How to make a BOOK into a bestseller

America bears from Planet Money, and it is not too late to be part of this movement. If you missed making a donation during public media giving days, do it right now. Show your support for a public radio that is by the people for the people. @donate.npr.org and thanks. If, somehow, given everything that's going on in the world these days, you missed it,

let me be the first to tell you.

Planet Money just published its first-ever book. It was the culmination of years of work. We navigated the world of agents, and editors, and auctions, figured out how to manufacture a book during a trade war, and get it to stores around the world from airports to cruise ships. Throughout that process, my boss's boss, my grand boss,

“Alex Goldmark, he and everyone else involved in the book, had harbored this secret fantasy.”

That if we played our cards right, maybe someday this book could reach the holy grail of commercial publishing. Maybe this book could make the New York Times' best-seller list. So, it was carrying all those dreams from my grand boss that I recently walked into the office

of Planet Money's Book Editor Tom Mayer at the publishing house WW in Northern in New York.

I was there about a week after the book launched to witness the moment of truth. Today is a big day. Today is the day when the best-seller lists are released. That's kind of as big as it gets in a way. Yeah, no, it's sort of scary in part because you have no idea if you're going to get anything at all, and we're going to find out today what the result is.

I've got butterflies.

“I'm very nervous. Over the last week, bookstores from chains like Barnes and Noble”

down to independence like Carmichael's bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. They've been logging

their sales and reporting them through some mysterious process to an anonymous department inside

the New York Times. All day, Tom has been trying to get a sense of how close the book might be to cracking the New York Times' best-seller list by nervously checking the sales numbers he has access to. I sort of feel like on a election night when you're counting the votes in, you know, the various counties across the state. Tom's checking how many copies we sold in independent stores, or on Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, you sort of have this constellation of

data, but you don't know what else was sold this week. I know what my book did, but there were several other very good books published the same day that the Planet Money Book was published. How well did they sell? We have no idea. The Planet Money Book Tom explains is facing some extremely steep competition. It's up against New Yorker, writer, Patrick Ratton, Keith's new book, which has been everywhere in the press this week. It's up against a divorce memoir by Belle

Burden that's been dominating the list for months. And the way the New York Times would count the Planet Money Book sales against those other titles is not really clear. The weird thing about the best-seller list is that we have no idea how it's put together. The New York Times is famously opaque. It's like we receive this email that's like the smoke after a people conclave. That's just like, here it is. I'm not going to tell you how we got to this information,

but here's the list for most of my reading life. Whenever I saw the best-seller sticker on a book cover in the bookstore or saw the New York Times best-seller list in the Sunday paper, I didn't really think twice about it. It seemed like a pretty straightforward idea. The nation's literary preferences have been definitively revealed and here were the results in black and white. Reader, how very wrong I was. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm

Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. The best-seller list is this massive height building system with its own

“rituals and rules and secret codes. And just like any system with potentially millions of”

dollars at stake, it isn't inspired legions of would-be best-selling authors to try to game it by hook or by crook. Today I'm the show, the fourth episode in our series. Planet Money uncovers all the ways people have tried to hack their way onto the New York Times best-seller list, and we learn what it really means to be a best-selling author. There will be mass hallucinations, legal exorcisms, cheat, booklanders, and scarlet daggers. And we learn the hard way how trying to

engineer your way onto the list just might be the thing that keeps you from getting there. Given how big the deal it is to get your book onto the best-seller list, you can imagine there is a whole world of strategy and gamesmanship that publishers and authors use to try to engineer that outcome. To understand those strategies and where they came from and how they might inform the fate of the Planet Money book, I called up a professor named Laura McGrath. I understand

you teach a class that's kind of relevant to the story we're telling. I do. I teach a class on the history of the best-seller at Temple. And everything that's on the syllabus must have been on the

There's the publishers weekly list for industry insiders and the USA today list. But I think we all

know there is kind of one best-seller list to rule them all. So the biggest and the most important

best-seller list is the New York Times best-seller list. This is the list that publishers are tracking that matters most to readers and that matters most to writers. And one of the big reasons that matter so much is that the New York Times best-seller list is not just a signal of what books are already selling. It is a major cause of new books sales. Best-seller's get premium placement in bookstores and online. It's also free advertising for a writer. Yeah. Right. Like the New York Times

puts you on the list. That's an ad you didn't have to pay for. At least you don't have to pay the New York Times for you. You might have had to pay for it in some other way, shape or form. Pay attention to that. That is what we in the biz call foreshadowing. And what happens when a book is named to a best-seller list is a sort of rich gets richer effect. It has a snowball effect where being named a best-seller becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Readers now begin flocking to this

book because they have been told. It is very popular. And it must be popular for a reason. Now, one of the best possible shots that a book has for making it onto the list is during the

opening week after launch. It's like the opening box office in Hollywood. The first week is when

there's likely to be the most publicity around the book. And crucially, all of the pre-orders are counted towards that first week of sales. So big pre-order campaigns are not only really important for creating buzz around the book, but also really important for that like big first week

“splash. The actual number of copies you need to sell that first week to actually break onto the list”

can shift back and forth depending on the competition. A book itself just a few thousand copies and e-kids way onto the list. But basically, the more you can convince people to buy your book in the opening week, the better your odds. And yet for how prominent this best-seller list is, the actual methodology used to decide which books make it is notoriously secretive. The Times does have a standard statement about the list on their best-seller page. They explain

that it's based on a weekly survey of tens of thousands of bookstores around the country, but the identities of those specific bookstores are not public. There's speculation about where the Times gets its sales data, the way the data is weighted, if at all is unclear. And the identities of the people who actually crunch the numbers of the paper are not publicized. You're probably not going to see these people posting on LinkedIn. My assumption is that these data scientists

are operating under rock solid NDAs. They're in a like basement. Yeah, sure, somewhere.

“Yeah, I think so. But what is clear is that with any ranking system with massive”

economic stakes like this, people are going to figure out ways to optimize around it. How long have people been trying to game their way onto the New York Times best-seller list? Oh, for as long as there's been a New York Times best-seller list, people have been doing everything that they can to try to make sure that their book lands on this list. Lurisa, as you can tell, the tale of best-seller hacking shenanigans and roughly four chapters.

The first happened not long after the national list began back in the 1940s. Within a decade or so

by the mid-1950s, these kinds of lists had become so prominent that for some people, they'd come to stand in as a symbol of the mindless herd mentality that defined popular American taste. For most among those critics was a man named Jean Shepard or Shephard for short. He was kind of this eccentric talk radio personality, like an early Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh. DJ Shep's radio slot was one in the morning to 530 a.m. and he'd get up to all sorts of weird stuff.

“Like consider this clip, which sounds a bit like experimental musical theatre?”

You are now undergoing a process of big-source system. The next 25 minutes we will exercise the Devils which have taken our ears off. Shep would also take listener calls and kind of just riff on whatever came to mind. And one of the big themes Shep would talk about was this divide between what he called the night people, the Bohemian Types who might listen to a show, and the day people. All the squares

who commuted to work every day and turned to things like best-seller lists to guide their taste. So one night Shep comes up with an idea for an elaborate prank. He enlist the help of his listeners to come up with an idea for a fake book. He wants to see if they can hype up this fake book so much that the day people would come to believe in it and even treat it like a literary sensation. To prove, just how silly and mindless this list obsessed culture actually was. He puts out a call

on the air for potential titles, and beer Shep describing that night from an interview years later. I'm getting close from Alaska. And these guys are giving me all the suggestion for titles. And finally, at 430 in the morning it was getting so late. I said, "Okay, I picked the title. And some unknown guy called in this title. I liberty. I sound like a booker." Shep also comes up with a fake author for the book, a guy named Fredrick

R. Ewing, and this whole backstory for him. He's both a former British officer and a scholar of

start requesting this made up book from bookstores around New York City. And then it very quickly

“exceeds the bubble of New York City, where booksellers in London and Paris and Rome are getting”

requests for I liberty. And this book begins to be discussed as though it were real, because booksellers are hearing about it everywhere. A bunch of bookstores are desperately trying to figure out how to order this book. Other people start pretending like they've read the book to see cool. People who are writing in the book review are talking about having had lunch with Freddy Ewing, and having all of these sightings of Freddy Ewing who's coming to New York to promote his book

in the book. Right, it becomes a sort of like mass hallucinations. Yes, yes, it's like just outrageous, the degree of posturing that develops around this false title. And in that way, I libertyan really hits its mark. And in a final delicious twist, because of all this who plot over I libertyan, a publisher reaches out to DJ Shep that year and convinces him to team up with a ghost writer to actually write and publish the fake book under the name of

its fake author. So the buzz around this made up book actually ended up willing it into reality, which Shep later said basically proved his point. The thing was a real comment on the entire structure, the world of the official list, the 10 best seller books, newspapers both of this kind of stuff.

And there's this powerful lesson baked into the whole I libertyan affair. In the solar system of

book publishing best seller lists, then and now have their own kind of gravitational force, almost like a black hole. The fact that Shep was able to stir up such a frenzy by insinuating all this demand, kind of underlines the self-fulfilling power of getting onto a best seller list because popularity gets popularity. Okay, so that was chapter one. For our next brief stop on our history of best seller list shenanigans, Laura McGrath says you'll want to consider

the story of author Jacqueline Suzanne. Jacqueline Suzanne was an actress who started publishing novels in the 1960s. And she was this larger than life character, super charming. Here's an interviewer asking Jacqueline Suzanne a question on a TV show called Good Afternoon about her public persona.

“You have the reputation tough, cynical, Jackie says. And you know what I mean?”

I'm not tough at all. I think they regard they mix the novelist with the novel. In other words, if I'm writing about a tough, cynical lady, they say she must be tough. But if I did all the things, my heroine's did in my books, I'd be in a glass jar at Harvard on this slide. Most importantly for us, Jacqueline Suzanne is credited as one of the pioneering tacticians of the modern book tour. You know, going out across the nation and generating book sales through

live author events. But also maybe even more importantly, Laura says when Jacqueline Suzanne was about to come out with her debut novel, Valley of the Dolls in 1966, she directed her charm offensive at a new target. She started cultivating close friendships with the book sellers in different cities. So what Jacqueline Suzanne was able to do through these relationships was figure out which are the bookstores that were reporting to the New York Times. What are the stores that the

New York Times is counting? And she directed her readers and and she herself purchased books

from those retailers to ensure that there would be a really big splashy first week sale.

And Jacqueline Suzanne's strategy here really appeared to have worked. Valley of the Dolls went on to become number one on the New York Times best seller list. For years it held the Guinness World Record for best selling novel of all time and it was

“turning into a hit movie. And I think the thing that Jacqueline Suzanne's story reveals”

about the New York Times best seller list is the importance of sales at particular bookstores over others. And it suggested that there were ways that authors and publishers could try to engineer their way onto the list by playing this sort of geographical sales game. Okay, so that is tales from the best seller list chapter two. But chapter three, we turned to an episode that has haunted the literary world since it happened.

We turned to the strange case of William Peter Blattie. Blattie was the author of the 1971 book The Exorcist later adapted into an iconic movie. Here he is talking about a notorious scene in the film. The turning of the head was a subject of great discussion between myself and the director Billy Friedkin. I tried to explain to Billy that a head cannot turn 360 degrees. It falls off.

It's supernatural. It does not mean impossible. But nevertheless, I was wrong. The audience loved it. I wouldn't say everyone in the audience loved it. In fact, some of us have yet to recover from having watched it as children. Thanks a lot, Dan. But anyway, in the early 1980s, Blattie published a sequel to the exorcist called Legion. In the weeks after its release, Blattie saw that he had not made the list and came to suspect that he was not getting a fair

that his new novel had sold well. It was on other bestseller lists. So he thought he'd likely

“sold more copies than other books that had appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.”

So what does William Peter Blattie do you ask? Well, he does what any red-blooded profit-seeking American novelist would. He files a lawsuit. The problem for Blattie, what he alleges, is that by excluding him, the New York Times has cost him millions of dollars in profits. And that not only is it just like the profits of the book sales, but that he loses out on a lucrative paperback right steel. He's potentially missing out on

movie rights. And so he shares the New York Times for damages. We love that argument. Love it. The power of profit compels you. The New York Times for its part does not take this legal battle lying down. The New York Times makes the argument that their bestseller list is protected speech, that it is editorial content, right? That it is not purporting to be accurate, that it is not saying that it is a transparent statistical accounting of what is actually selling

the best, but that they cannot disclose either their sources or their methodology that that's all protected. And so the lawyer for the New York Times argues that editors are entitled to edit, and the New York Times isn't entitled to have its own bestseller list. The Times argument suggested that Blattie had just kind of fundamentally misunderstood what the New York Times bestseller list actually was. It wasn't just a reflection of raw sales. It was a journalistic process. The times was

essentially reporting out different sources of sales data and using a secret formula to parse that data and come up with their definitive assessment of which books had in fact sold the best.

And the courts ultimately rule with the New York Times. That this is editorial content,

and therefore it is protected under the first amendment, and Blattie does not have a case. As you can imagine, for readers and writers and publishers around the country,

“and honestly for me when I first learned about this, this ruling was absolutely headspinning.”

Not unlike the head of Linda Blair, the demonically possessed protagonist of the exercice. The tale of William Peter Blattie revealed something about the list that hadn't been clear before. That even if a book seemed like it might have sold more copies than some of the books that did make the New York Times bestseller list, that book still did not have a guaranteed place on the list, because the list is based on a kind of secret formula that the courts ruled the times

did not have to disclose. Okay, let's do a quick recap. In chapter 1, we learned about the power of the bestseller list in the literary hype machine. In chapter 2, we learned how authors could optimize their book tours and sales efforts around stores that specifically report to the times. In chapter 3, we learned that the list is a journalistic product based on a secret formula

and protected by the first amendment. All of which brings us to the fourth and final chapter in

“our bestseller history. By the modern era, Laura explains, gaming the bestseller list had become”

so lucrative and pervasive that it spawned its own little cottage industry, based around one hack in particular. So one of the ways that people, especially in nonfiction, will very frequently try to hack their way onto the bestseller list is through book sales. Book sales. So instead of trying to get an organic grassroots wave of real flesh and blood readers to go out and buy your book, Laura says some authors might instead use the resources and institutional

sway at their disposal to juice those sales more directly. If you're a politician, say you might ask your super PAC to do it. If you are a minister, you might ask your mega church to do it. If you are a business leader, you might hire a firm to run a campaign for you that will purchase large enough quantities of this book that you are almost guaranteed a spot on the New York Times bestseller list because of how many copies this firm has purchased for you or your super PAC or

your church. Laura says the blueprint for this strategy was exposed back in 1995. When a couple of corporate business influencer types or business influencers published a book called the discipline of market leaders. After it's released, it came out that the authors had somehow figured out a way to essentially buy massive amounts of books themselves in order to boost their sales and get on the list. It was a pretty big scandal for the New York Times. It exposed the faults in their system

that it could be hacked, you know, in the same way that like the Louvre looks really bad when people can just walk in and steal stuff like it wasn't a good look for them. But the New York Times did find a way to strike back it would be list hackers. That same year, the paper introduced a new tool to combat and sort of call out these tactics whenever they could be detected. So they begin adding a little figure called a dagger to the side of books that have been purchased using bulk sales.

It's like a little buyer beware symbol. They add an actual like dagger next to your name on the list.

almost a little cool. I'm like it's kind of metal. It is not a badge of honor though. It is a mark

“of a shame. This is like this is a scarlet dagger. Before reporting the series, I personally never”

noticed any daggers when perusing the Sunday New York Times. But once you know, you kind of start seeing it frequently on the list. Because despite the risk of becoming a literary pariah, Laura explains the discipline of market leaders fiasco was merely one of a recurring cycle of bulk buying scandals over the last couple decades. In large part, because of the economic benefit of being able to call yourself a New York Times bestselling author in your bio, some authors might find

it worth the risk. Yeah, nonfiction authors who have made it onto the New York Times bestseller list can charge more in their speaker fees. So if you are a business writer, right, you are in the thought leader space. You are going and speaking at conferences or you were getting hired to be a consultant being stamped with the New York Times seal of approval means that you can charge people more money to hear you say that idea to different contexts. It's a kind of like a brand endorsement.

Right, right. I actually talked to some folks in the thought fluency space about all this on

background. They understandably did not want to reveal themselves. But basically the strategy to

try to bulk buy your way onto the bestseller list without incurring the shame of the scarlet dagger is this. When you are a business fluencer and you have a new book coming out, what you do is you book as many fancy speaking gigs as possible around the time of your book release. Maybe you line up a talk at a corporate retreat at Google or Microsoft or speak in an accounting convention. And instead of taking your usual, you know, $20,000 speaking fee, you instead ask the company to buy a certain

number of your books. One of these authors told me sometimes a company will ask like you're asking us to buy way more books than we have employees, but are we going to do with an extra thousand

copies of your book. And the author told me they'd essentially say, "I don't care if you burn the

books." As long as those sales are logged, that is kind of your problem. Of course, a huge

“key to this whole scheme is that the authors have to be very careful not to tip off the mysterious”

data crunchers at the New York Times bestseller department. So what they'll do is hire a specialized firm to essentially longer their bulk book purchases. One of these shadowy companies will then go to the trouble of identifying the bookstores that likely report to the New York Times. And they'll use the author's money to buy the books in small enough batches to not trigger any bulk sales alarms. In total, this strategy can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. And after

all that, there isn't any guarantee it'll work. Remember, the times uses its own top secret methodology to determine which books make the list. And authors who engage in bulk buying run the risk of getting found out and potentially earning that scarlet dagger next to their name on the list. Now, the New York Times has the reputation of playing extremely close to the chest about the inner workings of the bestseller list. We didn't expect them to want to talk to us for this story.

But just a couple days before we went to air, when we reached out to the times, they agreed to hop on the phone. So we spoke with assistant managing editor Patrick Healy, who oversees standards across the newsroom, including the bestseller list team. Are you like the great, great boss of the people who are putting the list together? Maybe like a kindly uncle who cares a lot about details. Patrick says the paper is fully aware of the many shenanigans that authors have

occasionally employed in an effort to backward engineer their way onto the list. We know that gaming does go on. People try to attempt to influence their ranking on the list. But we have a lot of steps in our process in terms of the analysis that we do with that confidential reporting from booksellers. Patrick says the system the times as developed is able to identify those cases and they communicate their findings to readers with tools like the dagger. Now, he did push back

“on the characterization of their methodology as some kind of secret formula. To him, a formula”

sounds a bit too simple. He says the bestseller list methodology captures the majority of book sales across the country. It's based on data. It's not based on personal preference or a person putting their thumb on the scale. Our bestseller list has nothing to do for instance with our book review or whether a book has been assessed by one of our critics. Our editors on the bookside aren't involved in the bestseller list. And because we want the lists to reflect organic demand

we're really focused on that rigorous application of our methodology so that our audience believes in the list, trusts in the list, comes back to the list every week. The bestseller team collects

list, in order to accurately reflect the nation's literary tastes to itself. It's a way to give book buyers

an unbiased picture of what might be worth reading according to what their fellow readers have chosen with their wallets. Now, maybe because without saying, but when it came to the planet money book, neither my Grand Boss Alex nor the publicist at Norton seemed all that interested in engaging the services of a grey market booklonder and risking that reputational dagger. Luckily, Laura told me there are more traditional ways authors often try to up their odds at getting onto the list.

“Mostly aimed at juicing those crucial pre-sales numbers. They might launch pre-order campaigns”

where they are speaking on podcasts and they are targeting newsletters and they're doing everything that they can to generate buzz around their forthcoming title. They might launch giveaways. Sweet and the deal a little bit. Exactly. With some really fun merch, so there's some cute things that you can get other times it's just reach out to your network and get them to buy copies of your book. All right. So coming up with some fun merch and media campaigns to convince people to buy the book

early noted, and then Laura told me there was one other major way that authors often try to boost early sales momentum. So you are going on book tour. You'll be going all around the United States to tour the new planet money book instead of asking for people to register and purchase a ticket to come see you speak. You can ask for people to buy copies of your book instead. Interesting. Okay. We could make the ticket price actually the book sale. You could. You could.

“Yep. That wouldn't necessarily count as somehow gaming the system to get a book buy.”

If readers were genuinely buying independently, if this is going through independent book stores, I don't think it would count as a book buy. No. Okay. So maybe a way of sliding through under the dangling dagger. Yep. You could you could do it. Something I'll have to tell my grand boss about. After the break, Alex and the folks at Norden come up with a plan to take the book on the road. We learn the hard way that even the best laid plans of podcasts and publishers

can often go awry. And we find out whether the planet money book will make the best seller list. Okay. So as we have learned, the strategy for trying to make it onto the best seller list is about manufacturing a sequence of buzzy media hits, juiced up pre-order sales. And in some cases, live events meant to spur early sales. All perfectly timed around the moment a new book is launched. And the person in charge of trying to engineer this celestial alignment for the

planet money book is a senior publicity director named Rachel Salzman. Rachel works at Morton, which is the publisher of the planet money book. And I should say a financial supporter of NPR. Rachel started putting together a plan for how to launch the book about a year ago, because getting the timing right is key. Because you know that if you do all these things in sequence, close together, that is kind of how you leverage yourself onto the list. This is all

“supposed to help the book get off the ground and achieve lift off. Do you think of books as rockets?”

My first boss and my first job used to walk up and down the hallways all the time saying, "It's not rocket science." It's a form of rocket science. Am I allowed to say no comment? It is Rachel's job as a book publicist to try to shape the narrative around whatever book she's working on. And out of all the people I interviewed for this series, she might have been the most nervous about revealing too much of the inner workings of the publishing industry.

When you heard, we are going to report about this, where you're like, "Man."

I mean, like, it's not always fun to have to share how this sausage gets made.

The thing Rachel seemed to most on edge about, where my question is about how to engineer a bestseller. Norton does not want to bite the hand of the bestseller listed feeds at, and also Rachel was clear, "This isn't something you can engineer." Though there are ways to maximize your odds. Now, the first big part of trying to create a bestseller is publicity. You know, getting your book into the zeitgeist by going on TV and radio shows.

That job used to be simpler when the media landscape was less splintered. In these days, publicists also have to focus on finding niche audiences on podcasts and booktalk. Luckily for the planet money book, NPR itself is still one of the major platforms where publishers try to spread the word about their books to everybody else. That was, of course,

one big factor in Norton's decision to spend over a million dollars to buy the book in the first place.

The fact that we have been reporting this very series meant that hundreds of thousands of people would hear about the book. In addition to other NPR shows that I talk about it. Now, the second major part of trying to create a bestseller is getting as many pre-orders as possible,

they all get counted in the first week of sales. So the big challenge before Rachel and my

Grand Boss Alex is how to persuade people to buy the book before it's out. Alex says they also started planning their pre-order strategy nearly a year ago. Norton talked a lot about how important pre-sales were, which is why the book goes on pre-sales six months before launch day, which him crazy to me. And they have like a sequence of things you do, because the pre-sales start the snowball. Most importantly, they had to come up with an incentive for people to buy the

book early, a little treat to make it worth their while. Alex and the marketing team in Norton eventually settled on offering a poster based on our laws of the office episode. It was sort of a visual parody on those OSHA style workplace posters, and was almost designed to be included with every book until it ended up being too expensive. So six months before launch day, Planet Money announces this incentive, and pretty quickly the pre-order start rolling in. While

that's off to the races, Rachel and her team are figuring out the other big part of the plan, using a live event tour to juice our opening week sales. Book tours, Rachel explains, are generally less common these days, in part because they used to be a chance to appear on local TV and radio shows to drive buzz, but as more local media outlets have shuddered, that benefit of the book tour has dwindled, and also because traditional book events where an author does a

reading and signs some books at a store do not necessarily translate into enough sales to justify the cost of flying an author around the country. If you have an event in a bookstore and people just show up to hear someone give a talk for a reading, they might buy a copy of the book there, or they might just be like, "Hey, it was great to share that person give a talk and then leave." But Planet Money Rachel explains how a big advantage here. First, Planet Money has listeners all over

the country, and it could presumably put on a live event that could draw in paying crowds. It's a show, you guys have a show, and you have done a live show before, right? So, um, you know, when Alex Goldmark, the grand boss, and Tom Ayer and I talked about what a book tour might

“look like. I think we all agreed that putting on a show would be really great.”

Alex and Rachel started figuring out which cities planet money might want to visit, based on where the show has a lot of listeners, and where Norton has existing relationships with theaters and independent bookstores. Alex and Rachel also had a couple ways they might structure

the business side of these events. They could do what we almost always do with live events.

We partner with a venue and PR get some of the ticket revenue and the venue get some, and then we could try to sell books at a merch table before and after the show. Alternatively, we could instead do the thing that Laura McGrath, who teaches that class on the history of the best seller, told me about. We could make tickets include a book purchase. Rachel, of course, knows about this model. That model is great because then you have a guaranteed book sale. So,

in theory, if you sell 100 tickets, you sold 100 books. In this model, NPR wouldn't make any money, but the venues would get a cut of the ticket sales. Norton would make money with each book sold, and each book sale would go through an independent bookstore. And do we have any sense of

“whether these bookstores might be reporting their numbers to the New York Times best seller machine?”

Most of the stores report to the best seller list. That's exciting. I'm not sure what else to say about that. Now, for my Grand Boss Alex, committing to this strategy would be a bit of a gamble. planet money host would have to do a bunch of work to come up with live segments and go out and perform them, and even after hopefully packing feeders around the country, NPR wouldn't be getting any cut of the ticket sales. But when it came down to it, Alex understood that this live

event strategy was likely playing at money's best shot and making the best seller list. So, he decides to do a national live tour where a big chunk of the tickets at each venue will actually include a book purchase, because those tickets, if purchased before the launch, would count as pre-orders.

That could potentially mean thousands of copies that would go towards that crucial first week of sales.

It would turn the tour into a book selling machine. With that, everyone at planet money springs into motion, coming up with live stories to tell on stage. But as the weeks and then months start to tick by, ticket sales are going kind of slow, especially in some cities. And it looks like putting our eggs in the ticket to book sale basket might be less of a slam dunk than Alex

“had imagined. I think we'll be okay in most of the places. And then there's a couple other ones”

where the last time I checked, I just had a panic attack that it's going to be so sad to look out at how many empty seats there are. I think the nightmare catastrophe is that nobody buys the

flop and it's forgotten in three months, that would make me really sad. I would know I wasted a lot of time. Years of my life. Yep. Alex starts plastering specific cities with ads and promos, and eventually ticket sales do pick up. And in what feels like the blink of an eye,

finally the moment of truth arrives. On Monday, April 6th, the planet money launches a 12 city

book tour with an event at the 92nd Street Line New York. Tonight live from New York, the planet money book launch. The next day, Tuesday, April 7th, this book that is consumed so many of our collective waking hours of the past several years, finally launches at bookstores around the country. But just as all the brand new books start arriving at the homes of the couple thousand people who did pre-order the book, a problem arises. When did you first become aware that there might be

“some sort of wrinkle with our pre-order strategy? On published day, like I think they were like”

nearly instantaneous. Since the moment the book launched, Alex had been feverishly refreshing the book's page on Amazon to check our rankings and our reviews. And pretty soon, he notices a pattern.

If you look on Amazon, like the first comments are not people talking about the book,

they're talking about the poster. Specifically the absence of the poster. Yeah, like there's a couple one-star reviews, which is sad, of course. But they say things like book looks great. Can't wait to read it, but the poster didn't come. Ah, yes, the poster. A few days after launch, some are around a third of the Amazon reviews for the planet money book are one star reviews. The problem had to do with the highly touted

laws of the office poster that Planet Money in Norton had used to convince people to buy the book early. You see, due to the complexities of shipping and printing logistics, it just wasn't possible to ship the poster with the actual book. It had to be printed and sent separately. And apparently the process plan that money came up with, that people who ordered the book early needed to fill out a separate form to get the poster, that message did not make it to a lot

of people who pre-ordered the book. And so they took to Amazon to complain. But when my grandma's Alex sees this, yes, he's worried about how to get people their poster. But he's also wondering

about how this slew of one star reviews might affect would be bookbires during this crucial first

week. So then on the day that everybody's going to go to Amazon to maybe buy the book because it just launched, they see the lower rating, which is just like, ah, what a bummer. And like,

“is this stopping people? Are people going to go down and look at what the reviews are bad about?”

Or just think the book is bad somehow? And when a steady stream of disgruntled messages starts to hit the planet money email in box 2, we start to wonder whether he might have just risked alienating some of our most faithful fans and scuttled our efforts to get on the best seller list in one fell promotional faux pas. Alex shifts into problem solving mode. He scrambles to throw a promo in the feed, apologizing and giving listeners instructions for how to now get the poster.

And with that, Alex gets back to pounding the book publicity pavement to try to get as many sales as possible during this all important first week. And hopefully get this book on the New York Times best seller list. He and Alex Mayasi had out on tour, meeting different planet money hosts and special guests in new cities every couple of months. Hello and welcome to the planet money live show. We went from coast to coast. I'm so excited to be in Boston. By the way,

“I'm in San Francisco. What's going on? Can we say hello Seattle? Is that a thing we get to do on”

book tour? Hello. And between all these live shows, planet money hosts are going on every radio show and podcast that'll have us. Aloha, Mahalo for joining us here on the conversation of what he talks. The NPR show plant money are here to help with their first ever book. Welcome to the local talk show side of WMIC. Hi. Hi. We're honored to see you. So people are still reading books. Absolutely. We think so. Since the radio and they read books.

The first week after launch is a blitz creague of planet money book publicity. All of which brings us back to that Wednesday afternoon when I walked over to Norton's office in New York to find out whether we would ultimately make the best seller list. It's eight days after the launch of the planet money book when I meet up with our book editor Tom Mayer. I arrive a few minutes after 4pm, shortly before the New York Times usually sends out the latest best seller list for the week.

And surprisingly soon, a little group of people led by Rachel Saltsman come and knock on the door to his office. There's people here. We have news. What? The news. We have news. We have a lot of telling news. That's sour news. Okay. What do we got? We've got number three on the print hard cover nonfiction list. Oh my goodness. This is really fantastic. Fantastic news. This is better than

The publicity strategy seems to have worked. Thanks in no small part to all the listeners out there who pre-ordered the book or came out to see a live show. Tom says next, it's time to call up the book's author, Alex Mayossi and my grand boss, Alex, to deliver the good news. They were both out traveling on the book tour. We have published a New York Times best seller. Congratulations. We are number three in general nonfiction. We are also number three in the

combined print and ebook best seller list, which doesn't always happen. So we have been very well.

Wait, we're number three. We're number three. Oh, man. I thought we were going to like skirt by just at the bottom in the in a best case scenario. Wow. You're like a bronze medal. What's happened? I don't even want it. No, it's just like a gold medal. A medal that might translate into actual gold or revenue at least because being anointed to the best seller list means planet money can now call itself a best selling author podcast. Tom says Norton can put New York Times best seller

in every ad they run hands for. It's a big help for the book. It lets us re-approach accounts and

“say, hey, this book was a best seller. You know, you should keep it in your store longer. You should”

bring it back for the holidays. You should put it on your best seller shelf. We can advertise the book in new ways. And so it's a chance for us to reach a larger audience and it gives us new momentum

as we continue to sell the book. Finally, it was time to get back to the central mission of

basically every planet money series to follow the money. When I asked Tom about what reaching the best seller list might mean for Norton's investment, he tells me that in the book business, they often don't get a full financial picture until years after a book is published. All books have a pretty predictable sales trajectory where they'd go up and then they eventually decay over time. The higher you can start, the farther that tail goes. So having a New York Times best seller, having a book that's

sold a lot of copies to start is a great place to be. Okay, so this snowball has kind of started to roll

“now. That's what we hope. That's what we hope. Getting to profitability on any given book, even a”

best seller could involve multiple print runs of the hardcover version and then the paper back edition after that. And in the case of the planet money book, it's also going to roll out in the academic market as part of courseware and classrooms. As for the millionaire so dollar advance that Norton paid to NPR, that money was to be dulled out in four installments. Each time the book agents got their commission, usually around 15%. And so far NPR has gotten three installments.

And then we spent a lot of it on like writing the book, paying Alex Mayasi, the travel for the reporting, the illustrators. We hired a fact checker, which you know, you have to hire your own fact checker out of your advance. But NPR made money. If the book continues to sell well enough to cover that initial advance, NPR will start to receive royalties on every additional copy sold. Often around a few bucks per hardcover. And selling enough copies to start receiving royalties

is relatively rare. Even hitting the best seller list isn't a guarantee of earning out your advance and making a fortune. But if the planet money book keeps on selling, the show might even be tempted to do another book. Because having now reached the best seller list, it might make it

easier for us to get a second book deal if we decide we want to do that. And we maybe get more

“for the advance. I think, I don't know, presumably, right? Is it finally time to pitch 50 shades of”

green? Uh, how about this? You go run the plot summary by HR. And if they sign off on it as something you can send to your colleagues to edit, I will I will seriously consider it. You got to deal. Such a pushover. One final note on all of this. As of today, the planet money book has actually fallen back off the best seller list. There's apparently no stopping me in a dime. But, you know, once in New York Times best selling author, O is a New York Times best selling author. In any event,

after having gone on what feels like a whole Homeric Odyssey of reporting on the publishing world through the eyes of the planet money book, suffice it to say that it's changed the way I see all sorts of things. Now, whenever I pass a bookstore window and see the books on the shelf, I can't help but give them a little salute. Just for having survived this truly Darwinian struggle. When I see that little New York Times best seller sticker on the cover of a book,

I think of all the machinations, both dastardly and wholesome, that earned them that sticker. And I think of the many books that might have sold more copies and yet still fail to make the list. And reader, now I hope you will too.

of this project by buying the book and coming to our shows. We are so grateful for your support. Thank you.

If you are still waiting for your poster, we hear they'll be arriving within the next six to eight weeks.

“So buy around you. And if you want to help us get back on the best seller list, tell your friends”

about the book. If you see it somewhere fun out in the wild, take a photo, tag us on social media,

and we can all keep this snowball rolling. This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with

“help from Emma Peasley. It was edited by Jess Zhang, fact check by Sierra Wattas, and we had research”

help from Barclay Walsh and Greta Piddinger. Engineering by Robert Rodriguez and Sinolefrido,

Alex Goldmark, my grand boss, is our executive producer.

“It has taken many villages to put this book together. Alex Mayossi spent years researching and”

writing the book at NPR special thanks to Devin Meller for heroic project managing and also to on the agrandman Laura Hogan and Kristen Hartman. Thank you to the many people at Morton who we talked to for this series, especially make sure men and Steve Attardo Michelle Rothfarbe at Lakeside Book Company and Phil Stamper. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi, this is NPR. Thanks for listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]