Joel J. Miller

I’ve been thinking recently on an important topic for bibliophiles: Should you write in your books? The answer varies for every person, but as for me and my tomes: Yes. Scribble away.

Last week Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from some of their customers’ Kindles.

Thomas Nelson CEO Mike Hyatt is fond of saying that good marketing makes bad books fail fast. The logic is pretty straightforward: If the marketing works and people swarm to a book only to discover it’s lousy, what happens? Blog posts, email chatter, coffee-shop eyerolls–scads of people saying that the book stinks. The better the [...]

Here’s a fact: The way to write edifying fiction is to write what is. Here’s another: The way to write bad fiction is to write what is edifying.
I just read a line by Flannery O’Connor that explains why this is so: “what is written to edify usually ends by amusing.” The word “amusing” is [...]

Tales of tragedy, crime, and corruption have value for several reasons. One is that those that read them do not usually lead tragic, criminal, and corrupt lives, at least not the extent portrayed in such stories.

Everyone wants to get published. It’s universal. Read this from Justin Martyr’s Second Apology:
And we therefore pray you to publish this little book, appending what you think right, that our opinions may be known to others, and that these persons may have a fair chance of being freed from erroneous notions and ignorance of [...]