MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Our Planet Money team has been reporting a series on the inner workings of the publishing industry and the publication of Planet Money's first book. And as Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi tells us, every book in a store went through a lot to get there.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: Like sea turtle hatchlings trying to reach the sea, most books never make it onto a bookshelf near you. Because even if a book idea gets turned into a proposal, then sold to a publisher and actually edited and manufactured, it still has to make it past a final trial - the book buyers at stores around the country.
FISHER NASH: I am the last gatekeeper because I decide whether we're even going to have it in the store or not.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Fisher Nash is the book buyer at Carmichael's independent bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, and the challenge Fisher faces is essentially a real estate puzzle. Carmichael's is just about 1,800 square feet, and they can only stock a fraction of the tens of thousands of books on offer from publishers every season.
NASH: I try to give each title 30 seconds or less (laughter), which doesn't sound like a lot. But that 30 seconds is a very rich moment.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: For every book, Fisher is scanning information about the author. Are they famous? Do they live nearby? Has the store sold copies of their previous books or any similar titles? If Fisher does decide to order the book, they then have to decide on how many copies.
NASH: 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.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Or should Fisher up the ante and order two copies?
NASH: So you'll notice when you look at the spines. People are more likely to be like, oh, they've got more copies of that. I wonder what that is.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Finally, Fisher has to decide where in the bookstore that new title should live. Publishers offer a suggestion for that called the book's BISAC code.
NASH: BISAC stands for Book Industry Standards and Communications.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: For the Planet Money book, for example, Norton, the publisher of the book, assigned the code of business/economics. But Fisher thinks for this book, tucking it into that corner of the store might miss impulse-buying NPR listeners. So Fisher slots it in general new nonfiction. With every order and shelving choice, Fisher is making a kind of bet, investing the store's capital and real estate. But risk in the publishing industry is largely taken on by the publishers because booksellers like Fisher can return unsold books for credit.
Steven Pace is the director of trade sales at Norton, which, by the way, is a financial supporter of NPR, like several other publishers. Pace explains that publishers are also making bets with how many copies of a book they decide to print. But when a book doesn't sell well, they often have to figure out how to recoup their costs. For that, they could remainder the books, meaning sell them off at a huge discount to resellers.
So it's trying to sort of, like, minimize your losses.
STEVEN PACE: Yeah. It's an auction, if you will, kind of a fire-sale auction.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Remainders are often marked in some way so they don't reenter the regular market. So they might have a black Sharpie mark on the side or a hole punched out of the barcode. Some other publishers, Steven explains, will even pulp some of their unsold inventory, running the books through an industrial shredding machine.
PACE: Just a giant conveyor belt. You know, it takes something that took years and, you know, like a wood chipper, in 15 seconds, there's just no sign of anything at all that remains. And it's soul-crushing.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So every time we see a bookstore shelf, what we're really seeing is a series of calculated bets that, taken collectively, shape which books survive and thrive and maybe even shape our culture and which ones face the maw of the pulping pit.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, NPR News.
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