Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

In the end, Fisher decides to order one copy of Carthage, A New History for each of the two Carmichael's bookstores.

And this whole evaluation process that Fisher applies to every book, the one that's taken about 10 minutes to explain, when Fisher does it, it actually happens in a fraction of that time.

So all of the years of work that's gone into thinking up the idea for a book and crafting a book proposal and the publishers figuring out how much money they're willing to put on the line for the advance and then going through the trouble of editing the book and getting it together to craft the sales copy...

All of that eventually boils down to 30 seconds of intense scrutiny amidst thousands of other books to decide whether or not it gets into a bookstore.

As to the question I was really here for, how did the Planet Money book fare in that information-rich 30-second trial by fire?

Fisher says they first encountered it last November while blazing through Norton's winter catalog.

And Fisher knew that a lot of Carmichael's customers listened to NPR.

No, no, no.

We like to be commodified.

Okay.

Fisher's analysis on size and page count, the Planet Money book was in the sweet spot.

They liked the sample images of the whimsical color illustrations.

There weren't any blurbs, but that seemed fine since it was being written by a public media company often supplying the blurbs.

Finally, Fisher quickly scans the comparable titles.

They see that one of them, the 99% Invisible book, had sold well at Carmichael's, as had the Atlas Obscura food book.

In terms of the number of copies they wanted, Fisher was aiming to thread a sort of needle.

On the one hand, they were worried about overordering.

In the past year, they'd taken a big bet on a new book by a popular author whose last book sold like bananas.

They'd ordered several cases of the book, only to discover that customers did not really care for it.

And yes, the books are returnable, but because bookstores have to pay shipping, they'll often wait several months.