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- [00:04]
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Jessi Cohen
Hi, and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Jessi Cohen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Miranda Melcher. Our discussion is a little different today because instead of talking about a book, we're discussing her time as a New Books Network host. Miranda is one of our most prolific NBN hosts and she has just reached the milestone of 1000 New Books Network interviews. We'll discuss why she joined the nbn, her interview process, and some fun stories she's collected from over her years of hosting. So, Miranda, welcome to the show.
- [02:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for doing this with me. I'm quite excited.
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Jessi Cohen
Yeah, me too. So for our first question, can you tell a little bit about yourself to our listeners?
- [02:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So, I'm Miranda. I have been an NBN host now for a few years, since about 2021. And obviously I really like it because we're here today on the occasion of having completed a thousand interviews. So I've had the absolute pleasure and honour of reading a thousand books and speaking to a thousand authors and counting. I come to this as a background mainly as a historian, also kind of a political scientist. But that sort of interdisciplinary background is something I very much bring to the NBN and enjoy about it because this is a place where we don't have to sort of just stay within the one narrow area that we, you know, do a PhD on and write a book on which of course, is a great way of learning things. Right. The depth is really satisfying in a particular way, but so is getting to explore things well beyond the one topic too. So it's that combination of seeking depth in particular subjects, including my own, as well as wanting to go beyond that, that makes this so fun for me. And just to give a bit of background about what my own research is in, I look at how to better negotiate, write and implement peace treaties to more effectively end civil wars. So it's a comb of war studies. There's also a lot of law involved. There's lots of diplomacy and negotiation and the psychology of that as well as, of course, then in depth understanding of particular wars and what's happening in different places. So my PhD research focused on Mozambique and Angola. So getting into their histories, their colonial histories, the dynamics of the conflicts. There's a whole bunch of Cold War stuff that got brought into all of that. So very interdisciplinary.
- [03:56]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, that's fascinating. And so how did you first hear about the New Books Network and what made you decide, okay, I'll become a host?
- [04:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I honestly don't remember when I first heard about the nbn. It was sometime in grad school. And I think I probably came across it in one of those ways where as many listeners I'm sure can identify with in grad school, you know, you need to read all the things. But sometimes it's hard to tell which things you need to read. And the blurb on the back of a book on a publisher's website will often hint that this book could be useful to your research, but it kind of only gives you a limited amount of information. And trying to track down those books, especially the new books that have just come out that aren't in your university library yet, you're on a bit of a deadline. You need to have more information about, do you actually need to go read this book? Do you need to go find this author? And so I first came to the NBN as a listener, using the interviews as a way to find out more about these books. Do I need them in my research? What are other people doing in the field in that sort of grad student mindset? It then expanded as I went further into the Ph.D. and again, a shift I'm sure many people are familiar with. You've gone from needing to read all the things to being so deep in your own research that it's really hard sometimes to get your brain to take a break for a second. And so that's when the NBN kind of took its second life in my head, which was as a way to hear about things totally unrelated to my research. That just gave my brain a little bit of a break while I was getting groceries or commuting somewhere or whatever, whatever it was, and needed a moment to not be obsessed with my PhD topic. I could find an NBN episode on, I don't know, Victorian shipwrecks and just be somewhere completely different, which was really helpful. So that's how I came to NBN as a listener. But it wasn't actually until I finished my PhD that I thought about being a host. And in fact, I do not get any credit for being a host. That was not my idea to start with. It was, in fact my husband's idea. He's not an academic at all, but he, maybe because of that, is perhaps more well rounded as a human who uses his time. And he saw that after the Ph.D. i had a sort of more normal 9 to 5 job, which academia doesn't really train you to do. And so closing my work computer at, you know, 5:05pm, I kind of didn't know what to do with myself for the rest of the evening. And at first, obviously, it was really nice to relax and read for fun and do all of that, but after a few months, I sort of didn't know what to do with myself. And obviously accessing all of the same sorts of books that you get as a grad student doesn't really work as well in the kind of quote unquote, real world. And so my husband sort of looked at me and was like, well, hang on a second. You've been listening to this NBN podcast for literally years. You always say that hosts have PhDs. You have one now, why not be a host? Then you get to read all these books and talk to people about it. You'll have something to do in the evenings. I was like, huh, yeah, you're right. Actually, there is a become a host button on the website that somehow I've never noticed. Let's see what happens if I select it. And I did. And Marshall, our editor in chief, was obviously lovely and said, sure, why not? So I picked a book, I emailed an author, and it's kind of snowballed extremely from there.
- [07:15]
Jessi Cohen
Oh, that's great. Yeah, I think I came to the New Books Network similarly in grad school, like, found it when I was trying to find a book I wanted to read and then, yeah, found out that it has interviews on so many different books. Just download it. I think I downloaded, like, 20 interviews in, like, one sitting just to listen to. Exactly, yeah. So it's nice that you found it in a similar way. So you've done a thousand interviews, which means you've read a thousand books. So how do you read so much?
- [07:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I get this question a lot. I'd say there's a few key elements. First off, I'm just freakishly naturally gifted at reading fast. There's no secret weapon, just that's how my brain works. It does require more than just that, though. So I obviously am very organized. So there's lots of spreadsheets and color coding going on, so I can keep track of everything. A big part of it, though, is that I get to choose the books that I interview. All NBN hosts do. And so no one's assigning me these books. I'm not slogging through them. Oh, I wish I didn't have to read it. I'm excited to read these books. I've chosen them on purpose. I still get such a thrill when I have an email in my inbox from an author saying, sure, I'm happy to be interviewed. I'm like, yay, victory. So that's definitely a big motivation, is that I'm always excited to read the books, and that's really a big goal of mine in how I choose them is I want to make sure that kind of when I get an author saying yes, when a book arrives, I'm still as excited as the moment I see it first and kind of have the idea to invite it. So I don't really know if there's a secret beyond that. I really like reading books. And obviously things like grad school train you to read academic books quite well. So that does help to some extent. You know, you can easily see one or two pages in. Oh, now we're in the lit review section. Cool. Probably don't need to read it that closely for the purpose of an interview. Maybe I'll skip to chapter three. So those sorts of things do help. But aside from the lit review, really, I do read the books. I mean, after all, that's why I've invited them. I want to read the books.
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Jessi Cohen
Yeah. Yeah. And for me, I don't know if you've got, like. Yeah, I'm sure you've experienced there's so many different books out there, but you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can only do so many books.
- [09:26]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. So how do you decide? Okay, there's, I don't know, 10 books I'm interested in, but, you know, these are the ones I'm going to Decide to do the interviews on.
- [09:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, if the list was only 10 books, I might just invite them all.
- [09:38]
Jessi Cohen
It's true. You're able to do like one a day.
- [09:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So, yeah, I do interview a lot of books, but, yeah, the list I do kind of start with a bigger list and then narrow it down a bit. There's a few things that I'm looking for. I like books that are interdisciplinary quite often both in terms of my own background, but also in terms of what I think is a benefit that I can maybe do a little bit to bring to the wider world that are structures in academia have historically been so focused on particular departments and structures that kind of privilege certain ways of thinking, certain ways of writing. And there are lots of strengths in that. But there are a lot of topics or ways of talking about topics that have a hard time getting noticed. Even if what they're doing is really cool and really interesting, it sort of doesn't fit in the box. And that is a sort of structural disadvantage. And that's something that I'm very motivated to try and do something to help. You know, maybe it's a really small thing, but at least it's something to kind of get information more available and accessible. So things that are interdisciplinary that maybe don't quite fit in one box is always interesting to me. Work that is asking and answering questions that we don't see that often as interesting to me. So whether that's combining disciplines in a different way, or using archives that we haven't used before, or combining them in different ways, going to different places and times than we often will look at tend to be things I'm really drawn to. So I know one book that often kind of gets some raised eyebrows from people that know that my background is more in war, cities and diplomacy in 20th and 21st centuries. I did an interview about a book on ancient Mayan teeth, which is pretty much as far away as you could possibly get right, but is maybe not a topic that's in the headlines, whereas Civil wars, unfortunately, are. So those are things I tend to look for and really focusing on kind of what's innovative and what's new in terms of combination of things and perspective taken. And quite often that also means that I love looking for authors where it's their first book, where maybe they haven't done this a lot before. I've really tried to make my interview process as welcoming as possible in order to encourage those voices again as part of the goal of making more information more accessible.
- [12:09]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. When I go to do editing Sometimes I look up the book, and before I even know who the host is, I can tell it's a Miranda book even. It can be about, like, you're saying, like, any topic, but if it's right, this combination of interdisciplinary and, like, a little bit obscure, but still really interesting and, like, it's for sure, Miranda. Yeah.
- [12:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm glad you. I'm glad you can see that. It is definitely that sort of things I'm looking for. And it really often comes down to looking at the blurb and the table of contents as a starting point and just going like, hmm, okay, maybe this has never occurred to me before, but now that this idea is in front of me, I'm kind of intrigued.
- [12:48]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. Yeah. So since you've read so many books for these interviews, and I mean, as a scholar yourself, is there any guidance you have for, you know, what makes a great book?
- [12:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, kind of. I think the key thing that I find myself hoping for when I open a book that I've assessed and analyzed and really hope it's good and the author has said yes, and the book's arrived and I'm excited to read it, the sort of moment of doubt that I still have when I open the book is the thing that the author has said the book is about in the table of contents, in the blurb, in the sort of introduction chapter. Is that actually what the book is saying? And a lot of times those things do match up. And I think that's because in academia, we're often trained to, like, really make sure that chapter two relates to your argument and how does chapter four relate to your argument? And so, in fact, the more kind of quote unquote academic the book is, often the stronger that element is. The structure really hangs together, and the argument really hangs together, even if, like, maybe it doesn't have amazingly compellingly written anecdotes that I would read out to, like, a friend of mine who's not an academic. Fine. But the structure of it all the pieces are very clearly related to each other. And that makes the argument, I think, a lot stronger. And it comes through in an interview much more clearly because all the pieces are there for a reason. That's not always the case. Sometimes I think we end up with books that have a really compelling blurb of kind of why this is a unique book, what's the unique angle and take on it. And then the actual written book is interesting, often has cool stories and anecdotes, but isn't actually making that same argument and that disconnect, maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine that I find frustrating, but I think can also make it harder to sometimes get that message across because it's not necessarily clear which message is trying to get across. So from a writing perspective, I'd say that something I really notice across genres, across kind of types of publishers, is how clear is the argument at the beginning and how consistently do all of the pieces as the book goes on. Keep tying back to that. And I think it can be done in a sort of straight up academic way. It can be done in a trade book, it can be done in books that are in between. But that really makes a difference.
- [15:18]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, I can see that because I think as a host, when you're coming up with your questions, if you don't see the through line or if the through line isn't totally clear, then it can be a little bit tough to decide, okay, what am I going to focus on when I'm asking questions?
- [15:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, exactly.
- [15:33]
Jessi Cohen
So to what extent might the interview change your perception of a book? You've read it, then you've interviewed the person. You probably have a pretty good idea when you go into the conversation. So once you've talked to them. Yeah. Can an interviewer change your mind about a book in any way?
- [15:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
To some extent, I think. I mean, obviously having read the book, I do know pretty much what they're going to say to almost every question I ask. It does mean that for me, the most interesting questions I ask is the first and the last question every time. The first question is always, why did you write the book? And the last question is, what are you working on next now? Why you wrote the book? Sometimes authors do talk about this and the acknowledgments or the introduction. So I do often have some sense. But the story of how a book comes to be is often way more complicated than people will write in an introduction. Fair enough. But often for the interesting, because it usually is a combination of kind of a professional motivation, a personal interest, some amount of luck and chance. And that's, I think, always really an interesting way to start an interview. And I don't know the answer to that question necessarily when I ask it. So I always enjoy starting off that way because it's kind of like I'm intrigued from the beginning. The last question, obviously, is about what they're doing after the book, so I have no idea what they're going to say at that point and so can get some very interesting answers. But in terms of the questions in the middle, I think what Makes the difference is if an author sounds excited about their work. Obviously by the time you get to an interview with someone like me, you've been working on this book for a really long time. Not all of those moments are fun, I absolutely understand that. But if an author, when talking about their work publicly, sounds excited, that makes a massive, massive difference in terms of my experience of the interview, I think in terms of listeners experience of the interview. So that's definitely something that you know. As much as I've already read the book before we start recording, I don't know if that's going to come through until the author starts talking. I think that's probably also my biggest piece of advice to authors is sounding excited matters more than whether or not you say it matters more than how perfect your English is or isn't. If you sound excited, then people will go with you. So I think those are the sort of unknowns that kind of I go into the recording with. And I will admit it does make a difference. There are sometimes books where I read them and go, okay, kind of fuzzy there. Not sure you so completely made your point on the page, but wow, it really comes through in the interview. Or sometimes vice versa. Like this was a really engaging, well written book. You kind of sound bored about it though when I talk to you. So that combination can definitely make a difference. So I definitely recommend sounding like you wanted to do this for a reason.
- [18:23]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think tone like it comes across so strongly even though we don't necessarily realize it when we're talking, but right when we're listening to episodes, you can definitely tell if someone is excited or seems really interested in their own work. And yeah, I agree. It's like of course you've probably worked on this for like 10 to 15 years at this point. I totally get if you're a little tired of it. But yeah, I think just making sure that your excitement is at least in your voice a little bit. Yeah, that's great advice.
- [18:55]
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- [19:24]
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- [20:08]
Jessi Cohen
Do all of your interviews kind of blur together, like at a thousand? You know, has anyone stood out or is it all just kind of a big mush in the end?
- [20:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a fair question. I think a lot of them do stand out in a number of different ways. So first of all, I have my wonderful library behind me if anyone's watching. That definitely keeps a lot of books top of mind because I'm literally seeing them sort of all the time. And part of how I do this is I organize my books by theme. And so that also is really interesting because as I'm reading a new book, it will remind me of other books and that kind of revives them in my head. I'm like, oh, wait, this reminds me of this thing. And finding those kinds of connections is something I really enjoy about the preparation process. So that also sort of revives books in my head, you know, keeps them from sort of falling off my radar entirely. But yeah, of course, there are particular conversations that I remember more than others, or arguments I remember more than others, whether they were especially unusual to me or something I hadn't come across before or there was some amazing anecdote. But generally I think they're all pretty firmly in there, at least for now. I mean, you know, ask me in a few more thousand. I don't know. But I mean, I spend a decent amount of time with choosing the books, with emailing the authors multiple times in advance, with obviously reading the book and writing questions on it and then doing the interview itself. So that kind of repetition over time and the deep engagement with it, I think dolls tend to embed them pretty strongly.
- [21:46]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. And I think, of course, all of the interviewees, of course, they're people, so they have their own personality and their own kind of thing. So when you have your interaction with them, it's like an hour long, so it is pretty meaningful. Yeah, yeah.
- [21:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And sometimes we get to talk a bit after the recording or, you know, some email exchanges are more memorable than others. So there's all sorts of kind of points for my brain to latch onto.
- [22:09]
Jessi Cohen
Was there any interview that you did that was really intimidating to do?
- [22:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Ooh, that's a good question. I think a few. Intimidating for a few different reasons. So I've had a few interviews where the author is very established in their field, and it's not a field that I'm an expert in. And so there was a bit of back and forth, perhaps before the interview actually happened around sort of, do you actually know enough to interview my book properly? And that obviously sort of raises the stakes when I'm reading the book and writing the questions. But I'm very pleased to say that in those cases, the interview went very well, and the author also thought the interview went very well. So I kind of, you know, met that challenge. So that was a bit intimidating, but also kind of a challenge I enjoyed. It was sort of like, oh, okay, great, that's what you want. I think I can do that. There's also been some who are intimidating more because I think I knew of their work because they're in my field. And so interviewing people that, like, are in my own bibliography, sort of like, oh, my goodness, okay, that was a little intimidating a few times. And then I think there have been times where I've interviewed books, like, well, outside my own research area, but, like, even beyond that, in fields that I didn't know before I started interviewing books. And so the first few books in those sorts of fields were sort of like, okay, I literally cannot make heads or tails of this lit review section. Like, I have no idea what theoretical contribution, like, how big a deal this theoretical contribution is. And some of those were sort of intimidating, I think, internally, not in terms of the author's interaction or anything, but just sort of in my own head. But again, I think those were challenges I enjoyed of, like, well, you know, we've been in that position before. Like, you don't go into undergrad knowing how to read a lit review. You don't go into grad school knowing how to write a book, necessarily. So, hey, you know what? This is a little intimidating, but I know I've done this before, so let's figure it out. And now I have a whole shelf of film studies books, which, to be honest, was not on my radar until I started interviewing them.
- [24:19]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. If a guest asked me if I felt I was qualified to interview them, I'd be like, wait a minute, let me get a PhD in your field, and then I'll come back to you. That would make me so nervous.
- [24:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I did decide that a whole PhD in a new field was a little too much of an ask, but, yeah, that is a question I've gotten.
- [24:37]
Jessi Cohen
Wow. Well, guess you are in good hands with Miranda.
- [24:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I like having challenges. Yeah.
- [24:44]
Jessi Cohen
Were there any authors that were a challenge to interview?
- [24:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
As I said, I really try and make the preparation process as sort of clear and welcoming as possible, and I think that does a lot to ensure that by the time we get to the actual recording, we have sort of removed a lot of potential challenges. So, for example, authors who are like, are you qualified to interview my book? Well, by the time we're actually in the recording, they've seen the questions I've written, and they've made their own judgment about whether or not they think I know what I'm talking about. So kind of that issue is off the table. Or authors who might be really nervous about speaking in English for an extended period of time. Again, by the time we get to the interview, they've seen the questions, they've been able to prepare, they've been able to ask questions. So that's less of a challenge, I think. Mainly for me, the thing that does still come up is if authors just sound deeply, deeply bored and, like, they don't want to be there, there's really only so much I can do to fix that. As we're going, and I've not yet figured out a great way to stop the interview in the middle, pause it, and go, so you sound bored. Can we work on that? That's. That's not an interview skill I've necessarily developed yet. So I'd say that's probably the main thing that could come up. But thankfully, it doesn't happen that often. It's kind of an awkward critique to kids.
- [26:03]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. Yeah. When I was a kid, like, I was in, like, an etiquette class, like, at my school, and they said, when you're on the phone, smile when you talk. So that. Because it comes across as you're speaking, even though it doesn't seem like it. So I think that's, like, a maybe some advice as well.
- [26:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Great advice. Definitely second that.
- [26:18]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, maybe I'll put that in my little FAQ section that I send out. So are there any crazy stories that you read in your thousand books that you had to really interview the author to be like, okay, is this real? Is this.
- [26:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Many, many crazy stories? I mean, really so many that I cannot remember all of them off the top of my head. Not so much in the. I have to speak to you to verify it, because obviously they've cited the thing. Sometimes I do go look up the footnotes, though. I'm like, really? Okay. And, you know, flick to the back and go, wow. Okay. I guess that never came across my radar before, but goodness. So there's loads of them. Really fun. They might be factoids, they might just be really amazingly written sentences that are very evocative of a place and time. So I've got a few examples, if you'd like.
- [27:07]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, of course.
- [27:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So some recent interviews that come to mind. First of all, bananas do not grow on trees. They are herbs. So, like really big parsley. Bananas, not actually bananas, turns out, are functionally herbs, not trees. Wow, that was cool.
- [27:25]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah.
- [27:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
50 plants that changed the World, I think, is that book. Other fun things I've learned. Medieval churches really liked stained glass. We obviously know this. We can still see examples of this all over the place. They liked it for a number of reasons, though. One was that stained glass was easier and cheaper to make than clear glass because if there were imperfections in the glass, you could like color them and then you wouldn't notice. But a more conceptual reason that I really liked is that if you are inside a church with stained glass, you cannot see outside. Right. You can see the stained glass itself, but you can't really see whatever's on the other side of the wall. And vice versa. If you're outside the church and there's stained glass, you can't really peer in. And so some religious leaders really liked this because it meant that everyone's minds were as focused on the religious service happening, not staring out the window, which I found a deeply amusing aspect of stained glass. I hadn't thought of. Yeah, some other ones that come to mind. Oh, Bath Spa in England. Bath, the city of Jane Austen. Really, really famous in British culture. Turns out, obviously there were Roman baths from a really long time ago, but it wasn't consistently a destination for all of that time since the Romans, which honestly I had kind of assumed it was. There was in fact, hundreds of years where it was just sort of a decaying random town that no one really cared about. And in fact, it was revived as a place that the rich and famous wanted to go to by Elizabeth I, because it had been decayed and therefore had no Catholic shrines or Catholic anything attached to it. And so in her very Protestant kingdom of being worried that there were Catholic plots against her, she wanted to turn everyone's attention away from Catholic related spas where maybe there was plotting going on. It was kind of hard to tell. Instead, if you really want the therapeutic aspects of a spa. You go to bath, and that's how you prove that you're just seeking medicine, not treason. Wow. So I thought that was pretty fun.
- [29:35]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah.
- [29:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And then a recent quotation that I just. I read in one of the books that I got to interview. It was the start of a chapter, even right towards the beginning of the book. So you open up this book, Cambridge University Press, and suddenly you get the sentence of, quote, In 1528, the wife of a Spanish conquistador swept and swept and swept in her Mexico City mansion. Nothing exciting there. But she was naked and it was midnight, and she said strange things. Maybe praying to a Mesoamerican God. If that book. If a book starts with that, don't you want to know more?
- [30:14]
Jessi Cohen
That's a great opener.
- [30:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So these are some of the things that I've gotten to learn, some of which are just cool. Some of which are blood boiling. For example, it turns out about 100,000 women between 1923 and 1940 lost their American citizenship that they had by birth simply by fact of marrying a non American man. And they had to petition US Courts in order to regain their US Citizenship that they had been born with.
- [30:43]
Jessi Cohen
Whoa. Yikes.
- [30:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's less than 100 years ago.
- [30:46]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah.
- [30:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. So I get to learn all sorts of things.
- [30:50]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. Sometimes reading and history is really fun, and sometimes you're like, oh, my God.
- [30:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And sometimes it's both at the same time. Right. So a great one. I read a few days ago, Vanilla ice cream. Vanilla ice cream was a massive, massive fad for decades. Obviously, it's still popular In World War II, American soldiers were so obsessed with it that there was an entire ice cream barge floated out to one of the naval installations to make sure that gis always had their ice cream at the same time. Brits also missing their ice cream, were told to suck on frozen carrots instead.
- [31:24]
Jessi Cohen
Ooh, sorry. Yikes. Man. Wow.
- [31:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Just stop for the storytelling there. But that gives you a bunch of ideas about why this is really fun.
- [31:35]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, no, I mean, you learn so much. Yeah. Fun stuff. So much interesting stuff, and, yeah, so much random stuff, too. It's great. If you were to, you know, start your book podcasting Journey today, was there anything you would do differently?
- [31:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I think the main thing I would do to start with is something that I've kind of developed over time, but I would have started with it if I had thought of it, which is having an FAQ document. So this is a document that I send out to all of the authors multiple Times they get it in their initial invite, they get it when they agree, they get it when they get the questions. They just kind of constantly have access to this document. And I've developed it over time based on literally what an FAQ is for, frequently asked questions. So things that authors have brought up time and time again, and it covers all sorts of things. What kind of software do you need? What sorts of answers tend to be good? Who is our audience? And who should you imagine you're speaking to? How worried should you be or not if English is not your first language? And having this FAQ document that really speaks to what authors are concerned about, I think is really helpful. And then also having it available so many different times through the process, especially in that initial invite, I think is really crucial because it helps authors who might be nervous about this idea to be able to say yes. Because when you get the invitation, you can see all the information about what this would actually take. And that, I think, helps sort of demystify the prospect so that people can go, okay, yes, this is kind of scary, but I think I can do it. And because so much of what I'm motivated by is, yes, learning the incredible facts from history, but it's also about getting more information, more accessible, ensuring that we have people on the podcast who are not necessarily the kind of people who would sort of be comfortable promoting themselves or going out to seek opportunities or doing 15 interviews, that's great, but we don't just want those voices. And so by having this sort of document that's so responsive to what authors have actually brought up and is so easily available is important to me to ensure we have a wider group of authors involved. And I'm really pleased that I get actually quite consistent feedback from authors saying that the FAQ really made a difference, or that it made it more able for them to say yes, or it made them feel more confident going into the interview, or it made them enjoy the process, even though it was also nerve wracking. So that's something that I'm really glad I have now. I'm still constantly developing it. And if I was to start this all over again, I would do that from day one.
- [34:18]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, yeah. I actually just started using an FAQ too, and I think, yeah, it's very helpful. Right. Just to get the interviewees comfortable. And so I would recommend that for all hosts to have some version of that that you sent out, and any.
- [34:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hosts that want to use mine or adapt from mine, feel free to get in touch. There's no reason this Sort of stuff has to be a secret. In fact, that's exactly what I don't want to do. So any hosts that want any of these things, please feel free to get in touch.
- [34:47]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah. And we want to make these kind of documents accessible to all of our hosts on our website, so stay tuned for that. But. Okay, so we're kind of nearing the end here. Are you hoping to do 1,000 more interviews?
- [34:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Oh, absolutely, yes. I have so many more interviews scheduled already, I mostly started counting. Well, the spreadsheet I keep track of anyway obviously counts automatically. But I sort of realized, kind of accidentally, I was getting to a thousand. It wasn't sort of some goal I had in my head. In fact, I remember when I got to 25, which was about one screen's worth on the spreadsheet, and I think we went out to dinner, like it was a big deal. I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe I've done 25 of these. How amazing. And sort of I figured I should keep track every 25 from there. And somehow we're at a thousand now, so I'm absolutely still going. The goal was never sort of a thousand and stop, but it is kind of a cool milestone. So I'm pleased that we get to take a moment and recognise it and then, you know, full speed ahead.
- [35:48]
Jessi Cohen
Yeah, definitely. I mean, when I heard it was your 1000th interview, I was blown away. So I'm happy that you're still interested, still happy to do it. And we'll still get your interviews on the New Books Network.
- [36:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, as you said, there are so many books. There are so many books. It's endlessly exciting. So New Books with Miranda Melcher is going to continue going strong, and I can't wait to see what I get to read next. Great.
- [36:12]
Jessi Cohen
Well, thank you so much for chatting with us today, Miranda. It was great to talk to you.
- [36:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's very fun to be on this side of the interview. Thank you very much.
- [36:19]
Jessi Cohen
Thank you for listening to my interview with Miranda Melcher. To hear any of her 1000 new books network interviews, you can subscribe to her channel or visit her page on our website. You can also subscribe to our Substack newsletter, which goes out weekly to receive this week's edition, which features Miranda. Thank you for listening.