Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, it's Alex Goldmark here. Thank you to everybody who pre-ordered our book. You are helping make this a success. The poster that should come with it will ship soon. It was not supposed to ship with the book and we should have been clearer about that. And an address in the United States. Email us at planetmoneyatnpr.org. Planetmoneyatnpr.org.
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This is Planet Money from NPR.
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.
That is me. I am Fisher the bookseller.
Fisher greets me wearing an all-green getup. Green jumpsuit, socks, shoes.
I wore green today in honor of planet money.
We love that. Fisher lives and breathes books. If you were a character in a novel, how would you describe yourself?
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Chapter 2: How do bookstores decide which books to stock?
And do we even have space for all of these things?
Looking around the store, this scarcity issue is clear. The whole place is around 1,800 square feet divided into two rooms, which means Fisher's got to make some tough calls. For those that do make the cut...
The second question is, how many am I going to bring in? Am I going to bring in one because it's important to be represented on the shelf, but it's not necessarily going to fly off the shelf?
Or should Fisher order two copies, knowing that doubling down can actually make a book more visible to passing customers?
So you'll notice when you look at the spines, you can see it stands out when there's two copies of something. People are more likely to be like, oh, they've got more copies of that. I wonder what that is.
If Fisher wants to up the ante, the next biggest bet would be to buy a total of four copies. That is the minimum number they need to qualify for the display table. This is a table right in the center of the store where a very lucky selection of new books are stacked several copies high, So this is sort of like the most prominent billboard or placement in the store?
Yes.
This is like the Holy Grail.
It is the Holy Grail, getting on the display table.
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Chapter 3: What role does a book buyer play in a bookstore?
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?
For fun, let's look at Norton.
Ooh. Norton, of course, is the publisher of the Planet Money book and also a financial supporter of NPR. At the top of Norton's winter catalog for 2026, we spy a new history of ancient Carthage called Carthage, A New History. Fisher runs me through the different variables they use to decide how many copies of a book to buy or whether to order it at all. First, there are the basics.
For example, the book about Carthage...
It's a hardcover. It is $39.99 list price, which makes sense for a more academic history title.
There's the cover image so Fisher can imagine the book on the shelf. There's a quick summary of what the book's about, along with the author's name. For that, Fisher is checking to see if the author is a household name. Is this the latest celebrity memoir from Matthew McConaughey? Is it a political tell-all from a former White House insider? Does the author have a big social media following?
That'll often be listed prominently.
So it would say she has 3.7 million followers on Twitter, which does matter to me because I know she has an audience already that she's also going to be pitching the book to.
And like what number feels significant enough to make a difference?
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Chapter 4: What challenges do bookstores face with inventory management?
Will there be a book tour or other live events? Will the author be going on TV or showing up in any podcasts? Could they potentially get on Fresh Air? Terry Gross, for a long time, has been kind of the Moby Dick of book publicity. Each entry also lists the physical dimensions of the book, which Fisher says can affect whether it'll physically fit onto the shelves in the store.
So another thing that matters? The page count.
If it's 500 pages or less, then I just think, okay, kind of standard book size. If it is 1,200 pages, I'm thinking even if I want a lot of it, I'm going to bring fewer into the store because it takes up so much room.
And you're wondering, like, how many people are going to sign up for a 1,200-page book?
Yeah, that's not as many people as will sign up for a nice, tight 350 pages. There's kind of a sweet spot, like between, I think it's 250 and 400. It's kind of the ideal book range.
The Carthage book is right in that sweet spot at 368 pages. And another very important piece of information that Fisher will often look for in the metadata is the size of the publisher's first print run. What does the print run tell you?
It's really a measure of publisher confidence.
If a publisher prints a lot of copies for a book's first print run, say 100,000, that's an indicator they think it'll sell well and that Fisher might want to get in on the action. The next piece of information in a book's catalog entry is whether booksellers like Fisher can return the book.
95% of the books that we buy are returnable, meaning we can return this to the publisher if we don't sell it after a certain amount of time.
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Chapter 5: How does shelf space impact book sales?
And one other little thing is they're considering each book. They're also sometimes thinking about specific customers who might want that book.
We have a few customers that I just I know very well and they're very regular. So when I see something that I know that they specifically will buy, I tag them for it so that I can let them know when they walk in the door. And in the case of Carthage... I know exactly which customer is going to be interested in this book. I've even tagged him down here. I shall keep his name private.
I love that. You're looking through all of these publishers' catalogs and sometimes you'll see a book that you know a particular customer will be interested in. And so you order it.
And I know they might be the only person interested in it.
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.
I try to give each title 30 seconds or less, which doesn't sound like a lot.
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.
Yes, that sounds really harsh, but that 30 seconds is a very rich moment filled with information.
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Chapter 6: What factors influence how many copies of a book to order?
Yeah. It's probably a better word than product.
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.
Atlas Obscura is a pretty recognizable brand. 99% Invisible is a pretty recognizable brand. Planet Money is a pretty recognizable brand. So I knew that I wanted something similar.
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. In the meantime, those unsold books eat up valuable real estate and capital.
And then we're stuck with 24 copies of a book that just sit around for months and months and months. And I see it, and it reminds me... I was wrong to buy so many up front. I didn't have to make that choice. I could have just gotten six or seven.
Every day you're reminded of that decision. Oh, yes. But at the same time, Fisher was also worried about under-ordering. They'd also recently had an experience with this, with Andrew Ross Sorkin's book 1929, a history of the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression. Fisher had ordered only a few copies of that book, which sold out almost immediately.
And that's an outcome Fisher wants to avoid, because compared to over-ordering the book, selling out on the first day...
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Chapter 7: How does the bestseller list affect book visibility?
As for the holiest grail in the game, the bestseller shelf, to even get a shot at that, the sales team at Norton would have to be thinking much bigger than one little chain of independent bookstores in Louisville, Kentucky. They'd have to initiate their plan to launch the Planet Money book into the stratosphere. That's coming up after the break.
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Fisher Nash is just one bookseller out of thousands all around the country. And independent bookstores are just one sales channel where this will all be playing out. So to get a sense of the Planet Money book's chances out in the broader marketplace, I had to go one final link higher in the great chain of publishing.
To the person tasked with figuring out the strategy for wringing every possible dollar and cent out of the Planet Money book. W.W. Norton's director of trade sales, Stephen Pace.
Yes. I mean, if there's anything that would define me, it was the fact that nothing bothers me more than not being able to make a sale.
Stephen fell in love with the book business while working at a bookstore as a teenager. Since then, he ran his own bookstore for a while, became a sales rep for major publishers, all before rising to become the head of trade sales at Norton. Do you ever anthropomorphize your books? Like, think of them like they're little characters in Toy Story or something with their own hopes and dreams.
Well, it's funny you say that. I grew up understanding that books are like babies. When we get to the place where we've got a book that's finished and it's being put in boxes and sent out to stores around the country, I make sure that we're taking as good a care as we can for each one of those little babies.
Stephen's role in the publishing process begins basically as soon as an editor brings in a book idea for serious consideration. See, while the editor's primary job is to obsess over the writing and design of a book, Stephen's mandate is to obsess over what the book might mean as a financial investment. At its core, Stephen is trying to estimate how many copies a book might sell.
To do that, he starts by building a model. At first, whenever a new book idea is being seriously considered for acquisition, the model is just based on the comparable titles and how they've sold over time. This is what helps Norton determine whether they buy the book and for how much.
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Chapter 8: What strategies do publishers use to promote their books?
Reader, only you can decide. Are you curious about how bestseller lists actually work? Want to hear about how authors have tried to game their way into bestseller status? That is our next installment in the Planet Money book series, coming up in the next few weeks.
As we've mentioned in other episodes, perhaps ad nauseum, Planet Money is taking this book on tour around the country, maybe to a city near you. Check it out at planetmoneybook.com or pick up a copy of the book wherever they are sold. Maybe on a cruise ship. This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Emma Peasley.
It was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark, my grandboss, is our executive producer. Also, we first learned about Fisher Nash through their Substack in a post about the economics of book buying. The Substack is excellent. It's a behind-the-scenes diary of the world of books, appropriately titled Fisher the Bookseller.
We'll link to it in our show notes. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.