AILSA CHANG, HOST:
What does it take for a book to become a bestseller? Well, that's a question our Planet Money team has been digging into as part of a series on the inner workings of the publishing industry. This is as they publish Planet Money's first ever book. Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi has this story.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: In the book business, there is nary an achievement so financially sweet as making the New York Times Best Seller list. Just ask Temple University professor Laura McGrath, who teaches on the history of bestsellers.
LAURA MCGRATH: What happens when a book is named to a bestseller list is a sort of rich-gets-richer effect. It has a snowball effect where being named a bestseller becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But the way The New York Times actually determines which books make the list each week is notoriously opaque. They have a standard statement where they explain that it's based on a weekly survey of tens of thousands of bookstores around the country. But the identities of those specific bookstores are a guarded secret. Authors are constantly speculating about where the Times gets its sales data, how that data is weighted and who exactly is crunching the numbers.
How long have people been trying to game their way onto The New York Times Best Seller list?
MCGRATH: Oh, for as long as there's been a New York Times Best Seller list.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: (Laughter) One of the pioneering tacticians of the bestseller system was the novelist Jacqueline Susann, who published her debut novel, "Valley Of The Dolls," in 1966. McGrath says Susann was particularly adept at befriending the booksellers around the country.
MCGRATH: So what Jacqueline Susann was able to do through these relationships was figure out which are the bookstores that were reporting to The New York Times. And she directed her readers, and she herself purchased books from those retailers to ensure that there would be a really big, splashy first week sale.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Susann is credited with helping develop the modern book tour, visiting key bookstores across the nation to generate sales. And sure enough, "Valley Of The Dolls" quickly became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. But McGrath says that strategy was just a warmup compared to the gamesmanship of recent decades, largely centered around one technique in particular, bulk sales.
MCGRATH: If you're a politician, say, you might ask your super PAC to do it. If you are a minister, you might ask your megachurch to do it. If you are a business leader, you might hire a firm to run a campaign for you that will purchase large enough quantities of this book that you are almost guaranteed a spot on The New York Times Best Seller list.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: McGrath says the blueprint for this strategy was exposed back in 1995 with a book called "The Discipline Of Market Leaders." After its release, it came out that the authors had hired a sort of book sale laundering firm to buy tons of copies and ended up on The New York Times Best Seller list.
MCGRATH: It exposed a fault in their system, that it could be hacked, you know, in the same way that, like, the Louvre looks really bad when people can just walk in and steal stuff. Like, it wasn't a good look for them.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: That same year, The New York Times introduced a new tool to combat and sort of call out these tactics whenever they could be detected.
MCGRATH: So they begin adding a little figure called a dagger to the side of books that have been purchased using bulk sales. It's like a little buyer beware symbol.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Still, the economic benefit of being able to call yourself a New York Times bestselling author in your bio is high enough, McGrath says, that many authors find it worth the risk. New York Times assistant managing editor Patrick Healy oversees standards across the newsroom, including the bestseller list team.
PATRICK HEALY: We know that gaming does go on. People try to attempt to influence their ranking on the list, but we have a lot of steps in our process in terms of the analysis that we do with that confidential reporting from booksellers.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Healy says the bestseller department collects a dataset comprising the majority of book sales in the country and does extensive analysis in order to fulfill the core purpose of the list, to accurately reflect the nation's literary tastes to itself.
HEALY: Because we want the lists to reflect organic demand, we're really focused on that rigorous application of our methodology so that our audience believes in the list, trusts in the list, comes back to the list every week.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: These days, whenever I see that little New York Times bestseller sticker on the cover of a book, I can't help but think of all the machinations, both dastardly and wholesome, that might have gone into it - besides, of course, writing a good book. Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, NPR News.
CHANG: There's a whole podcast series on Planet Money that follows the making of their book. The book is called "Planet Money: A Guide To The Economic Forces That Shape Your Life" and spoiler - it made it onto the bestsellers list. Congrats, guys.
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