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- [00:00]
Commercial Announcer
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- [00:17]
Laura McGrath
This is Planet Money from npr.
- [00:22]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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. And 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 public. Maybe this book could make the New York Times best seller list. So it was carrying all those dreams from my grandboss that I recently walked into the office of Planet Money's book editor, Tom Mayer at the publishing house W.W. norton in New York. I was there about a week after the book launched to witness the moment of truth.
- [01:21]
Tom Mayer
Today is a big day. Today is the day when the bestseller lists are released.
- [01:26]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
That's kind of as big as it gets, in a way.
- [01:29]
Tom Mayer
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.
- [01:38]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
I've got butterflies.
- [01:40]
Tom Mayer
I'm very nervous.
- [01:41]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Over the last week, bookstores from chains like Barnes and Noble down to independents 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. The all day, Tom has been trying to get a sense of how close the book might be to cracking the New York Times bestseller list by nervously checking the sales numbers he has access to.
- [02:06]
Tom Mayer
I sort of feel like on election night when you're counting the votes in, you know, the various counties across the
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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
state, Tom's checking how many copies we sold in independent stores or on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
- [02:17]
Tom Mayer
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.
- [02:31]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
The Planet Money book, Tom explains is facing some extremely steep competition. It's up against New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe's new book, which has been everywhere in the press this week. It's up against a divorce memoir by Bell 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.
- [02:53]
Tom Mayer
I mean, the weird thing about the bestseller 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 papal conclave that just like here it is not going to tell you how we got to this information, but here's the list.
- [03:09]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
For most of my reading life, whenever I saw the bestseller sticker on a book cover in the bookstore or saw the New York Times bestseller 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 had 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 Ghazi the best seller list is this massive hype building system with its own rituals and rules and secret codes. And just like any system with potentially millions of dollars at stake, it has inspired legions of would be best selling authors to to game it by hook or by crook. Today on 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 bestseller list. And we learned what it really means to be a best selling author. There will be mass hallucinations, legal exorcisms, shady book launderers 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.
- [04:25]
Commercial Announcer
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- [04:57]
This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet terms apply. See capitalone.combank for details. Capital One NA member, FDIC support for NPR. And the following message comes from Rippling. Tired of using HR systems that feel fragmented and manual rippling? Rippling unifies hr, IT and finance into a single platform to run your business. In as little as 90 seconds, rippling can onboard a new employee automatically setting up payroll, benefits, devices and corporate cards all from one place. It's a simpler way to run your business. Head to rippling.com money and sign up today. That's R I P P L-I N G.com money given how big of a
- [05:47]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
deal it is to get your book onto the bestseller 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.
- [06:09]
Laura McGrath
I do. I teach a class on the history of the bestseller at Temple. And everything that's on the syllabus must have been on the York Times bestseller list.
- [06:18]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
And yes, Laura says there are different kinds of bestseller lists. 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 bestseller list to rule them all.
- [06:31]
Laura McGrath
So the biggest and the most important bestseller list is the New York Times bestseller list. This is the list that publishers are tracking that matters most to readers and that matters most to writers.
- [06:41]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
And one of the big reasons it matters so much is that the New York Times bestseller list is not just a signal of what books are already selling. It is a major cause of new book sales. Bestsellers get premium placement in bookstores and online.
- [06:54]
Laura McGrath
It's also free advertising for a writer.
- [06:56]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Yeah, right.
- [06:57]
Laura McGrath
Like the New York Times puts you on the list, that's an ad you didn't have to pay for. At least you'd have to pay the New York Times for. You might have had to pay for it in some other way, shape or form.
- [07:04]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Pay attention to that. That is what we in the biz call foreshadowing.
- [07:07]
Laura McGrath
And what happens when a book is named to a bestseller list is a sort of rich gets richer effect. It has a snowball effect where being named a bestseller becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Readers now begin flocking to this book because they have been it is very popular and it must be popular for a reason.
- [07:24]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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.
- [07:41]
Laura McGrath
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.
- [07:48]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
The actual number of copies you need to sell that first week to actually break onto the list. Shift back and forth. Depending on the competition, a book could sell just a few thousand copies and eek its 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 bestseller 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 bestseller 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 at the paper are not publicized. You're probably not going to see these people posting on LinkedIn.
- [08:39]
Laura McGrath
My assumption is that these data scientists are operating under, like, rock solid NDAs.
- [08:43]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
They're in a, like, basement fortress somewhere.
- [08:47]
Laura McGrath
Yeah, I think so.
- [08:48]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 Bestseller list?
- [09:02]
Laura McGrath
Oh, for as long as there's been a New York Times bestseller list, people have been doing everything that they can to try to make sure that their book lands on this list.
- [09:09]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Laura says you can tell the tale of bestseller hacking shenanigans in 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. Foremost among those critics was a man named Gene shepherd, or Shep 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 5:30am and he'd get up to all sorts of weird stuff like consider this clip, which Sounds a bit like experimental musical theater.
- [09:54]
DJ Shep
You are now undergoing a process of exorcism. The next 45 minutes, we will exorcise the devils which have taken over your soul.
- [10:04]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 his show, and the day people, all the squares who commuted to work every day and turned to things like bestseller lists to guide their taste. So one night, Shep comes up with an idea for an elaborate prank. He enlists 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 Piers Shep describing that night from an interview years later, I'm getting calls
- [10:52]
DJ Shep
from Alaska and these guys are giving me all these suggestions for titles. And finally, at 4:30 in the morning, it was getting so late, I said, okay, okay. I picked the title. And some unknown guy called him this title, I Libertine. I said, now that sounds like a book.
- [11:09]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Shep also comes up with a fake author for the book, a guy named Frederick R. Ewing. And this whole backstory for him. He's both a former British officer and a scholar of 18th century erotica. And then over the next few weeks, Shep's legion of night people go out and start requesting this made up book from bookstores around New York City.
- [11:28]
Laura McGrath
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 Libertine. And this book begins to be discussed as though it were real, because booksellers are hearing about it everywhere.
- [11:44]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 seem cool.
- [11:51]
Laura McGrath
People who are writing in the book review are talking about having had lunch with Freddie Ewing and having all of these sightings of Freddy Ewing, who's coming to New York to promote his book. And right.
- [12:01]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
It becomes a sort of like mass hallucination.
- [12:03]
Laura McGrath
Yes, yes. It's like just outrageous, the degree of posturing that develops around this false title. And in that way, I Libertine really hits its mark.
- [12:16]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
And in a final delicious twist, because of all this hoopla over Ilibertine. A publisher reaches out to DJ Shep that year and convinces him to team up with a ghostwriter 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 wheeling it into reality, which Shep later said basically proved his point.
- [12:39]
DJ Shep
The thing was a real comment on the entire structure, the world of the Official lists, the 10 bestseller books. Newspapers go for this kind of stuff.
- [12:51]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
And there is this powerful lesson baked into the whole I libertine affair in the solar system of book publishing. Bestseller 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 kinda underlines the self fulfilling power of getting onto a bestseller list. Because popularity begets popularity. Okay, so that was chapter one. For our next brief stop on our history of bestseller 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.
- [13:40]
Rachel Salzman
You have the reputation tough, cynical Jackie Suzanne.
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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
You know what I mean?
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Rachel Salzman
I'm not tough at all. I think they regard they mix a novelist with a 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 that my heroines did in my books, I'd be in a glass jar at Harvard on display.
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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 important, 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 booksellers in different cities.
- [14:32]
Laura McGrath
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, right? What are the stores that the New York Times is counting? And she directed her readers and she herself purchase books from those retailers to ensure that there would be a really big, splashy first week sale.
- [14:53]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 Bestseller list for years. It held the Guinness World record for best selling novel of all time. And it was turned into a hit movie. And I think the thing that Jacqueline Suzanne's story reveals about the New York Times bestseller list is the importance of sales at particular bookstores over others. And it suggested that there 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 Bestseller List, chapter two. For chapter three, we turn to an episode that has haunted the literary world since it happened. We turn to the strange case of William Peter Blatty. Blatty 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.
- [15:46]
DJ Shep
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. Supernatural does not mean impossible. But nevertheless, I was wrong. The audience loved it.
- [16:04]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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, dad. But, but anyway. In the early 1980s, Blatty published a sequel to the Exorcist called Legion. In the weeks after its release, Blatty saw that he had not made the list and came to suspect that he was not getting a fair shake from the New York Times. You see, Blatty inferred from the 84,000 books his publisher distributed 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 Blatty do, you ask? Well, he does what any red blooded, profit seeking American novelist would. He files a lawsuit.
- [16:49]
Laura McGrath
The problem for Blatty, 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 rights deal, he's potentially missing out on movie rights. And so he sues the New York Times for damages.
- [17:09]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
We love that argument.
- [17:10]
Laura McGrath
Love it, love it.
- [17:12]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
The power of profit compels you. The New York Times, for its part, does not take this legal battle lying down.
- [17:19]
Laura McGrath
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, editors are entitled to edit, and the New York Times is entitled to have its own bestseller list.
- [17:51]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
The Times argument suggested that Blatty 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.
- [18:16]
Laura McGrath
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 mblatty does not have a case,
- [18:25]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 head spinning. Not unlike the head of Linda Blair, the demonically possessed protagonist of the Exorcist. The tale of William Peter Blatty 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 one, we learned about the power of the bestseller list and the literary hype machine. In chapter two, we learned how authors could optimize their book tours and sales efforts around stores that specifically report to the Times. In chapter three, 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 best seller list had become so lucrative and pervasive that it had spawned its own little cottage industry based around one hack in particular.
- [19:39]
Laura McGrath
So one of the ways that people, especially in nonfiction, will very frequently try to hack their way onto the bestseller list is through bulk sales.
- [19:47]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Bulk 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 dispos to juice those sales more directly.
- [20:03]
Laura McGrath
If you're a politician, say, you might ask your super PAC to do it. If you are a minister, you might ask your megachurch 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.
- [20:30]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Laura says the blueprint for this strategy was exposed back in 1995 when a couple of corporate business influencer types, or bizfluencers, published a book called the Discipline of Market Leaders. After its release, 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.
- [20:54]
Laura McGrath
It exposed a fault 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.
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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
But the New York Times did find a way to strike back at 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.
- [21:14]
Laura McGrath
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.
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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
They add an actual dagger next to your name on the list.
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Laura McGrath
It's like an asterisk, arrow, cross thing. It is called the dagger colloquially.
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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
It seems almost a little cool. I'm like, it's kind of metal.
- [21:38]
Laura McGrath
It is not a badge of honor though. It is a mark of shame.
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Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Right? This is like. This is a scarlet dagger.
- [21:44]
Laura McGrath
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [21:45]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Before reporting this 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.
- [22:16]
Laura McGrath
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 are 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 in
- [22:38]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
a different context, it's kind of like a brand endorsement, Right?
- [22:41]
Laura McGrath
Right.
- [22:42]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
I actually talked to some folks in the thoughtfluencer 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, incurring the shame of the scarlet dagger, is this. When you are a bizfluencer 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. What 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 kinda 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 launder 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 best seller list team. Are you like the great, great, grand boss of the people who are putting the list together,
- [24:55]
Patrick Healy
maybe like a kindly uncle who cares a lot about details,
- [25:00]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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.
- [25:09]
Patrick Healy
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.
- [25:25]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Patrick says the system the Times has 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 best seller list methodology captures the majority of book sales across the country.
- [25:47]
Patrick Healy
It's based on data. It's not based on a 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 book side 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.
- [26:27]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
The best seller team collects all that data and does extensive analysis, Patrick says, in order to fulfill the core purpose of the 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 goes without saying, but when it came to the Planet Money Book, neither my grandboss Alex nor the publicist at Norton seemed all that interested in engaging the services of a gray market book launderer 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 the list, mostly aimed at juicing those crucial pre sales numbers.
- [27:14]
Laura McGrath
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, sweeten the deal a little bit. Exactly. With like 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.
- [27:35]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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.
- [27:47]
Laura McGrath
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. Yeah, you could ask for people to buy copies of your book instead.
- [28:01]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Interesting. Okay, we could make the ticket price actually the book sale.
- [28:05]
Laura McGrath
You could? You could. Yep.
- [28:06]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
That wouldn't necessarily count as somehow gaming the system to get a bulk if
- [28:11]
Laura McGrath
readers were genuinely buying independently or if this was going through independent bookstores, I don't think it would count as a bulk buy. No.
- [28:17]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Okay, so maybe a way of sliding through under the dangling dagger.
- [28:21]
Laura McGrath
Yep, you could do it.
- [28:23]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Something I'll have to tell my grand boss about. After the break, Alex and the folks at Norton come up with a plan to take the book on the road. We learn the hard way that even the best laid plans to of podcasts and publishers can often go awry. And we find out whether the Planet Money book will make the best seller list.
- [28:52]
Commercial Announcer
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- [30:13]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Okay, so as we have learned, the strategy for trying to make it onto the bestseller 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 Norton, 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
- [30:51]
Rachel Salzman
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 liftoff.
- [31:08]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Do you think of books as rockets?
- [31:11]
Rachel Salzman
My first boss at my first job used to walk up and down the hallways all the time saying, it's not
- [31:17]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
rocket science, it's a form of rocket science.
- [31:20]
Rachel Salzman
Am I allowed to say no comment?
- [31:23]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
It is Rachel's job as a book publicist to try to shape the narrative around whatever book 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 were going to report about this, were you like, oh
- [31:41]
Rachel Salzman
man, I mean, like, it's not always fun to have to share how the sausage gets made.
- [31:50]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
The thing Rachel seemed most on edge about were my questions about how to engineer a bestseller. Norton does not want to bite the hand of the bestseller listed, feeds it. 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. And these days, publicists also have to focus on finding niche audiences on podcasts and book talks. 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 I might talk about about it. Now, the second major part of trying to create a bestseller is getting as many pre orders as possible. Because all the copies you can convince people to pre order in the months before launch, 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.
- [33:15]
Alex Mayassi
Norton talked a lot about how important pre sales were, which is why the book goes on pre sale six months before launch day, which seemed crazy to me. Yeah, and they have like a sequence of things you do because the pre sales start the snowball.
- [33:28]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 at Norton eventually settle 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 book until it ended up being too expensive. So six months before launch day, Planet Money announces this incentive, and pretty quickly, the pre orders 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 shuttered, that benefit of the book tour 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.
- [34:31]
Rachel Salzman
If you have an event in a bookstore and people just show up to hear someone give a talk or a reading, they might buy a copy of the book there, or they might just be like, hey, it was great to hear that person give a talk and then leave.
- [34:47]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
But Planet Money, Rachel explains, had 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.
- [34:58]
Rachel Salzman
It's a show. You guys have a show, and you have done a live show before, Right. So, you know, when Alex Goldmark, the grand boss, and Tom Mayer 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.
- [35:17]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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. NPR gets some of the ticket revenue and the venue gets some. And then we could try to sell books at a merch table before and after the show. Show. Alternatively, we could instead do the thing that Laura McGrath, who teaches that class on the history of the bestseller, told me about. We could make tickets include a book purchase. Rachel, of course, knows about this model.
- [35:55]
Rachel Salzman
That model is great because then you have a guaranteed book sale. So in theory, if you sell 100 tickets, you've sold 100 books.
- [36:07]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 bestseller machine?
- [36:26]
Rachel Salzman
Most of the stores report to the bestseller lists.
- [36:31]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
That's exciting.
- [36:34]
Rachel Salzman
I'm not sure what else to say about that now.
- [36:39]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
For my grandboss, Alex, committing to this strategy would be a bit of a gamble 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 theaters 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 Planet Money's best shot at 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 bunch of 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 bookselling 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 than Alex had imagined.
- [37:45]
Alex Mayassi
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 gonna be so sad to look out at how many empty seats there are. I think the nightmare catastrophe is that nobody buys the book. Like, oh my God, if we put three years into this and just like nobody buys it and it's a flop and it's forgotten in three months, that would make me really sad. I would know I wasted a lot
- [38:09]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
of time, years of my life.
- [38:11]
Alex Mayassi
Yep.
- [38:12]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 6, Planet Money launches a 12 city book tour with an event at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Tonight, live from New York, the Planet Money book launch. The next day, Tuesday, April 7th, this book that has consumed so many of our collective waking hours over 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 publish day?
- [39:02]
Alex Mayassi
Like I think they were like nearly instantaneous.
- [39:05]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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.
- [39:14]
Alex Mayassi
If you look on Amazon like the first comments are not people talking about the book, they're talking about the poster.
- [39:22]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Specifically the absence of the poster.
- [39:24]
Alex Mayassi
Yeah, like there's a couple one star reviews, which you know is sad of course, but they say things like, book looks great, can't wait to read it. But the poster didn't come.
- [39:32]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Ah yes, the poster. A few days after launch, somewhere around a third of the Amazon reviews for the Planet Money book are one star review reviews. The problem had to do with the highly touted laws of the office poster that Planet Money and 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 Planet 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 grand boss 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 book buyers during this crucial first week.
- [40:24]
Alex Mayassi
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, oh 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.
- [40:38]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
And when a steady stream of disgruntled messages starts to hit the Planet Money email inbox too, we start to wonder whether we might have just risked alienating some of our most faithful fans and scuttled our efforts to get on the bestseller 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, 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 bestseller list. He and Alex Mayasi head out on tour, meeting different Planet Money hosts and special guests in new cities every couple months.
- [41:22]
Rachel Salzman
Hello and welcome to the Planet Money live show.
- [41:28]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
We went from, from coast to coast. I'm so excited to be in Boston, by the way. I'm in San Francisco. What's going on?
- [41:33]
Tom Mayer
Can we say hello, Seattle? Is that a thing we get to do on book tour?
- [41:37]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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. Hawaii Talks, the NPR show Planet Money
- [41:52]
Laura McGrath
are here to help with their faith. First ever book.
- [41:55]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Welcome to the local talk show side of wnyc. Hi.
- [41:58]
Rachel Salzman
Hi.
- [41:58]
Laura McGrath
We're honored to.
- [41:59]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
So people are still reading books? Absolutely, we think so. Listen to the radio and they read books. The first week after launch is a blitzkrieg 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 Seller Mayor. I arrive a few minutes after 4pm shortly before the New York Times usually sends out the latest bestseller list for the week. And surprisingly soon, a little group of people led by Rachel Saltzman come and knock on the door to his office.
- [42:37]
Tom Mayer
There's people here. We have news.
- [42:38]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
What the news.
- [42:39]
Rachel Salzman
Have news.
- [42:40]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
We have news. We have a laptop.
- [42:43]
Rachel Salzman
Bestseller news.
- [42:45]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Bestseller news. Okay, what do we got? What do we got? What do we got?
- [42:47]
Rachel Salzman
We've got number three.
- [42:49]
Commercial Announcer
Three on the print hardcover nonfiction list.
- [42:52]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Oh, my God.
- [42:55]
Tom Mayer
Oh, my goodness.
- [42:56]
Rachel Salzman
This is really, this is fantastic, fantastic news.
- [42:59]
Tom Mayer
This is better than I thought we'd do, honestly.
- [43:01]
Rachel Salzman
Top three is a great result.
- [43:04]
Tom Mayer
This is really, really exciting.
- [43:06]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 Maassi, and my grand boss, Alex, to deliver the good news. They were both out traveling on the book tour.
- [43:24]
Tom Mayer
We have published a New York Times bestseller. Congratulations. We are number three in general nonfiction. We are also number three in the combined print and ebook bestseller list, which doesn't always. So we have done very, very well.
- [43:44]
Alex Mayassi
Wait, we're number three?
- [43:45]
Tom Mayer
We're number three.
- [43:46]
Alex Mayassi
Oh, man, I thought we were gonna like skirt by just at the bottom in the, in a best case scenario.
- [43:51]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Wow, you like a bronze medal has happened.
- [43:54]
Laura McGrath
I don't know what
- [43:56]
Alex Mayassi
feels like a gold medal.
- [43:58]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
A medal that might translate into actual gold or revenue at least, because being anointed to the bestseller list means Planet Money can now call itself a best selling selling author podcast. Tom says Norton can put New York Times bestseller in every ad they run henceforth.
- [44:14]
Tom Mayer
It's a big help for the book. It lets us re approach accounts and say, hey, this book was a bestseller. You know, we should keep it in your store longer. You should bring it back for the holidays. You should put it on your bestseller 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.
- [44:36]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 bestseller 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.
- [44:54]
Tom Mayer
All books have a pretty predictable sales trajectory where they go up and then they eventually decay over time. The higher you can start start, the farther that tale goes. So having a New York Times bestseller, having a book that's sold a lot of copies to start, is a great place to be.
- [45:11]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Okay, so the snowball has kind of started to roll now.
- [45:14]
Tom Mayer
That's what we hope. That's what we hope.
- [45:17]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Getting to profitability on any given book, even a bestseller, could involve multiple print runs of the hardcover version and then the paperback 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 in classroom. As for the million or so dollar advance that Norton paid to npr, that money was to be doled out in four installments. Each time, the book agents got their commission, usually around 15%. And so far NPR has gotten three installments.
- [45:46]
Alex Mayassi
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.
- [46:00]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
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 bestseller 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 bestseller list, it might
- [46:29]
Alex Mayassi
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, like, I don't know, presumably, right.
- [46:39]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Is it finally time to pitch 50 Shades of Green?
- [46:42]
Alex Mayassi
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 seriously consider. Consider it.
- [46:55]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
You got a deal.
- [46:58]
Alex Mayassi
Such a pushover.
- [47:05]
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
One final note on all of this. As of today, the Planet Money book has actually fallen back off the bestseller list. There's apparently no stopping Lena Dunham. But you know, once a New York Times bestselling author, always a New York Times best selling author in a. 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 COVID 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. We, of course, have to take a moment to thank all of you listeners out there for being an integral part 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 by around June. And if you want to help us get back on the bestseller 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 Jang, fact checked by Sierra Juarez, and we had research help from Barclay Walsh and Greta Pittenger, engineering by Robert Rodriguez and Sina Alafredo. Alex Goldmark, my grand Boss, is our executive producer. It has taken many villages to put this book together. Alex Mayassi spent years researching and writing the book at npr. Special thanks to Devin Mellor for heroic project managing and also to Anya Grundmann, Laura Hogan and Kristin Hartman. Thank you to the many people at Norton who we talked to for this series, especially Meg Sherman and Steve Attardo, Michelle Rothfarb at Lakeside Book Company and Phil Stamper. I'm Alexei Horowitzka. This is npr. Thanks for listening.
- [49:41]
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