Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Whether you realize it or not, America's intellectual life is still largely determined by what books actually make it to market.

And making it in the book business really comes down to getting around a series of gatekeepers.

There are book agents and then book editors, and then there are people like Fisher Nash, the bookseller.

Fisher is kind of the final boss between books like ours and the customers who might actually want to buy them.

So we're going to do a dive into how Fisher actually makes these decisions, in part to understand how the Planet Money book might fare.

This all plays out, Fisher explains, through a process that is repeated three times a year.

Every publishing season, Fisher will be inundated with all the publishers' catalogs outlining their new releases, from tiny independent presses all the way to the big five publishers that dominate the market.

And each catalog can have as many as 2,000 titles.

Fisher's job is to go through every one of those titles because they don't want to leave a single literary stone unturned.

Wow.

And roughly how many slots do you have available when you're sifting through these 12,000 to 15,000 titles?

Not that many.

Fisher says each season, they'll usually end up ordering somewhere around 3,000 titles, about 20 to 25 percent of the books on offer.

And Fisher's goal in placing these bets is to select books that'll connect with Carmichael's customers and keep the bookstore profitable.

The way this selection process works is that Fisher will go onto this website, Edelweiss.

It's an online platform that gives booksellers access to all the major publishers' catalogs in one place.

Fischer takes me into the back office and fires up Edelweiss on their laptop to show me how this all works in practice.

Should we do one?

Can we pick a catalog to look through?

Ooh.