BOOKstore Economics

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2026

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do bookstores choose the books they stock, and how does that affect what customers read? It may not seem like it, but every shelf in a bookstore is a highly valuable and contested piece of commercial real estate. And for every new book that a bookstore decides to stock, there are thousands of others that did not make the cut. So how do bookstores make those decisions? And how will the Planet Money book fare under the discerning eyes of the booksellers, the final gatekeepers in the long gauntlet of the publishing industry?

Today on the show: the third episode in our series. Planet Money sets out to actually sell a book. We burrow behind the bookstore shelves to learn the secret codes that publishers use to try to convince booksellers to carry the book, from little mom and pops to airport juggernauts. There will be corporate intelligence networks, bargain bin shenanigans, and a giant industrial saw chewing up books by the thousands. Call it Pulp Non-fiction.

Related:

- Fisher Nash’s Substack
- Episode 1: Inside a BOOK auction
- Episode 2: Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain
- Episode 4: How to make a BOOK into a bestseller
- Series: Planet Money makes a book

Live show tour and book info. / Subscribe to Planet Money+

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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Music: NPR Source Audio - “A Peculiar Investigation,” “Round Round,” and “Neighbourhood Watcher.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Alex Goldmark here. Thank you to everybody who pre-ordered our book. You are helping make this a success.
0:06.7	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.
0:13.6	If you filled out the forum on our book website, thank you. You should have gotten a confirmation email.
0:18.6	But if you didn't do that or you didn't get an email, there is still time to get the poster.
0:24.0	Send us an email, and we will send you a link to fill out the form to get the poster.
0:28.2	You will need to have proof of purchase that you bought it before April 6th and an address in the United States.
0:34.2	Email us at PlanetMoney at NPR.org.
0:37.0	PlanetMoney at NPR.org put poster in the subject line
0:40.1	and do that before April 17th. Thank you for your patience and thank you very much for supporting
0:45.6	this big book project. This is Planet Money from NPR.
1:05.5	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.
1:11.8	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
1:17.7	when I found myself walking into a small independent bookstore called Carmichael's in Louisville,
1:22.1	Kentucky. I was there to meet a bookseller named Fisher Nash. That is me. I am Fisher the
1:27.1	bookseller. Fisher greets me wearing me. I am Fisher the bookseller.
1:28.0	Fisher greets me wearing an all-green get-up, green jumpsuit, socks, shoes.
1:32.5	I wore green today in honor of Planet Money.
1:35.9	We love that.
1:38.5	Fisher lives and breathes books.
1:41.5	If you were a character in a novel, how would you describe yourself? Oh,
1:45.5	wow. That's a really hard question. I would probably say I am a quirky bookseller whose personality
1:54.9	is mainly books. How do you feel about You've Got Mail? Oh, I love You've Got Mail, the Meg Ryan movie from the 90s. It's so good. It's my favorite bookstore movie. 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? That is me. It is primarily me. I am the book buyer.
	...

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