Academic · Co-founder
Dr Miriam
J. Johnson
I research how digital platforms reshape who creates, who gets seen, and who holds power in culture, from publishing and genre fiction to the wider creative industries.
Current thinking
Publications
My Books
Pop Culture Marketing in the Publishing Industry: 'Good Luck, Babe!'
Routledge
This comprehensive study examines how UK publishers leverage pop culture across TikTok and Instagram, analysing over 1,000 posts from 16 publishers during 12 months. The research demonstrates how pop culture functions as a powerful distribution mechanism within the attention economy, utilising gender dynamics, trending content, strategic timing, and music to connect authentically with target audiences. This evidence-based guide provides practical insights into how UK publishers effectively harness pop culture on two of the industry's most crucial marketing platforms. The analysis identifies four core elements (music, trends, timing, and gender) that publishers can strategically employ to communicate with audiences in their native digital language, thereby boosting engagement and expanding reach. Through detailed examination of visual content, audio elements, captions, comments, and hashtags, each chapter reveals current publisher strategies, highlights successful approaches, and identifies opportunities for improved performance metrics. The study encompasses the full spectrum of pop culture integration across multiple content dimensions. The final chapters address pop culture's measurable value and distil six actionable recommendations that publishers can immediately implement to enhance their social media marketing strategies on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms. This practical framework enables publishers to optimise their pop culture integration for maximum audience resonance and engagement. Pop Culture Marketing in the Publishing Industry is essential reading for publishing professionals, digital marketers, and social media strategists seeking data-driven approaches to audience engagement in the contemporary attention economy.
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The Power of Brand Ownership: How Brands Shape our Cultural Landscape
Cambridge University Press
How do brands cultivate loyalty and influence consumer purchasing decisions? The Power of Brand Ownership explores the complex dynamics between branding and consumer identity within both the physical and digital realms that form our cultural landscape. Miriam J. Johnson uncovers a symbiotic relationship where brands serve not merely as navigational aids in a consumer's journey but also as integral components of self-identity and social projection, and the power that entails. Investigating the nuances of power shifts, brand authenticity, activism, and the gendered nature of consumption, Johnson asserts that brands are both influenced by and influencers of the cultural terrain they inhabit as well as the temporal contexts in which they interact. Theoretical frameworks articulate the fluidity of capital within the consumer-brand nexus whilst insightful case studies illustrate industry examples, revealing the shifting strategies employed by companies to make brands identifiable and desirable in the ever-changing cultural landscape.
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The Digital Pen: Navigating Performance of Authorship in the Digital Age
Palgrave Macmillan
The growth and adoption of social media has significantly impacted the writing and publishing landscape, challenging traditional concepts of authorship and prompting a re-evaluation of how authors present themselves in digitally social spaces. This book explores how authors navigate the performance of their authorship in the digital age, focusing on the development of author identity, its relationship to performance, the value of authenticity, and how authors may self-censor based on who they think their audiences are. Drawing on qualitative surveys and interviews, and quantitative data scraping and mining for sentiment analysis, this research explores how authors project their identities within the consumer's cultural landscape. By investigating the performative nature of authorship in digitally social spaces, this study aims to deepen our understanding of the evolving dynamics between authors, their works, and readers in the digital era.
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Social Media Marketing for Book Publishers
Routledge
Providing a concise toolbox for publishing professionals and students of publishing, this book explores the skills needed to master the key elements of social media marketing and therefore stay relevant in this ever-competitive industry. Taking a hands-on, practical approach, Social Media Marketing for Book Publishers covers topics including researching and identifying actionable insights, developing a strategy, producing content, promotion types, community building, working with influencers, and how to measure success. Pulling from years of industry experience, the authors' main focus is on adult fiction publishing, but they also address other areas of the industry including children's, young adult (YA), academic, and non-fiction. The book additionally brings in valuable voices from the wider digital marketing industries, featuring excerpts from interviews with experts across search engine optimisation (SEO), AdWords, social platforms, community management, influencer management, and content strategists. Social Media Marketing for Book Publishers is a key text for any publishing courses covering how to market books, and should find a place on every publishers' bookshelf.
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Books and Social Media: How the Digital Age is Shaping the Printed Word
Routledge
Social media and digital technologies are transforming what and how we read. Books and Social Media considers the way in which readers and writers come together in digital communities to discover and create new works of fiction. This new way of engaging with fiction stretches the boundaries of what has been considered a book in the past by moving beyond the physical or even digitally bound object to the consideration of content, containers, and the ability to share. Using empirical data and up-to-date research methods, Miriam Johnson introduces the ways in which digitally social platforms give rise to a new type of citizen author who chooses to sidestep the industry's gatekeepers and share their works directly with interested readers on social platforms. Gender and genre, especially, play a key role in developing the communities in which these authors write. The use of surveys, interviews, and data mining brings to the fore issues of gender, genre, community, and power, which highlight the push and pull between these writers and the industry. Questioning what we always thought we knew about what makes a book and traditional publishing channels, this book will be of interest to anyone studying or researching publishing, book history, print cultures, and digital and contemporary literatures.
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Research interests
Platform Studies, Digital Cultures, and Publishing
I study digital culture at the intersection of platforms, publishing, and participatory communities: how BookTok influencers, fan cultures, and self-publishing ecosystems are restructuring the literary field, and what this reveals about cultural power, identity, and pop culture in networked life.
AI, Authorship, and Augmentation
What does it mean to be an author, artist, or creator when generative AI can produce convincing work? I examine what this means for the creative industries, from publishing to digital media: where the guardrails sit, who holds the power, and how AI might be harnessed to benefit creative labour rather than displace it.
Genre Fiction and Digital Communities
Genre fiction and romance are sites of feminist practice, shifting capital, and cultural resistance. My current research maps how romance bestsellers became cultural infrastructure, and how publisher strategy, platform economics, and classification systems shape which intimacy norms go mainstream.
Immersive Technologies and Narrative
Founding and editing the journal Immersive Technologies, and exploring how immersive tech can create more inclusive tools and environments within the humanities and digital culture.
Projects
Things I'm Building
Dudley Editions
A personalised audiobook platform that lets families record and share stories in their own voices.
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JADE Check
An inclusive language checker that flags gendered, ableist, ageist, and exclusionary text and suggests fairer alternatives. Born from research into publishing job ads.
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The Agent Stack
Building a set of AI agents to automate, simulate, and interrogate publishing industry questions. Always adding to the stack
Smidget
A manuscript summarisation tool for publishing rights agents. Paste or upload a manuscript and get multi-length summaries, with translations.
