How to make a BOOK into a bestseller

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the world of commercial publishing, there are few crowning achievements more coveted than a place on the New York Times Best Seller List. But how does a book actually end up there? There is, of course, a playbook that publishers and authors use to try to gin up enough sales at the beginning of a new book’s life to launch it onto the list. But there is also a world of more shadowy techniques – a whole history of hacking shenanigans going back nearly a century.

Today on the show, the fourth episode in our series: Planet Money sets out to make the Planet Money book a best seller, and along the way, we uncover all the outlandish strategies that people have tried to hack their way onto the New York Times Best Seller List. There will be mass hallucinations, legal exorcisms, shady book launderers, and scarlet daggers. And we learn the hard way how trying to engineer your way onto the list, just might be the thing that keeps you from getting there.

Related:

- “Night People's Hoax On Day People Makes Hit With Book Folks”
- New York Times: “Jacqueline Susann Dead at 53; Novelist Wrote 'Valley of Dolls'”
- New York Times: “Blatty Sue Times On Best-Seller List”
- New York Times: “Court Bars A Suit Over Books List”
- Bloomberg Businessweek: “Did Dirty Tricks Create A Best Seller?”
- Episode 1: Inside a BOOK auction
- Episode 2: Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain
- Episode 3: BOOKstore Economics
- Series: Planet Money makes a book
- Laura McGrath’s new book: Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction

Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life is in stores now.

Support: Planet Money+

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.4	If somehow, given everything that's going on in the world these days, you missed it,
0:10.9	let me be the first to tell you.
0:12.6	Planet Money just published its first ever book.
0:15.8	It was the culmination of years of work.
0:18.0	We navigated the world of agents and editors and auctions, figured out how to
0:21.9	manufacture a book during a trade war and get it to stores around the world from airports to cruise
0:27.1	ships. And throughout that process, my boss's boss, my grand boss, Alex Goldmark, he and everyone
0:33.4	else involved in the book had harbored this secret fantasy, that if we played our cards
0:39.0	right, maybe someday this book could reach the holy grail of commercial publishing.
0:45.2	Maybe this book could make the New York Times bestseller list.
0:49.5	So it was carrying all those dreams from my grand boss that I recently walked into the office
0:55.0	of Planet Money's book editor Tom Mayer
0:57.1	at the publishing house W.W. Norton in New York.
1:00.6	I was there about a week after the book launched
1:02.3	to witness the moment of truth.
1:05.3	Today is a big day.
1:06.5	Today is the day when the bestseller lists are released.
1:10.7	That's kind of as big as it gets in a way. Yeah, no, it's sort of... is the day when the bestseller lists are released.
1:12.7	That's kind of as big as it gets in a way.
1:18.4	Yeah, no, it's sort of scary in part because you have no idea if you're going to get anything at all.
1:22.5	And we're going to find out today what the result is.
	...

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