Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

At the time, Stephen says he was working at one of the big five publishers as a sales rep.

And he and the other reps were invited to a warehouse to see how the company handled some of its unsold inventory.

Stephen says that image of industrial literary carnage has stayed with him over the decades.

And now, as the head of a sales operation for a major publisher, it still informs the way he thinks about printing and waste.

Stephen says Norton does not use pulping to manage its returned inventory, though they will occasionally pulp damaged books.

But that all means that his calculations and figuring out how many books to print are even more important.

So that's where he pours a lot of his energy.

That's exactly right.

As the head of trade sales, Stephen says it's his responsibility to think about the long-term economic life of all their books.

a publisher sustained in the long term by a steady back catalog of dependable sellers.

And so his ultimate goal for the Planet Money book is to get to a second printing, and then a third, and so on.

But in order to set the book up for a long, strong life, you want that freshly born baby book's first steps out into the world of retail to be as strong and steady as possible.

Because the better the baby's debut, the higher its lifetime potential earnings are likely to be.

So Stephen says he's mobilized his entire sales force to get the Planet Money book into every retail outlet you can imagine.

What channels are we going to be in at this point?

So we're going to see the Planet Money book in airports?

The book, Stephen tells me, will be available on bookshop.org, amazon.com.

It'll roll out in libraries, gift shops, military bases, even cruise ships.

We left no stone unturned.

I didn't know you could buy books on a cruise ship.