Dear Republic,
Joel J. Miller is the former publishing exec behind LitStack fixture MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚. We were excited to get Joel’s take on the rise of serialized novels, oral versus written culture, and the thesis of his new book, The Idea Machine.
- Greta
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOEL MILLER
1. You were a senior editor at HarperCollins for over ten years. What has your career in publishing helped you bring to your writing about books and book culture?
Well, I started as a senior editor at Thomas Nelson and eventually settled into vice president of editorial and acquisitions for one of the trade imprints there. I continued in that role when Harper bought Nelson. I think the answer to the question though is simple: perspective.
I see a lot of people writing about the industry who don’t have the benefit of having sat on the publisher’s side of the desk. Publishing is a black box, and when we don’t know what’s actually happening we tend to fabricate stories to explain what we don’t understand. Uncertainty is a burr in our brain. Maybe a person has even published before, but they don’t always know why publishing operates the way that it does, what considerations are at play, and so on. I try to share that perspective whenever meaningful.
2. Why did you decide to start Miller’s Book Review in 2022?
I had two primary reasons. The first was that I don’t retain enough of what I read, and I initially thought that I would review every book that I read over the course of the year. My reading still outstripped my reviewing, but it was a good discipline and I enjoyed the practice. It’s morphed since then, but that was the root. I could have done that in private, but I also knew I lacked the discipline to keep up the practice. I needed some form of public accountability—a deliverable people expected to see Saturday morning—to follow through.
The other reason is more crass, or at least might seem that way. As an author, I needed to build an email list. Speaking of the publishing business, I knew to be attractive as an author I would need to have some kind of audience that cared to hear from me, and I thought the perfect time to begin cultivating that was 10 years ago. Yeah, oops! Having missed that boat, I was glad to get started when I did. In some ways, though, that was best for me. I didn’t know about Substack until then, and it’s really proved to be the ideal platform for me and how I like to work.
3. You’ve said you had your upcoming book, The Idea Machine, in the back of your mind for ten years. Can you describe that impulse a bit more? Why did you want to write, as you said, “a book about books”?
Depending on how you count these things, it was really more like 13 years. I had been working on a book about the rise of individualism in the West. I thought I had a killer thesis, and I developed a book proposal and a couple of sample chapters.
I got shot down by every house I pitched it to. But a couple of editors responded well to one chapter in that proposal about the role that books played in the Reformation and I thought, well what if I just expanded that and wrote a history of books? Brilliant! How much fun would that be? Then I realized that book had been written a few hundred times already, and I needed a more unique angle.
Sometimes personal enthusiasm masks drawbacks in our ideas we don’t see until faced with whatever passes for reality. We get high on our own supply. Rejection is a great way to discover that and push us toward making a more valuable contribution.
4. In your own description, the thesis you’ve ended up with—that the book is a tool and informational technology—wasn’t apparent to you at the start of your project. What was initially the guiding force?
I think the guiding force was simply the recognition that books played a major role in our cultural evolution. I knew that much. But I hadn’t quite understood the mechanism. I didn’t know how—outside of the fact that ideas were instrumental in that development.
The more I played with that angle, however, the more I realized it didn’t satisfy me, not exactly. An intellectual history doesn’t—nor can it—tell the whole story. It was when I realized that books are both software and hardware that it clicked for me. In some ways that was a slow and fast realization: slow in that I knew the thing with books played some part in the story, though I couldn’t have defined it; fast in that, when that clicked for me, a lot of pieces fell into place at once. It gave me a track to run on, and I hadn’t seen anyone really push that line before, not to the extent I wanted to.
5. You propose four key ways in which the book serves as a novel technology. One of them is the scaling of ideas at speeds “unmatchable by oral cultures.” It’s difficult in our information-saturated present day to conceptualize what oral cultures look like, but I imagine this was a meaningful point of inquiry for research in your book. To put your conceit in negative: what is an oral culture? In what meaningful ways does it differ from written cultures? Does that distinction survive today?
That’s a fun question, and I think oral culture has actually rebounded in the last decade. We’ve seen the resurgence of oral culture through the mediums of podcasts and video. But there are tradeoffs: three people yammering around microphones can’t convey the intricacies of ideas the way written language can, nor does the final product have any permanence.
I love a great podcast, and they can’t beat a book for what they do well. But they can’t match a book for what books do well. They can’t, for instance, convey the sort of immersive experience that a novel, memoir, or history can. Conversations by their very nature cannot present a total vision for a particular topic; at best they can gesture at totalizing statements. But there’s not enough oomph behind the ideas. They tend to be superficial.
6. You define the Book as “a portable collection of written ideas, designed to elevate the human mind beyond its natural limits of experience, memory, distance, and time.” That suggests a book can take several forms (scroll, paperback, vellum sheets) and must have some level of complexity. I’m curious about the porousness you’ve observed between a book’s medium and the content. “The medium is the message” posits that our experience of a thing is shaped by the vehicle through which we engage with it. The easiest example is that we read paperbacks better than we read articles on our phones. With that in mind, can you articulate any specific relationship between the medium of the book (portable content) and its impact? Why aren’t we all hauling clay tablets around anymore?
A clay tablet is wonderfully portable, but cuneiform is a bitch to learn and any particular tablet can only contain so much information, so you’ve got to lug around a lot of tablets to contain an entire work. If you’re into rucking instead of reading, that might be a good tradeoff. But what the history of the book demonstrates is an evolution of the format, slowly if unsteadily optimized for accessibility and use.
That could mean that the highest expression of the book is a digital file that sits on your Kindle. But there are tradeoffs there, too. For one, when your whole library is nothing but thumbnails on a screen, it’s easy to lose track of what you have. Interacting with the text in the form of highlighting and marginalia is limited, and there are other losses as well.
In that sense, the highest evolution of the book might actually be the trade paperback. It’s super portable, can easily carry 100,000 words or more, doesn’t take up much space, and plus it can spark interesting exchanges when people spy the cover. Oh, you’re reading that; tell me what you like about it…
7. To push a bit more: You note that the “revolutions that produced the modern world… wouldn’t have happened without the book,” because “nobody changes the world without ideas.” Some ostensible non-book mediums (like the “topical, polemical, and short” revolutionary pamphlets that created a shared American political consciousness, or the Facebook post during the Arab Spring) are responsible for generating large-scale social change in their own right. In your research, is there a tradeoff between complexity and medium?
Definitely. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was not rigorously or intricately argued in the way a lawyer or a politician might debate the case. In fact, it came in for quite a lot of criticism, even among the founders—for instance, John Adams—because of its slapdash approach. But Paine was fueling fires, and an incendiary pamphlet was the perfect format for that.
It pissed people off. It was quickly read and easily passed along to the next reader. It was cheap, so lots of people could read and discuss it. Maybe a hundred thousand people read Common Sense at the time; a carefully reasoned treatise wouldn’t, couldn’t have had the same effect.
Of course, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers were closely argued texts, and those continue to inform our understanding of the Constitution to this day. Either way, what wouldn’t have worked to spark that kind of change were stump speeches and the like, important as those might have been. There needed to be a fixed form of the idea that people could refer to—rather than simply floating on waves of gist and vibes.
The same was true for other revolutions, like the 16th century Reformation. Martin Luther could preach a stemwinder of a sermon, but without the gobs of print he dumped on Europe, he never would’ve had the effect he did.
8. Does a book need to be sufficiently long to achieve the complexity required in your definition? (To use the previous example: can a pamphlet be understood as a Book? Can a tweet?)
Yes, a pamphlet is definitely a book. Any complete written statement packaged in a portable format I would count as a book. As far as length, a book only needs to be as long as it needs to be. In fact, anytime an author writes a short book they have done a service to the species.
When it comes to edge cases like a tweet, I think the easier comparison might be to something like graffiti. A short standalone message is a statement, but not necessarily a book, though it can certainly grow into a book with enough development—and plenty of acquisition editors have created tidy profits for their publishers by looking out for those sorts of resonant messages X, Instagram, or whatever platform.
The relative development of the idea here is key. A book seeks to create, usually, some form of total statement on a thesis—at least in the nonfiction sphere. And a version of that holds for, say, literary fiction as well. A novel tries to capture a poignant but robust experience of being human that requires suitable depth and development to execute. That’s why the difference between a short story and a novel is not merely length; it involves the mechanics of the narrative itself.
Length does not equate to effective development, but it’s a component.
9. One of the compelling points you make is that the development of the Book is the development of a tool that relates complex information and changes human thinking. This makes sense—not only does organizing one’s thoughts on paper enable further relationships to those arguments to develop (counterpoint, nuance, connection to a related thought), but tracing that complexity on paper can train other human beings to think this way. How does fiction-writing (from epics to plays to novels) fit into this idea of complexity?
Well, continuing my previous answer: fiction seeks to convey experience. It’s not analytical like an argument. Instead, it trades upon the interplay between action and reaction to communicate about human desires and relationships and how those are so easily frustrated. Without sufficient development in the story it fails to connect. Middlemarch or Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed could’ve been half as long, but they would’ve been lesser works for want of sufficient development. In the hands of an untalented author, length just equals more words. But every one of those words is an opportunity to push a line of thought in a way that captures a reader. If the author fails to do that, they’ve wasted their effort.
The complexity of the story becomes an essential means to adequately convey the experience of life. Henry James’s The Ambassadors is a master class on theory of mind. Nothing happens in that story except people guessing what others are thinking; life is like that too. And this, by the way, is just as true for history, economics, reportage, and more. To make a total statement, an author says X, but they also need to say Y, because that affects how we understand X. And they can’t leave out Z or we’ll miss some essential interplay—same for A, B, and C. So what might have begun as 2,500 word article balloons into a 75,000 word book. Only then does it approach the full statement the author envisions.
As a side note, I think this is why essay collections don’t often work well in the marketplace; they lack the cohesion of a complex narrative or argument.
10. You’ve written that “Literature brings us into the orbit of other lives,” and literature famously is lauded for making us more empathetic, better able to imagine the interiority of another human being. In The Idea Machine, you write about Xenophon’s Memorabilia, in which Socrates strips the book-toting Euthydemus of his pretension to wisdom. Simply amassing knowledge was not sufficient to understand justice and truth—Socrates demonstrated to Euthydemus that a teacher was necessary to demonstrate those virtues. What do you think—are books alone sufficient for moral development? If not, what does the books-alone approach miss?
I think there is a range here. A tome is a wonderful tutor, and a student can take a lot of instruction from a book. But Socrates’s complaint involves the conviction that a book cannot teach the full nature of a subject. When in the Memorabilia he corrects Euthydemus, it’s precisely for this reason. On paper, the boy understands justice; books gave him false confidence. But once Socrates complicates the case, he realizes his ignorance knows no bounds. It’s like there is a world of assumptions and considerations that live in the air above a book—all the context—and to properly understand what is in the book one must go outside the book.
The way I talk about The Idea Machine is that a book can say only what it says. It can’t be queried. It can’t be interrogated. To get more from the book, a person has to consult other authorities. Strictly speaking, that could be another book or another shelf full of books. But a teacher can help facilitate an understanding that a book might miss. A book is an attempt at a total statement, but it’s a big world out there and a book can’t cover everything, no matter how well developed.
What’s more, there’s what the book says, and what we say it says, and that means there’s room for interpretation and argument and application that require additional human intelligence to make the most of. I think we intuitively know this when we speak about things like the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law; if the text were enough, we wouldn’t need judges.
When this comes to moral development, books offer the stuff of life but not life itself. We only pick that up by trying, getting bruised, and learning from our setbacks.
11. Silicon Valley has evolved a bit from Sam Bankman-Fried’s infamous derision for books, with tech CEOs now pointing to the humanities as newly promising amid rumbles of AI job disruption. How will books influence an age where AI and digital life dominate?
I have so many thoughts here. First, in some ways books provide a moat against AI. Books can offer immersive reading experiences. Large language models do not—almost the exact opposite, in fact. They tend toward the summary, the synthesis, the surface of things. Ask an LLM about Middlemarch. Ask it to write you a novel like Middlemarch. It can’t do it. Same with a memoir or a narrative history.
Anything that speaks as a total message is difficult to atomize and parcel out as rearrangeable facts, interpretations, statistics, and sources. LLMs are great at delivering those, even synthesizing new work based on those in its training data. But AI has not been trained on you, your experience or imagination. This is good news for authors. It’s also great news for readers: there will always be reasons to fill our shopping cart; as long as authors keep working, we keep reading.
That means literature has a major role to play in grounding us and elevating humane concerns in a digital age. AI can be trained on the artifacts of our suffering, frustration, elation, and successes. But they can’t experience them firsthand or convey them as humans might. Nor can they be properly skeptical. That’s a human strength worth nurturing. We give Doubting Thomas too much grief. As Thon Taddeo says in A Canticle for Leibowitz, “A doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.” And everything else, probably. Critical engagement with books can sharpen that skeptical sense.
I happen to think LLMs are remarkable tools, but I won’t be ceding my humanity to them. They’re not very good at being human. That said, creatives of all sorts, including authors, will find interesting, beneficial ways of using LLMs in service of humane ends. That seems inevitable, probably even desirable to one degree or another.
Humans have another wonderful feature. We can set a goal for ourselves and then blow it off. Boethius was planning to translate gobs of Aristotle into Latin. When he was arrested and jailed for treason, he had all the time he needed to work on the goal. Instead, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy and gave us a book that still resonates today. Humans can follow whims—and that’s where the magic usually is. That way lies not madness, but delight.
12. Literary name-dropping and allusion has long been a way of demonstrating cultivation, but it seems like reading has developed a new cachet in the past few years. There’s the rise of celebrity book clubs, authors writing for fashion houses, the new popularity of readings and book launches, new book imprints, and, of course, Substack. Much of this can be chalked up to commercial incentives and social media—books are perfect signals—but there’s an analogous fetish for books and reading on Substack that strikes me as a bit shallow or productized (for example, the popularity of compilation lists of reading and links). What do you make of this, as someone who’s both written about the history of the book in part as an object and someone who writes about book culture on Substack?
People like shallow, but they love deep. The problem is that love costs more than liking. We enjoy being thought of as well-read, as the kind of people that know the books that are important or popular for whatever reason. And taste and fashion change, and so there is a need to be up on who’s in and what’s out.
That can lead to a fairly superficial engagement with literature, which is a negative, but I think that’s a normal feature of cultural signaling. It’s much easier to rave about a book than to read it, and so the kind of fanboy/fangirl dynamic is to be expected, especially if people are rewarded for signaling how much they love this or that book. Humans will human.
I think the more rewarding thing for all of us is to find those authors whom we truly love, whose voice intrinsically resonates with us, whose books take us places we can’t go on our own, and celebrate those, invite others into the wonder that we experience when we read, say, Shirley Jackson or Cormac McCarthy or whoever. The goal is not to get points for dropping the name or mentioning the book. Rather, it’s to illumine what we find meaningful in those books. What did we feel? What did we discover? That’s what matters and sharing those insights is genuinely valuable.
13. Is this noise particularly new, or has it been around forever, and Substack is just a new avenue for a longstanding trend?
Some version of this has been around forever. In Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, he talks about some blowhard going on about a particular book he supposedly knew like his own name. Then he read it aloud for an audience and butchered it—because it turned out he didn’t know the work at all. BookTok is like this. Instagram is like this. Humans are like this. Substack just happens to have a lot of humans on the platform.
14. There’s a sort of jaded perspective common to lots of writers on Substack when it comes to publishing. What’s your take on those people—are they embittered, or are they onto something when they bemoan publishers as unfair gatekeepers?
I think a lot of this just goes back to the fact that publishing is a black box for outsiders and surprisingly challenging for insiders. Publishing is a fantastic way to lose a fortune—something like 70 percent of books lose money for a publisher. They pay advances, they have all the upfront costs of production, and then the book sinks without a ripple. Success is actually rare.
I once sat in a meeting after a profitability analysis of Nelson’s entire catalog had been conducted. We were reviewing the results, and the Pareto principle more or less held: Something like 20% of all titles on the list were driving the financial success of the company. 80% weren’t carrying their own weight. One brilliant guy in the meeting said, “Well then we should just publish the 20%.” With respect to my former colleague—who shall go unnamed—LOL. That’s like saying a batter who hits .300 should stop swinging at the other 70% of pitches he swings at. The only way you hit .300 is to swing and miss at all those other strikes. Publishers are gambling on taste, and it’s a game of percentages.
That said, publishers don’t like losing money, and therefore they are constantly trying to mitigate risk by publishing authors who seem to have the ability to reach their market. Since there is no perfect alignment between a publisher’s best guesses and what the market really wants, there are plenty of publishing failures, and a lot of books that might’ve been successful that get missed.
Anybody can tell a cynical version of that story in which publishers are keeping out important or worthy books from the market, but that misunderstands the game. If a publisher had perfect knowledge and could somehow find all of those hidden winners, they would love it—so would their stockholders and investors.
Authors reasonably hate this because their book is their baby. For a publisher a book is a line item. That’s reductive, but it’s still gospel in a business review. When a publisher has to explain their financials, it’s no good explaining away the losses by saying they were trying to be more fair.
For me, a good rule of thumb is assuming that most people in the universe are trying to do good by themselves for their own reasons, and if I get left out it’s just because there are 8 billion other people on this planet and my considerations are excluded from all but a few of their deliberations. Nobody’s thinking about you as much as you’re thinking about you, and that includes publishers. We’ve all got our own problems.
15. Also in light of your publishing experience, what do you think about the rise of serialized novels on Substack?
It’s fantastic. In the 19th century serialization was the primary way novels got written and published. The newspaper, magazine, and journal were the proving ground for the book. If the response from the market was significant, publishers would take the risk of publishing a final version—this was true for everything from Crime and Punishment to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. One of the ways authors got paid and publishers diminished risk was to float a story in bits and pieces in newspapers and journals before printing a book.
The history of publishing shows a lot of interesting models that authors can play with today. For instance, the subscription model popular in the 18th century—we’re now seeing that echoed in Kickstarter campaigns. Everything old is new again. What’s great about that is there’s a diversity of solutions for writers and authors who have something to say but who may not fit within the dominant publishing model as it emerged and cemented itself in the 20th century. Now in the early 21st century that model has fragmented, and there are more options for people.
16. Your Notes are great—you seem to have figured out a unique way to make that form work. How do you make those? What’s your process? What are you looking to express in a short form like that?
For me, it is some mix of amusing myself and sharing things that are interesting with whoever is following me, or whoever the algorithmic gods send my way. I was surprised how much Notes felt like Twitter back in the early days—like 2008 when I joined. Meme culture was not quite as robust then as it later became, but if you take curious observations, often in the form of quotes by interesting people, the random crap that happens to float through your own head, and slightly mischievous memes, it turns out that’s a pretty good combination for engagement. And it’s a hoot, which is the primary reason I do it. I mostly seek to amuse myself; if others are as weird as me, we’re all happier together.
17. To end on an easy one: is the young male novelist a vanishing breed?
I don’t think so. The gender dynamics in publishing are fascinating not because men are in decline so much as women are on the rise. I’ve read, for instance, that women in 1970 published a third as many books as men did, whereas by 2020 they’d reached parity, even pushing a little past. So men are not ebbing out to sea, so much as women are surging toward the shore. That’s great news. It’s only the relative mix that makes us think men are dwindling.
Last I checked women are doing better in literary fiction and garnering more prizes, but this doesn’t mean that men are vanishing—just that women are writing on themes and with voices the market and literary prize committees favor at the moment. Men should be curious about that, not threatened by it. If we just took all that angst and handwringing and channeled it into writing more novels, we’d all be better served.
Joel J. Miller is a writer, editor, and the chief content officer at Full Focus. He is the author of several books, including The Idea Machine: How Books Built Out World and Shape Our Future. You can find him and his work at MillersBookReview.com.
Interview conducted by Greta Dieck.
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