Story of a Book Podcast

Jason Jefferies

Many of the greatest moments in my career as a bookseller came from conversations I had with authors about their books. When I started the Bookin’ podcast in November 2018, I was the marketing manager at Quail Ridge Books, a job I took because I intended to continue the North Carolina Literary Festival/North Carolina Book Festival that the North Carolina University system wasn’t too interested in maintaining. A bookstore seemed like the perfect home base for the festival and a podcast.

The idea behind starting a podcast was that we would have an author event at the bookstore, record an interview while they were there, get extra books signed, release the podcast a few weeks later, and sell the signed books to listeners who heard about it on the podcast.

Brilliant, right? It went according to plan at the beginning. My first guest on Bookin’ was Ben Fountain. Ben was touring for a book of essays titled Beautiful Country Burn Again, which covers an NRA convention in Kentucky (among other things). There was a ton of traffic on the way to the interview, and I was a nervous wreck. My second guest was David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon, who discussed a photo essay about Ernest Shackleton. My third guest was bestselling author Therese Anne Fowler.

The podcast was released weekly and we were selling out of the respective signed books at Quail Ridge. Everything was going according to plan!

There was only one hitch around the corner: the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you know what did not happen during COVID-19? Book events in bookstores.

While our master podcast-related marketing plan was ruined, the unforeseen consequence of the lack of book events in bookstores was that many authors suddenly wanted to be on podcasts, and many readers were tuning into podcasts or other digital events because they were stuck at home.

The podcast started with around 100 listeners (thanks to Quail Ridge Books’ robust email list), but soon after the onset of the pandemic, the audience ballooned to thousands and then tens of thousands. Authors were sharing their interviews on social media. Listeners weren’t all buying their books from our bookstore, but hopefully they were buying them (or checking them out) from somewhere!

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So what is the format of my podcast? I was inspired by Frank Stasio. I listened to KCRW’s Bookworm by Frank Stasio like our Russian inventory manager in San Francisco smoked cigarettes. I appreciated Stasio’s friendly rapport with the authors. I had seen, heard, and managed enough author events at that juncture to know that many authors said and read the same things from event to event, but Stasio was drawing something unusual out of his guests. He was interviewing an actual person, not a publicity package.

I wanted to have these types of conversations on the Bookin’ podcast.

I ask ten questions in every interview, usually opening with a softball like a “How are things going?” type of question. After that, I try to ask questions that the author doesn’t get every day, usually based on observations I (the reader) made about an author’s character or setting that reminded me of a strange aspect of human psychology, or some philosophical quandary.

My hope is that authors appreciate these questions as much as I enjoy asking them.

Authors are recruited for interviews on Bookin’ in one of several ways:

1. I, or a bookstore event representative like Renè Martin or Rebecca Doel, know them and ask them to come on;
2. an author or their publicist reaches out to me and asks if I am interested in an interview;
3. I desperately want to read a book in the worst way possible, so I reach out to anyone who may know an author to try to get them on (surprisingly, this works often); or
4. an author cannot come on for one reason or another (Cormac McCarthy, for example), so I talk to one of my friends about the author’s book/s.

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Some of the most notable moments from the 300+ episodes of Bookin’ include:

• interviewing Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith in Lee’s kitchen while being fed coffee and homemade cookies;
• interviewing my former teacher Jill McCorkle;
• interviewing Randall Kenan shortly before he passed away;
• befriending William T. Vollmann, interviewing him several times, and hosting him in North Carolina while he researched his forthcoming novel A Table for Fortune (2026);
• interviewing James McBride, Erik Larson, and Rebecca Solnit in rapid succession at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute;
• meeting Hanif Abdurraqib right before he broke as a bestseller and hosting him at the North Carolina Book Festival;
• discovering that Michael Parker is one of the greatest living authors;
• interviewing my musical hero Jeff Tweedy;
• interviewing my television hero Ken Jennings (my family loves Jeopardy);
• nerding out with David Aldridge about the greatest NBA players of all time and arguing with Joe Posnanski for Buster Posey’s inclusion in The Baseball 100;
• speaking with John Kessel about Emily St. John Mandel’s approach to literary science fiction, and then speaking with Emily St. John Mandel about John Kessel’s approach to her approach to literary science fiction;
• interviewing Mark Lanegan and finding out about the many wonderful and unsung things Courtney Love has done to help musicians recover from drug abuse;
• learning how lucky students at the University of Southern California are to be able to take classes from both T. C. Boyle and Viet Thanh Nguyen;
• interviewing my former Borders Books and Music District Manager Jeff McKown about his book Solid Ground;
• reading through the works of Cormac McCarthy with my friend Dan Hawkins;
• sitting in a room with my Aunt Terri while interviewing one of her favorite authors, Shannon Messenger;
• learning about Tamsyn Muir’s tenure as a teacher;
• receiving postcards in the mail from Sesshu Foster after interviewing him and Arturo Romo; and
• interviewing my favorite childhood author, Margaret Weis.

There are so many more moments over my tenure as host of Bookin’ that I treasure. I hope my guests and listeners have a few too. Interviewing authors about their books has taught me to be a better, more attentive reader. I am grateful for the opportunities to share their thoughts.

One day, I may interview you.

Until then, happy reading!