Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

For most of my life, whenever I walked into my local bookstore, I never gave much of a thought to how that day's particular assortment of books actually managed to make it there.

I didn't suspect for a moment that for every new book on display, there might be literally thousands of others that had been passed over and left out in the cold.

Until one morning this January.

That's when I found myself walking into a small independent bookstore called Carmichael's in Louisville, Kentucky.

I was there to meet a bookseller named Fisher Nash.

Fisher greets me wearing an all-green getup.

Green jumpsuit, socks, shoes.

We love that.

Fisher lives and breathes books.

If you were a character in a novel, how would you describe yourself?

How do you feel about You've Got Mail?

And in their job at Carmichael's, Fisher holds one of the greatest responsibilities in the whole publishing ecosystem.

Who decides what books end up in bookstores?

The book buyer is a specific role at basically every bookstore or book chain around the country.

At Carmichael's bookstore, Fisher is the book buyer.

Book buyers like Fisher will be deciding the commercial fate of the Planet Money book.

And so I wanted to understand how these decisions actually get made.

Now, running an independent bookstore, Fisher explains, is a game of thin margins.

Order too few copies of a popular new book, and you'll be depriving your store of much-needed financial lifeblood.

Order too many, and you'll be clogging up coveted shelf space that could be holding more lucrative titles.