CC’ing Jordan Bascom

December 17, 2025 | jordan bascom | consortium corner

Jordan Bascom, Consortium’s marketing specialist, discusses marketing “assets,” the Mousse-iverse, and gloriously strange novels.

Welcome to Consortium Corner, a Q&A series with staff and reps to celebrate Consortium’s 40 years of independent book distribution.

Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Consortium.

I’m a marketing specialist here at Consortium, and I write our two weekly newsletters, the Communiqué and the Library Express, which I really like doing. I also coordinate and advise on various marketing opportunities for our publishers, attend a few conferences here and there, and do other classic marketing things like designing “assets” and “collateral.”

As for non-work life: in addition to books, I also like television, hanging with friends and family, the occasional craft, and lounging with my two perfect cats.

What are 5 Consortium titles you love and why?

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz (Transit Books)
This is the rare book that makes evangelists out of every type of reader, from BookTok influencers to litfic snobs, preteens to septuagenarians, offline hippies to book club moms. In early 2022, I was coming off a slow reading period—a few Jack Reachers had sustained my attention and not much else—and picking up IWHNKM flung me back into capital-r Reading. (It helped that there are arguably some Reacher-esque moments in the book, like when the narrator uses her heartbeats to tell time.)

Martha Moody by Susan Stinson (Small Beer Press)
This queer western follows the beats of a good old-fashioned romance, but it also possesses moments of glorious strangeness, like when a woman tosses fish at her future beloved, or a band of teetotaler women smash up a saloon with cries of “demon rum!” The novel also has many of the descriptive joys attendant to stories of domestic frontier life, with pleasing details such as wearing a second-best dress, churning fresh butter, and having earnest affection for a trusty cow.

Problems by Jade Sharma (Coffee House Press)
I love Jade Sharma’s acidic wit and candor, and in Problems, she’s refreshingly unsentimental about the indignities of living in the throes of mental illness, infidelity, and addiction. The novel is thrown into stark relief by the tragedy of Sharma’s death in 2019, and it feels like an essential entry in some kind of 21st-century canon about women unraveling.

Ring by André Alexis (Coach House Books)
Ring is a swoony literary take on romance novel tropes, in which a mysterious family heirloom allows its bearer to change three things about their one true love, albeit with a cost. This was my gateway into André Alexis—I’ve since read and loved Fifteen Dogs, Pastoral, The Hidden Keys, and Other Worlds—and like many books published in the pandemic, it didn’t get its full due.

Claire Lebourg’s Mousse series, trans. Sophie Lewis (Transit Children’s Editions)
Whether he’s peddling sea treasures through an online storefront or pondering his array of identical sock-based outfits, Mousse is a darling little grump who likes things just so, and I love him dearly. A fun exercise is to come up with a name for yourself in the Mousse universe (the Mousse-iverse); I’m still working on mine . . .

I’ve also just started Imagine Breaking Everything (Peirene Press), which is funny and propulsive, and next I’m excited to burrow further into the Harpman Hive with We Were Forbidden (Transit).

Outside of Consortium titles, what books have you enjoyed recently?

I gravitate towards fiction, and Sky Daddy by Kate Folk was my favorite reading experience this year. It’s filled with weird, pitch-perfect humor and unexpected tenderness, and Linda is just the most endearing and singular heroine.

Others I loved this year include Out There (also by Folk), The Custom of the Country, On the Calculation of Volume I-III, The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, Hunchback, True Grit, and Brawler.

Can you share any special or formative experiences you’ve had with bookstores and libraries?

Like many others in the publishing industry, I was a proud library contest winner as a kid, and despite a near misdemeanor in my teens for failing to return a library book on time, I remain a big fan. I now read a lot through Libby: I’m thankful for MELSA’s robust catalog, as well as for my brother, who recently got a notarized letter from his employer in order to renew his NYPL card for my usage.

On the bookstore front, working in proximity to the founding booksellers of Milkweed’s store was an excellent publishing education, during which I gleaned a deep appreciation for small press lit, book workers, and the many perspectives at play in the indie ecosystem.

In your time at Consortium, what memorable or meaningful moments stand out?

Our marketing team laughed and sobbed our way through the pandemic via Teams, which was certainly memorable, and at least we are now friends for life 🥲

But that gets at what the most rewarding part of this job is, which is meeting all the people working in their respective corners of the industry to support good books and important literature. It’s nice to play a small part in that greater project.

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