where does this world view come from that holds all this in it?
And so I did, I looked at the scriptures, I looked at the liturgical tradition, the iconography of the church and all of those kinds of sources and through it all, I was able to kind of tease out a narrative of what has been taught and what are these ideas and who are these characters, these angels and came up with that book.
Virginia Postrel (32:27.396)
It was interesting reading some of the Amazon reviews, particularly one that was trying to figure out—the person was writing was Catholic, but they were kind of trying to suss out where you were coming from. And they didn't like that you didn't say Saint so-and-so and Saint so-and-so. You would just say Augustine or whatever.
Joel (32:51.469)
It was an odd book to write in certain ways because I was trying to be accessible to really Christians of any tradition or people, even not Christians, who just happen to have some historical interest in the topic. And, so I did avoid things like referring to people as Saint So-and-So, which then offended the people that were apparently wanted that.
Virginia Postrel (33:13.656)
Yeah, I don't know whether that person was offended or just baffled. I couldn't quite tell. But they didn't think you were hostile. They were just like, Who is this guy? What does he think?
So you wrote a Substack post about writing in your books and why people write in your book, write in their books, which was enjoyable, why do you write in your books? And I wanted to know what do you write with when you write in your books?
Joel (33:51.17)
Well, let me start by answering that because I have two examples right in front of me. One would be a pencil. This is just a number two pencil. And then another one would be a Frixion pen from Pilot. So that's an erasable ink, which is nice. So like, I've only done this a couple of times, but I have written extensive notes and books and then erased all of those notes before passing the book on.
So you can actually, you can restore those notes by making the book very cold, which is weird, but you can make the, you can make those marks leave vanish by making them hot. So if you warm the pages, the ink will disappear. so that's, that's a neat little hack. But yes, I love to write in my books because, it makes them more useful.
I'm not a collector. I own about 3,000 books or have about 3,000 books in this house. And they're kind of coming in and coming out just depending on my needs. And, you know, I only have so much space. So at some point I'm full again and I look around and I start picking things I know I don't need anymore and I'll just let them go. So I'm not a collector. I write in everything.
I remember when I was working on the Paul Revere book, I had a book by Charles Ferris Gettemy, which was a biography written of Revere in the early 1900s or late 1800s, one or the other. And I had the book and you know, it's nice and you know, old and I didn't want to damage it or anything, but I was working up against a deadline that was just not going to give me any relief. And I needed to write in that book if I was going to be able to remember certain things. And it just occurred to me that I own this book. This is my book. I'm not accountable to anybody for this book other than myself.
And so I just started writing in this old book and I posted something about that and Charles Ferris Gettemy's like great-granddaughter found it and read it. I guess she was searching for his name and she wrote me and she said, I think he'd be okay with it. You know, so I felt better.
Virginia Postrel (36:01.018)
Yeah, I think most authors would be okay with people writing in their books because it means you're engaged with the reading. I'm inconsistent about whether I write in my books. When I'm teaching a book, which isn't very often, but when I was teaching at Chapman and I was teaching, I write in my books always with pencil. Or when I'm going to a Liberty Fund conference or some other conference where I'm going to be discussing a book I write in my book with pencil. Qhen I'm reading books for writing books, which I tend to do more often, I just put lots and lots of little Post-It notes on the side. My husband calls it fungus. He looks at side of the book
Joel (36:49.464)
Yeah, encrusted in the book.
Virginia Postrel (37:00.992)
And then I go back and sometimes I actually type in quotes from the book into a file. And when I was writing The Future and Its Enemies I did that for every book I read. And so I had these enormous files full of—lots of time—which was also a way of reviewing it. Now, if I think I'm going to likely quote a book a lot, I try to get an electronic version where I can do the same thing with less typing.
Joel (37:27.521)
That's wise. I think that I find I like to write in books when I'm going to have an argument with it in some way, where I want to be engaged in it. I want to remember key points. I want to challenge something later, or I would just want to go look it up later, anything like that. And then I'll also oftentimes make notes on, like, this point here relates to what he said over here on page 83. And, you know, so there'll be some hyperlinking in the book that I'm doing also. I find that very helpful. If I'm reading fiction, I write in fiction too, or notate in fiction, because sometimes it's just a choice line that you want to remember. I'm finding that somewhat frustrating right now with Middlemarch where George Eliot is like an aphorist. so every, I don't know, every page or every other page, there's some great aphorism and you're like, look at that, another one, you know, so.
Virginia Postrel (38:32.376)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A book you might enjoy in some memoir, not a classic memoir, it's not that old, is My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. I, I had read Middlemarch in college and really liked it. And I reread it about a year ago. And I then I read that book.
Joel (38:46.486)
I have that right behind me. You're on exactly the track that I'm going to be running myself. I'm going to finish Middlemarch and then read her book just to see, you know, what's the, what was her take on it?
Virginia Postrel (39:08.792)
Yeah. And actually, said this segues to another topic, which I said I read Middlemarch and I read Rebecca Mead's book, but I actually listened to both of them. I intend to I couldn't find my copy of Middlemarch that I had from college. And although I still believe it is somewhere around. So I got a new copy of it because I do intend to read it with my eyes again.
Because it's a book that bears many rereadings, which is what Rebecca Mead's book is about, reading it over different times in her life. How do you—you've written about audiobooks—where do audiobooks fit into the world of reading and the world of publishing also, if you have any insights on how publishers deal with them?
Joel (39:45.398)
Yeah, well, I remember I'll just tell you this personal story because this involves you. I remember when Fabric of Civilization came out and there was no audiobook available when the book first came out.
Virginia Postrel (40:17.176)
Right. It was about a year because they had terrible time selling the audiobook. It got sold to the, I mean, that went to every audiobook publisher. Probably shouldn't say this, but they went to every audiobook publisher. And I think it got sold by the last, you know, the last one on the list. Anyway.
Joel (40:23.771)
Interesting.
Well, I think the reason I still remember that is that I often, I love to engage in audiobook because I walk a lot every day. Usually walk, I don't know, five miles at least. And, that's a lot of time to be listening to podcasts. And I would rather read, I'd rather listen to a book than, than a podcast, as much as I love podcasts. I mean, here we are on a podcast.
But for just the benefit of being able to kind of like have somebody's language just wash over you. There's something really pleasant about an audiobook. However, this is the negative. It does wash over you, which is a different kind of engagement than reading with your eyes. so, and there's been a fair amount of research that's been done on this that will make these kinds of distinctions that for more passive entertainment kind of books, audios are great.
If you need to critically engage with it though, it's not ideal because it's harder, for instance, to go back to check something, which when you're critically engaging in a book, you're doing that probably every couple of pages. You just can't do that in an audiobook. It's really hard to capture quotes in an audiobook. So if an author is making a point that you really need to retain for some reason,
Virginia Postrel (41:43.82)
Right. Yeah, very hard.
Joel (42:02.19)
It's challenging to mark that in any kind of way that's efficient. So it's preferable if you're going to be critically engaging in a book, you're probably better off reading a physical copy or a digital copy that you can underline or mark up in some way.
Virginia Postrel (42:17.592)
Yeah, yeah, I once I once tried to listen to an audiobook of one of David Hume's philosophical work. It did not go well. I was I was like—I got it from the library—and I was like, no, that is not going to work at all. There there have been cases I can't remember where I owned and had read the where I had read the hard copy and I owned a Kindle version and I was listening to something and then I would just use the bookmark function and then search. The advantage of the Kindle version was I can then search for that passage and mark it. But yeah, you're right. There is a kind of washing over you. It's not a and many of the audiobooks I listen to are entertainment, you know.
Joel (43:00.161)
Yep.
Virginia Postrel (43:14.106)
genre fiction, mysteries, that sort of thing. Although I did listen to Middlemarch and I did listen to Moby Dick, which I've wrote about how they were both actually really good audiobook experiences.
Joel (43:14.168)
Yeah, I bet they would be. I've not, I'm reading a physical copy of Middlemarch right now. And I've enjoyed it in part for that point about the aphorisms. There's so many quotable lines and I just find myself having to underline as I go. But I could also imagine that story being just beautiful to listen to because the language is so elegant and the characters are in some cases so surprising and interesting that
Virginia Postrel (43:56.216)
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. And the particular version of I will need to—if I really want to absorb Moby Dick I, will need to read it in a printed copy. But the audiobook version I listened to, the narrator was just amazing. He was somebody who had essentially dedicated his life. He was an actor.
Joel (43:57.1)
just listening would be really enjoyable.
Virginia Postrel (44:24.058)
from the time he was an undergraduate at Princeton to performing Moby Dick. And he was amazing. And especially in the early parts of the book, Moby Dick is really funny, which I wouldn't have thought. But he brings that out. There's a certain amount of sort of
Joel (44:30.508)
my goodness, could you get anybody better for the role? That's amazing.
Virginia Postrel (44:50.67)
friendly satire, I guess I would call it. It's not mean satire, but of the whaling village and the church and the whalers and in the early parts of it. that was interesting, interesting thing. when you listen to a book, do you refer to it as reading the book or not?
Joel (45:11.47)
Yeah, I figure that, I mean, fundamentally I'm digesting the book. I'm consuming the book in some form or another. I often will buy the physical copy just to have. so I'm sometimes I'll get back from my walk and I'll spend 30 minutes after, you know, just like going back into the book and finding the things that were of interest to me. I just read, and I, you know, use the verb read, A Movable Feast by Hemingway. And of course,
Virginia Postrel (45:40.472)
Right.
Joel (45:41.23)
In this instance, I didn't read it. I listened to it. But as soon as I got back from the house on every walk, there was like 27 things I had to go find in every chapter or in the part that I had listened to that day. That's a great example of actually the challenge of trying to engage a piece of classic literature or really any literature through an audiobook. If it is something that you need to retain or work with, it's not the best medium. It's still great.
I would rather listen to the audio in certain instances and then follow back up with a book or do vice versa, listen to the audio after I've read the book. Either way, some books are just worth digesting in multiple ways, multiple times.
Virginia Postrel (46:25.348)
Right. The other thing, this wouldn't apply to fiction, but for nonfiction, a disadvantage of the audiobook, which I learned when The Fabric of Civilization actually came out as an audiobook and started to get a little bit of feedback from readers, is that the notes aren't there. And in my book, my editor felt very strongly that she didn't want to have a lot of names of the people that I was, who I was sourcing information from. So it will say a historian says blah, blah, blah on the assumption that if you really care who the historian is, you can flip to the back, but you can't do that in an audiobook. And fortunately, I had actually put the notes online on my website for a different reason.
Joel (47:04.982)
Right, you just flip to the back.
Virginia Postrel (47:20.878)
which was that the notes are not part of the index. And so I wanted to have a searchable thing for people who wanted to find notes. How you tell the audiobook readers that these notes are there and if they're curious, they can find them is another question. I have no way of reaching the mass audiobook listening public, but I do mention that whenever I have an opportunity that that's there. Do you listen to, do you ever listen to nonfiction? Well, I guess, Movable Feast is nonfiction, but it's sort of memoir.
Joel (48:02.21)
Yeah, I listened to both. Jennifer Burns's most recent book, the biography of Milton Friedman. I listened to that on audio and enjoyed it. It was a great way to digest it. I was traveling and so I was in a couple of different cities and in between, you know, back being back at home. so that book, you know, that'd be a big book to be lugging around wherever.
Virginia Postrel (48:28.184)
Yeah, yeah, I do have a physical copy, but I haven't read it.
Joel (48:31.788)
Yeah, it's delightful. It's misnamed, but it's delightful. Mistitled, but it's delightful.
Virginia Postrel (48:35.634)
Going back to your experience in publishing, how does having all these different forms of books affect how publishers think about the title and how does it work?
Joel (48:52.768)
Actually let's back up to 2007. In 2007, the iPhone came out and the Kindle came out. And there was this kind of assumption that eBooks would do to publishing what, what, iTunes had done or MP3s had done to the music business.
I never believed that at the time because as a very serious reader, knew nobody is going to want to actually read bite-sized bits of books, which is what the conversation was at the time—that we need to figure out how to digitize everything so that we can basically sell off just chapters at a time, because some people don't want the whole book. And I thought, you guys, I'm talking to publishing professionals, and I'm saying, you don't even understand how people read. That is never going to happen. And there is, by the way, there is a format for that already. It's called a magazine. like, if that's what we're going to do, then we're really changing everything. Thankfully that blew over and nobody really did that much or well anyway.
But one thing was everyone was afraid about was that eBooks would suddenly just like cannibalize everything. And it just never happened. You know, like you can think about fiction, maybe certain fiction titles sell 50/50 eBook and print. But I don't, I mean, that's not even typical. It's usually, it's probably more like 20 to 25 percent of total sales on a book will be eBooks. Certainly for like, in terms of the total number of books being sold, that's about the number is around 20, 25 percent, somewhere in there. But at the same time, what was overlooked was that that iPhone was the much more interesting invention, not the Kindle.
Virginia Postrel (50:24.601)
Right.
Joel (50:50.294)
and much more determinative for what would happen to publishing, not the Kindle, because the iPhone eventually enabled us to have ebook apps and audiobook apps. The audiobook app is actually the fundamental difference because when—you can remember the pre-phone version of audiobooks. It looked like getting CDs and you'd get this big cluster of CDs in a case that was very clunky, very difficult to walk around with. And depending on how long that book was, it could be, you know, like two, three, four CDs. That's not too bad. But like if you've got the Lord of the Rings on CD, that thing must have been like 20 CDs. And the bigger the book, you know, the more likely you're going to want to maybe listen to it. But you can't because it's just too many CDs and you can't keep them like there's just too many.
Virginia Postrel (51:30.042)
Yeah, yeah.
Joel (51:46.914)
The limited market was library patrons would go get those and, you know, and, other, other facilities where people could borrow them. But there's, you're never going to get a big market off of borrowing. And so you had to come up with a way of selling them and you had to have a way where you could stack them up and have zero impact to your life. And the only way to do that is in a digital environment on your phone, where suddenly you have the library available, the means to play it available and
Virginia Postrel (51:55.629)
Right, right.
Joel (52:15.374)
utter total portability. And that meant that you could listen to an audiobook wherever, whenever, under any circumstances. And suddenly, once that took off, people realized that's where the real market is. So the real disruptor is audiobooks. And that's been true. not, I mean, they're a little bit, they perform a little bit more than eBooks on the total numbers. But, you know, with some books, you may have 50 percent of the books that go out are audiobooks.
Virginia Postrel (52:17.496)
Right?
Joel (52:44.94)
And that's why, you know, like when a book comes out, you would hope that it'll be available in all formats because some people, they just gravitate to audiobooks. And if it's not available, they're not going to get the book.
Virginia Postrel (52:50.36)
right.
Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. Now it was and The Fabric of Civilization is the only one of my books that is available on audio, as an audiobook. And partly that's because of timing. It's also because The Power of Glamour is a very visual book and has lots of, you know, it's a four-color book. It's got lots of pictures that are part of the argument. So I don't think there was a lot of interest in doing it as an audiobook, although it might kind of maybe work. It's funny. I just listened to a book, Willa Cather's One of Ours where periodically they say, “this book is continued on disk four.” Clearly they had made the digital version from the original CDs.
Joel (53:38.743)
Right.
Virginia Postrel (53:50.703)
And that was the second book that I'd listened to that had that. I forget what the first one
Joel (53:55.958)
Yeah. The hard thing for publishers has been that with the boom in interest in audiobooks, keeping up with audiobook production is actually a real challenge. So anything that they have where they have audio rights to something that they've already recorded, they're going to like flow it into the format because it's available for them to do so. But anything that's outside of that, if they don't have an audio recording it's a real cost benefit question of Do we go put it in this new format? Cause it'll cost several hundred dollars to get something up to speed. That's where the AI narrator question has become rather interesting. And this is one that divides people's allegiances for sure. The fastest way to get a group to disagree on anything these days is to introduce AI into the question. But AI narrators would make it possible to go back in deep into catalog—deep into the publishing catalog and publish books in audio formats that otherwise would languish. For instance, The Future and Its Enemies, which I don't know if you're familiar with this, but this is one of the greatest books ever written. And that book should be an audiobook.
Virginia Postrel (54:53.85)
You think it would work even though it's full of quotes? Because one of the weird things about that book is that, you know, it's got lots and lots of quotes from the people I'm writing about. Yeah.
Joel (55:14.766)
yeah, 100%. I think a good narrator would or a well-trained AI narrator would do really well with that.
Virginia Postrel (55:29.167)
Something that people are people are always trying to get me to do a second edition, but the publisher is not interested. They're just—maybe an audiobook would be of more interest.
Joel (55:45.236)
You know, so just to challenge that, think we're living at a time where the message of that book is more relevant than ever. You know, when it first came out, I remember there was this kind of cynicism about the Dow growing at the level that James K. Glassman wrote about. And there was this kind of assumption that that was all just a fad. then the recession comes, the kind of dot-com bubble bursts and deflates some of those hopes. And then people were like, see, we were right. This was all just hype. But of course it wasn't just hype. It's after the correction, it's done nothing but accelerate. And now that we're in this period of AI and everything else like that, the dynamist take on things is fundamental. It's necessary.
Virginia Postrel (56:38.49)
Well, I've got to give a talk next month about sort of an introduction to dynamism for the progress movement types. I'm gonna be sort of revisiting that a little bit in the current context. One thing people don't understand about that book, which came out in 1998, is that it was not a product of the—the inspiration of it was not the internet boom and optimism. It was—actually the inspiration of it was actually the pessimism that of the sort of recession and restructuring, particularly of white collar employment that occurred in the early nineties. It was particularly strong in Southern California where I was living, because the end of the cold war was good for the world but it wasn't good for people working in the defense industry, which was a lot of, a lot of skilled labor and engineers and middle managers in Southern California. And I don't know if you remember the movie Falling Down but that was the kind of quintessential movie of that period of—the, you know, the now obsolete. middle, middle aged, middle class, white, male guy being mad. So anyway, that's, there's also some of that now.
Joel (58:19.092)
It all comes back. That's what saying. I think that it's more relevant now than ever.
Virginia Postrel (58:24.186)
So what sort of advice would you give to would-be authors? Narrow it down however you want.
Joel (58:36.684)
Well, first off, there is kind of an assumption that everyone has, which is that they've got some kind of book in them. And this is like a nearly universal thing. And Flannery O 'Connor was one time asked that she thought that, if English professors had, you know, dampened the dreams of, of authors, potential authors. And she said something like, you know, I wish they would dampen more. They ought to destroy more dreams.
I don't want to sound exactly like that, but I would say that I think sometimes people think the best thing that they can do with an idea that they have or a story they want to tell is that it has to be a book. And I would say these days, that's maybe not the case. These days, you know, like a typical book might sell—this is no joke, no more than 2 ,500 copies. It might sell 5,000 if you're really honestly kind of lucky.
If things really go well for you, 10, 15, 20,000 units. That's great. If you're selling 20,000 units, you're a solid B list author who might be able over time to actually turn it into something that would pay for your life. I doubt it, however, because that's still not enough.
So if you've got a great idea, maybe it's actually a serial podcast. Maybe it's a series of videos on YouTube. There's so many different platforms and methods of getting ideas out that you can use these days. But let's say it really is a book. I would say be prepared for a lot of self-advocacy because you have to recognize that your interests are your interests and nobody else involved in the process share your interests.
They can align, they can come together in ways that produce books and get into stores and the whole thing. But it's not a natural. You have to work it in order for that to happen.
VVirginia Postrel (01:00:42.138)
Well, we're coming up, I think we're on our hour, so I want to end with a question, which is what do you recommend people to read? And this could be books, it could be websites, substacks, magazines, just, know—one of the things I wanna do with this podcast is to give people ideas of things that they might wanna follow up on.
Joel (01:01:11.648)
Wow, okay. This is like my favorite kind of question. Yeah. All right. First off, I rarely make actual recommendations to people because people, you know, they come from with their own interests and you I don't know what people like. So, but I will say, I know what I like. I love history and I love fiction and I love anything that kind of extols, elevates human striving in a way that I find inspiring in some way or another. So I would say at some level I'm like classical humanist in my in my bent towards thinking about the world Small government liberal in the way I think about the way we ought to organize ourselves as societies So any of these recommendations I would say are kind of coming out of that that worldview.
Aeon, the website, aeon .co. If you're given to thinking about humanism, about ideas, about history, that's a wonderful website that has all of that and more on just a regular basis, a really rich feast of articles that you can partake on for free. It's a really wonderful website.
Virginia Postrel (01:02:33.178)
They actually published the article that eventually led to The Fabric of Civilization, back in 2015, I think. Anyway, go on, I'm sorry.
Joel (01:02:39.206)
That's fantastic. I didn't know that. Yeah, I I think that actually reflects really well on the point that it's exactly the kind of place where you're to find those kinds of great ideas. And they're really wonderfully written and wonderfully edited. So it's a great resource. I also think that Arts and Letters Daily is just a great place to go on a daily basis for just a quick hit of something interesting and literary or historical or academic. It's a great, great, compiler of a fascinating stuff.
On the political side, not that I stray very far into these worlds anymore, if I can avoid it into this world, if I can avoid it, but I still love reading Reason the print magazine. I look forward to every issue that comes to my house. And, and of course the online presence is great and has been for so long, along with their podcasts. There's a lot there that's really great.
Books though, books, books are really where it's at. And I would say you kind of have to follow Alan Jacobs thought, which is to read by whim. You kind of have to find the things that you love and just invest all your brain cells there if you can. And so for me, I love classic fiction right now.
I'm just, this is a world that in terms of like where I was coming from as a younger person, younger adult into my thirties and early forties, I would read like five or six novels a year, but I was never intentional about it. There would just be accidentally things that would interest me and I would go read them. I have recently just discovered, however, how much I love classic fiction. And I've just said, I want to spend like a lot of time reading this kind of thing. And so I have been doing that very intentionally and I've really loved it. And I would say anything that is out of that universe is worth digesting and just thinking about.
A book like, Betty Smith's, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a book that would never have crossed my radar if it weren't for just being alert to people saying, Hey, this is a really great book that really speaks a lot about, what it was like to grow up in America during this period and what it means to be an American. and so I latched hold of that book and read it last, December and I was floored by that book. I thought it was absolutely beautiful and riveting in all kinds of ways. It's a fantastic story. And so I would look for those kinds of books.
Virginia Postrel (01:05:18.261)
I would second that recommendation. I read that book maybe eight years ago, something like that, when I was developing one of my many syllabi for a course I never actually taught on glamour and the American dream. I had never read it. I mean, it's a very popular book to read among younger people, particularly girls, but I didn't read it when I was growing up. And I found it was quite a good read and very, as you say, very interesting in, I mean, it's fiction, but it's based on the author's actual childhood life. And so it gives you a slice of America and the immigrant experience that is, is on the one hand, very old, it sort of ends in at the time of World War I. But on the other hand, very, very fresh and relevant today. So yeah, so that's a great recommendation.
Well, thank you for coming on and I will definitely have you on again, definitely when your book is out, but possibly before then. And thanks a lot, Joel.
Joel (01:06:46.21)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a delight.
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