Q&A with Samantha Greene Woodruff

From my Q&A with Samantha Greene Woodruff, author of The Trade Off: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

This was not an easy book to name! From the moment I had the idea to write about a woman trying to be an investor in the stock market in the lead up to the Great Crash, I loved the title “What Goes Up.” For me it was fun and inviting but also foreshadowed the catastrophe that was coming (you know, because of the adage: “what goes up always comes down.”) But no one else liked it. They felt it sounded too rom-com for historical fiction and I saw that too. In the end, we came up with over fifty titles before we landed on The Trade Off. Two of the other finalists were Her Side of the Street and Rhapsody in Gold, but I felt that The Trade Off did just enough to play on Wall Street and hint at the fact that it isn’t going to be easy for the protagonist to achieve her goals, without...[read on]

Visit Samantha Greene Woodruff's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Lobotomist's Wife.

My Book, The Movie: The Trade Off.

Q&A with Samantha Greene Woodruff.

--Marshal Zeringue