Susan Coll on the Nonsensical Business of Publishing

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens interviews bestselling author Susan Coll to discuss her new novel, Word Salad, which explores the chaotic and often nonsensical w

Key takeaways

• Susan Coll's novel 'Word Salad' uses a bookstore setting to satirize the unpredictable nature of publishing math and marketing.
• The author utilizes her experience at Politics and Prose Bookstore to provide authentic behind-the-scenes details of bookstore life.

Main topics

• Word Salad novel plot
• Publishing industry economics

Notable quotes

When you talk about books, you really talking about life.

Conclusion

An insightful look at how real-world professional experience can enric

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to Totally Booked. I'm Zibby Owens. I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show and learned endless amounts about storytelling, reinvention, and life itself. Because when you talk about books, you're really talking about life. So get ready to hear from today's best authors, the best-selling, and the not-yet-discovered. Come find your next great read and the story behind it. Enjoy. Speaker 2 (0:26) Susan Call is the author of Word Salad. She is a best-selling author of eight novels, including The Literati, Real Life and Other Fictions, and Bookish People. Her other books include The Stager, Acceptance, Rockville Pike, and Karl Marx.com. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and many other places. Her novel Acceptance was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack. Susan Call is the recipient of multiple grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She works as an event consultant at Politics and Prose Bookstore and was the president of the Penn Faulkner Foundation for five years. She teaches workshops at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Enjoy. Speaker 1 (1:09) Welcome, Susan. Thank you for coming on Totally Booked to talk about Word Salad. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm so delighted to be here. Speaker 2 (1:17) Thank Speaker 1 (1:17) you, Zuby, Speaker 2 (1:18) for having me. Oh my gosh. As a bookstore owner, this was the most fun book to read. This is the ultimate behind the scenes, in the windowless office downstairs type of book where you pull back the curtain on really everything to know about working in a bookstore. And it is so fun among other things. Well, Speaker 1 (1:37) thank you. I'm glad to hear it holds up for you as a bookstore owner. Also, I did an event at Zibby's in Santa Monica and I love your store. So thank you. Speaker 2 (1:46) Oh, thank you. And I know that you I have worked at Politics and Prose, right? Is that where you, that's where you get all your inside information? Let me hear more about that. Well, the bookstore in this book and then Speaker 1 (1:57) Bookish People, which is the same bookstore, both not Politics and Prose, but it's true that I've worked there on and off for about 15 years now. Speaker 2 (2:08) Amazing. So a lot of inputs into this story. Why don't you tell listeners what Word Salad is about? Speaker 1 (2:16) Word Salad's about a young woman, 29 years old, who is from D.C. but has been living in Los Angeles. And she comes home because her mother's not well and she's going to help care for her. And she winds up working in her neighborhood bookstore, but she's kind of a misfit. She's a former economics major. She's not a very bookish person. She's well-read. She's very smart, but she has... trouble fitting in with her colleagues. And she sees the world a little differently than those around her. So she's coming into this as something of an outsider and trying to make sense of this nonsensical business of publishing. She doesn't understand publishing math or why, you know, none of us really do. Me neither. Speaker 2 (3:06) I was going to say, either do I. Speaker 1 (3:08) Right. So that's the premise. And then on her... The book begins when she is given a new colleague that she is meant to train to help her. And this is an older woman who's coming back into the workplace after her child goes off to college and has zero administrative skills, which is fine. But she also doesn't really care to learn much. And she's larger than life and sort of Matilda's opposite. Matilda's the... protagonist. So it's about their dynamic. Speaker 2 (3:43) Which was hilarious. I was like laughing out loud, the part about her bringing her dog and just being like, well, I already have the dog here, so it's just going to be fine. And then like pulling out the cuffs for the water and like all the accoutrements for the having a dog and just like settling in. She was so funny. Sage is like the antihero or I don't even know. I always Speaker 1 (4:04) like to have an animal in my... novel as well. So Janet just kind of introduced herself into the book. Speaker 2 (4:12) So funny. And I even love how she's asking, she's like, wait, so employees can't have dogs, but customers can have dogs? Like, how does that make sense? Right. Let's Speaker 1 (4:22) bring Speaker 2 (4:22) a Speaker 1 (4:22) lawsuit. In the standard operating procedure, I don't know. Speaker 2 (4:27) Oh my gosh. And even just all the fun characters that you have in the store and the people who come to the events and the Ikea chairs and setting up. And of course you open with this very funny scene of a sort of recreational photographer who is always in the store, sort of budding noses, I should say, with a sort of little arrogant author who... They clash. Let's just put it that way. They clash in a big way and blood comes out as a result, among other things. Talk a Speaker 1 (5:02) little Speaker 2 (5:02) bit about how you make, how you think of the scenes, these really funny scenes, as you're going through the minutia of the day, which is hilarious. But like, how did you come up with that? Where did that come from? Speaker 1 (5:14) I'm not sure entirely where the, you know, that particular scene came from, but some of it is what. hey, what could go wrong here? And I think of all the things that could potentially go wrong. And if you think about author events and, you know, somebody just disruptive. So in this case, I had a photographer who's just. very enthusiastically snapping photos with this old Soviet equipment that she picked up at a flea market. So it's really, it's not like a quiet iPhone. It's very in your face. She sets up a tripod and big lights and, you