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Listen now on the Up First podcast on the NPR app. This is Planet Money from NPR. For a long time, whenever I entered the cozy refuge of an independent bookstore, I couldn't help but suspect that there was this whole hidden world, this whole economy lurking behind the bookshelves. And I know in the era of TikTok and polymarket and video podcasting, it can be easy to overlook the humble book.
But it is undeniable books are one of the most influential technologies ever. From The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital to The Art of the Deal or Dreams for My Father. Books can make us all lean in one day, or suddenly everyone you know is finding life-changing magic and tidying up. Even if you haven't picked up a book in years, the forces that shape the marketplace for books have the power to shape everything else in your life.
They shape the ideas that make it to the masses. So last year, when my boss informed the team in an editorial meeting that the Planet Money book, which had been in the works for a while, was now hurtling toward publication, I found myself leaning in. The question of my boss's mind was this, would anyone on the team like to report out how the book got made to see what it might tell us about the business of books? Would anyone raise their hand?
And when I heard the call to tell the tale of the Planet Money book, what do you think I did? Leader, I raised it. Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Alexi Horwitz-Gazee. We live in a world built by books.
And yet, the economic machine that produces them is shrouded in mystery, the ways in which the invisible hand determines what books actually get made. Today on the show, the first episode in our series, Planet Money sets out to land a book deal and gets to go backstage to see everything that happens behind the shadowy curtain of the publishing industry. And we see what happens when lofty artistic ideals meet the cold logic of the market. There will be whale fights, corporate speed dating, and a literary shotgun wedding.
Accepted the mission to tell the tale of the Planet Money book. And in order to figure out where it came from, I started with a man who keeps the Planet Money solar system spinning every week. I'm Alex Goldmark. I am the executive producer of Planet Money.
And in that role, it is my job to to side on the structure of the big projects we do, the business side of Planet Money. And I guess for disclosure's sake, we should also say you are my boss. That is true. Or you're actually my boss's boss.
You're kind of my grand boss. Oh, ouch. But okay. I think it's cool.
Long time listeners may recall Planet Money's habit for participatory projects. We made a t-shirt and followed all the underlying economic threads around the globe. We bought a barrel of oil to follow it from the ground all the way to the pump. We resurrected a superhero to make a comic book.
We released a record. We just designed a board game. As to why our latest project is a book, Alex says you can kind of thank the free market for that. When did the first twinkle of a Planet Money book enter your eye?
I think in all honesty, like the first way it got on my radar was when these two literary agents said, hey, we've been retained by NPR to see if there are any NPR properties that would make for good books and we think Planet Money could be one. Alex was, let's say, lukewarm at first. Because this was kind of the opposite of how Planet Money projects have usually gotten started. Typically, we pick some part of the economy we want to understand better and then dive in to figure out the industry.
In practice, we've often failed to turn a profit, but that's okay because making money was not the point. But here with the Planet Money book, NPR seemed to smell an opportunity. And I think at the time, one of my bosses said, hey, will you talk to the people? My great-great-grand boss.
Yes. And I was like, okay, that sounds potentially fun. And that is how Alex first met a pair of seasoned literary agents named Laura Nolan and Jane von Merren. When you were first starting this, like were you aware that historically Planet Money projects have notoriously lost money?
No. Alex made a point of not telling us that. Laura and Jane are a tight-knit duo. Their minds are melded so closely, it can be hard to tell where one of Jane's sentences begins and Laura's ends.
As literary agents, Jane and Laura do not work directly for a publisher. They help authors sell their book ideas to the publishers. And when Jane and Laura make a sale, they make a commission, usually around 15%. They see themselves as sort of like the spotters within the publishing industry, peering into the vast swirl of infinite would-be books, and scooping up the ideas they think they might be able to sell.
We are always thinking, is this idea a book? Is this article a book? Is this conversation I'm having with this random cousin of my husband? A book?
Yeah. I mean, everything is processed through this lens of is this a book or not. And in the case of Planet Money, Laura and Jane had been wondering whether this podcast might be a book for a while. They'd previously helped NPR make a book about women in music and a wait-wait-don't-tell-me-crossword book.
And they saw potential in Planet Money in part because the show had recently sold out a live musical based on our superhero series. That made them even more intrigued by the idea of getting Planet Money between the hard-overs. Here's an engaged audience of people who will go to a theater because of a character that was created by Planet Money that is actually in a comic book. Was it Microfish?
Microface. Microface, thank you. And we're like, wow, if people are going to pay money to get the comic book and go to the show, this really bodes well for a book. So Jane and Laura set up a meeting with Alex at the South Street Seaboard in Lower Manhattan.
What was the point of that first meeting? We knew we wanted Planet Money to do a book. It was not clear that Planet Money was ready to do a book. So I think the point of the first meeting was to try and persuade Alex that now is the time.
Seal the deal. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. The agents make their case to Alex. They explain that making a book would allow Planet Money to spread the show's signature brand of irreverent economic infotainment. It might even invite new listeners to the podcast by getting into untapped markets.
Being in airport bookstores, being in libraries, being in schools, there were ways in which a book could do that in a way that a podcast can't. Talking with Laura and Jane, Alex starts to see how a Planet Money book might be a good way to advance the mission of the show. But there was still the question of what kind of book the show would actually want to make and what would find traction in the crowded marketplace for books. The three of them start brainstorming possible approaches, and at first Alex is throwing out all sorts of concepts.
And I think I was like, I want pamphlets and we'll do the first one and then we'll add to it. So we'll have like 10 different pamphlets in each one explain in industry or something. They would just like, no, like you got to stop Alex. I love the energy.
I think they were like, this is good. You're very generative. Let's keep going. Let's let anything else.
The agents told Alex his ideas were a little bit too narrow. The key to selling a big book these days, they say, is figuring out a broad frame that would appeal to as many people as possible. How wide was the spectrum of possible Planet Money books we could have gone down? Is it like, you know, if we're trying to move copies like romanticize super hot right now, maybe we do 50 Shades of Green?
50 Shades of Green. I love that. That is hilarious. We'll save that one for later.
I think that's going to be back too. For book one, however, the broad idea that Alex and the agents finally land on is a field guide to the global economy. Just like the show, this book could use a series of vividly reported stories to bring our daily lives into economic focus, from how we all work to how we date and pick our mates to how we invest and save for retirement. This they explain is a kind of book that might have a mass market appeal.
So Alex and the agents had a book idea. The next thing they needed was a book proposal. The proposal gives a sense of what it'll actually be like to read a perspective book. It lays out the structure of the various chapters, and it makes a business case for why this book and this author would be a good bet for a publisher.
Because a book is not just some collection of interesting stories. A book is a product. And book proposals are both the vehicle by which nonfiction books are bought and sold, and they offer publishers a glimpse of how they might sell the book to readers. To get the ball rolling, Alex needed someone to actually help write the proposal.
If everything went well, that person could write the actual book. Around the same time, my total coincidence, a guy named Alex Myosse reached out and he said, Hey, have you ever thought of doing a planning book? I would love to write one. And it was for two of this.
For two of this, because Alex Myosse had reported a few Planet Money episodes over the years. He understood the voice and style of the show. And Pete also worked on a book for Atlas Obscura about food. So he knew the book writing process.
After talking to some other candidates, my grand boss, Alex finally popped the question. Other Alex, he said, Do you want to be our writer? Other Alex said, I do. And then we had to write the proposal.
Over the next year or so, Alex and Alex and Jane and Laura passed this sort of epic Google Doc back and forth over and over. They come up with some sample writing, graphed and outline for the whole book, and they lay out a business case for why readers would be clamoring for just this book at just this moment. Okay, so at the end of the process, you have a very proposal, old radio tricks. Once Jane and Laura and the Alex's have that proposal, it was time to court some publishers.
And for months, Jane and Laura had been seeding the marketplace by dropping whispers of a Planet Money book at every power launch in cocktail hour they could. You see, the publishing industry is so small and connected, they explain it's a bit like a high school with its own set of unwritten rules and etiquette. And like a high school, a lot of the most important trade information travels from literary agents to book editors and back through word of mouth. We will have lunches or breakfasts or drinks, they generally reach out to them.
I haven't seen you, we should get together. What are you buying lately? What are you interested in? And that is essential information because each of these editors is a potential buyer representing the publishing house behind them, the penguins' random house and Simon's and Schuster of the world.
And the first thing to understand about this market is that over the past half century or so, it's become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few companies. Once upon a time, these were all independent publishers and over the many years that are swallowed by other publishers and swallowed again and those people that are so that's why we are down to the collabig five, which are major conglomerates that contain inside many, many publishers. The many, many subsidiary publishers inside a big one are actually known as imprints. And when you look around the bookstore at all the tiny little symbols at the base of a book spine, a penguin or a campfire or a random little house, those brand markers or collofons, they are signs of all the hundreds of formerly independent publishers that have been gobbled up over the decades.
So if the publishing world is an aquatic ecosystem, there are once where thousands of little fish that have been swallowed successfully by larger and larger fish until now, there are five gargantuan publishing houses and a few others who have managed to grow outside of this conglomeration process. Yes. The consolidation of the publishing industry has made the bottom line more important than ever. And it's changed the kind of books that actually make it to the printing press.
There's increasing pressure for publishers to boost their profits by betting on books that aren't as risky. Just like how Hollywood has turned more and more to mining familiar IP and cranking out sequels, publishing has leaned more and more on putting their money behind authors with platforms and built in audiences. There are of course still more than 100 small independent presses and academic presses, but Jane and Laura think the Planet Money book could go big. As they pointed out in the proposal, the show had already sold nearly 17,000 comic books and over 20,000 t-shirts.
In this era, when publishers are betting on whether a would-be author's audience might actually buy their book, Jane and Laura were hoping they could lure in one of the biggest fish in the sea of publishers. We want to whale, ideally. Yes. Exactly.
We want a big whale that will know how to sell books to every single person and get books in every single bookstore. So a lot of the editors Jane and Laura are casually courting represent a whale in this world. And one of the people they make sure to tell about the Planet Money book is someone named Tom Mayer. I was at my desk and I got a call from Lauren Nolan and Jane Van Meeran and they said we've got something really exciting.
Tom is an executive editor at WW Norton. Now, Norton is not a whale. They're not one of the big five, but they are a major publisher that has managed to stay independent. Kind of like a literary dolphin.
The house has published fictional sensations like Fight Club and Clockwork Orange and all sorts of heavy hitting nonfiction like Michael Lewis's Moneyball or The Big Short. We should say Norton, Penguin, Harper Collins and several other publishers are financial supporters of NPR. But Tom says the basic business model in publishing whether you're a whale, a dolphin or a puppy is generally the same. Publishers are trying to buy the rights to books based on what they like and what they think will be profitable.
Tom is trying to acquire and edit great works of art, but the publisher needs to keep in mind the commerce of it all. Because for the publisher, every book is also a financial risk. So they have to treat each new perspective book like a new perspective investment and check how it would fit into their overall portfolio. A publisher is kind of like a basket of stocks.
You know, we published 150 books a year. Some of them are going to do really well. Some of them are going to do okay. Some of them are not going to do well.
And what you hope to do is generally to keep the whole portfolio moving upwards. But it is balanced and you have to have diversity. You want to have some mysteries and you want to have some nonfiction and you want to have academic works of sociology and you want to have cookbooks. And having a diverse and interesting list of books means that there will be successes even as there are failures.
Publishing is a power law business. 20% of the books make 80% of the money and many, many books don't sell. Are you thinking about risk mitigation in your own annual list of books that you're acquiring sort of thing? I'm like, okay, well, these ones seem like they might not sell that much.
I should probably try to get some that are more surefire in some way. Alexi, every time I try to think like a businessman, I fail. And if I think too hard about well, I've signed up for music books this year. I can't do another one.
Well, then I'll miss the next great music book. If I think I've signed up a bunch of debut novels that might or might not work, I'd better sign up, you know, some branded podcast book, then I will make a mistake. Like I just if I think too strategically or too programmatically about my investment choices, I will not make good art. Now book editors, Tom explains, where a few different hats.
They are, of course, in the writing trenches with their authors, helping to shape the structure and style of a manuscript. That is the art side. But on the business side, and even more importantly for our story, they are also in charge of acquiring new titles for their houses. These are the buyers that agents like Jane and Laura need to sell on something like a Planet Money book.
But getting Tom's attention on any given book proposal can be difficult. I did them after a couple years ago, and I discovered that I receive 500 roughly proposals from book agents every year. So that's reputable book agents who have gone through this process of vetting authors and making book proposals. And out of those 500, I'm excited about 30 or 40.
And I end up buying 10 or 12 a year. So out of what I'm getting submitted from the entire world that has already been called, I end up signing up 2% of the things that are sent to me. And keep in mind, these days editors like Tom generally do not read unsolicited proposals or manuscripts that don't come to them through vetted agents. Publishing is, in some ways, in industry builds on gatekeeping.
And agents are just the first of many. The way Tom is thinking about it, every time he opens his inbox and gets a proposal from a trusted source, the thing he's hoping for is the tingly feeling of reading something undeniably great. I literally don't know what's going to come in my inbox today. It could be the next Nobel Prize-winning novel.
It could be garbage. I don't know. And that feeling of what might it be, is this going to be the one that gives me that feeling that that sparkle, that sense that this is the best thing I've ever read? It might be today.
I might go back to my desk and find an agent, he's emailing me something incredible. That is a feeling I love. And it's part of what I love about my job. And so when agents call and they say I've got something I'm excited about, I say, great, I know you agent, I can't wait to see what it is.
You know I'm chasing that literary high. I need my next fix. Give me that. I want that uncut nonfiction.
When the Planet Money book proposal hit Tom's inbox, he did not read it right away. It took a few days in a polite reminder from Jane and Laura telling him that other publishers were getting excited before he finally took a look. But when he did, he says he did notice that telltale tingle. I immediately said this is a book for Norton.
You know, we publish lots of books that explain business and finance and economics to everyday readers. It's a category of books we know really well and we're good at it. Tom knew and liked Planet Money, he knew the show had a big following, and he knew that NPR listeners generally buy books. And I said this book is going to be big, I hope I expect, I think, and I want to share with my colleagues right away.
So it was kind of a perfect storm, another famous Norton book. It was a perfect storm of feeling about why I wanted to proceed. Now the decision to pursue a book for acquisition isn't solely up to individual editors like Tom. He has to make the case to all of Norton's other editors in department heads at a big editorial meeting about why this is a Norton book and why it's a good bet.
And Tom says most of his colleagues were generally on board, but honestly the biggest challenge is what is the evaluation. You know, Planet Money is a household name, they've got lots of followers, but this book was some more than zero copies, which is the potential fate of many books. Zero copies sold happens. In reality, Tom says even a total flop will sell at least a few copies, but Tom's colleagues at Norton wondered how many copies would the Planet Money book actually sell.
Tom told him about Planet Money selling t-shirts and comic books and vinyl records. The proposal was claiming that Planet Money would promote the book in all sorts of ways. They'd talk about it on NPR, put endless promos in the feed. Maybe even produce a meta reported series about the making of the book?
Tom's colleagues pushed back. Would Planet Money actually do any of that? And if they did, would any of it translate to more book sales? Tom did not know the answer to those questions, but he still got the green light to push the process forward to set up a meeting with the agents Jane and Laura and both of the Alexes.
But remember, Tom is not the only editor who Jane and Laura have been courting for this book. A key part of a literary agent's job is to try to give as many editors as possible a sense of FOMO over the book proposal. Of course, that doesn't always work. But it wasn't clear when we sent it out, how many people were going to respond?
If we had one publisher only, everybody else would like one publisher love it. That's all you need is one. But in this case, we were getting absolutely just inundated with requests. Jane and I were then faced with 23 publishers who wanted meetings, which was probably the largest number I've ever had in my career.
Jane and Laura explained to my grand boss, Alex, that before the pandemic, when a book proposal was hot, the book's author and agents might take a fancy black car all over town to meet all the prospective publishers. But we get to do it all in Zoom now. And I think it was like 17 meetings, or maybe it was 27 meetings. I remember there being a seven in there.
It was actually 23 meetings, but you get the point. So Jane and Laura set up a sort of speed dating zoom gauntlet, 23 half hour meetings spread out over four days, where Alex and company meet their prospective publishers one by one to pitch each other on why they might be the best fit. One publisher pitches a sort of glossy graphics-heavy coffee table version of the book. Tom and his team at Norton pitched the idea of making college courseware based on the book to get it into classrooms and onto economics syllabi.
But Alex has the whole thing was kind of a blur. For Jane and Laura, all this interest means one thing. They've got enough potential buyers to hold in auction. They play their cards right?
They should be able to turn this hot hand into cold, hard cash. Laura and I were behind the scenes talking and strategizing about, okay, how are we going to structure this auction? Because we had created a lot of excitement by having so many meetings, but we wanted to continue that excitement and incentivize publishers to jump high. After the break, Jane and Laura come up with an auction plan, and this little plan money book goes to market.
This week on sources and methods, every White House has an official counterterrorism plan, strategy document basically, but President Trump's new 2026 plan shifts focus to left-wing extremism. We're unpacking what's in the document and who influenced it this week on sources and methods. You can listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Nearly a year and a half after book agents Jane and Laura reached out to Planet Money's executive producer, Alex, about making a book, it was finally time for all of this careful planning and gamesmanship to come to a head.
It was time to take the proposal to auction. But Jane and Laura say, you got to remember this is a gentle bookish crowd. So if you're picturing a dramatic sotheby-style paddle party or a rowdy cattle auction, it's not like the auctioneer who's like, give me your big, give me your big, this is all done by email. I want that fast-talking gavel kind of flavor.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot more interaction. Yeah, exactly. But what we did do was we tried to create a structure and rules that would give us some advantages to make it a little bit more like that gavel-toting situation. The main thing they're trying to do is to make potential bidders feel motivated by the level of competition without scaring them away.
And a lot of this comes down to a kind of information management. For example, normally Jane and Laura would keep something like the number of publishers they'd met with a secret. If they're only a couple of bidders, they don't want to tip their hand. But in the case of the Planet Money Book, there were 23 potential bidders.
So Laura and Jane strategically let that number slip. Which, for Tom Mayer, the book editor who's always chasing the literary dragon, it seems to have had its intended effect. Oh my god, everybody in town is bidding. All the publishers want this book.
What are we going to do next? The key information Tom needed to come up with a plan for bidding was to know what type of auction format Jane and Laura were going to use to sell the Planet Money Book. Tom says there are a few classic auction formats you generally see in the world of book publishing. The first is what's known as a round robin auction.
It's sort of a classic poker game style of bidding in which each person can top the prior bid in turn. So when publisher bids $10,000 next person says $15,000 after that says $20, and you just go around until the bidding stops. This produces the most rational price, but it can take a really long time. And people's attention can wane.
Agents might prefer this format to push editors to try to one up each other. But if the agents want to capitalize on people's limited attention, Tom says there's one particularly intense auction format known as the one round best bid. One shot. You put your best foot forward, your best offer, and you just hope you win.
Bidders, they have almost no information. You don't know what the baseline price is. You don't know anyone else is thinking. You know nothing.
And this leads to really unpredictable results. So it's risky for everyone. It's risky for the authors. It's risky for agents.
It's risky for publishers, because prices are less rational in that one round low information bidding environment. Agents might choose this format if they want to keep the auction quick and efficient. The one round best bid auction forces potential publishers to set aside all the flattery and small talk and actually put their money where their mouths are. But luckily for Tom and also maybe everyone else, Laura and Jane decide because there's so much competitive interest for the Planet Money Book, the kind of auction they will run is something called the two round best bid.
Though there's sometimes a third round. Tom likes to call this one the wedding cake auction because there are tears of bidding and the pool of bidders get smaller each round like the layers of a cake. And in the wedding cake auction, the top four bidders advance to the second round and often there will be a third round where the top two bidders advance and they're sort of sitting on top of the wedding cake like little cake toppers. Huge but very adversary.
Yeah, a little bit. Kind of, yeah. Not unlike marriage. It's a complicated relationship, Alexi.
And the wedding cake auction also requires a complicated beating strategy. Now that Tom's gotten word about what kind of auction he's entering, it's time to do some planning. And so now I'm thinking, we've got to come up with the strategy to get into that second round. That's the most important thing.
Like how does he make sure he's able to bid enough to make it to the second stage of the auction without accidentally driving the price to a rational heights? He's got to contact with the sales team, the marketing folks and come up with a model to justify a range of possible bids. The way they do this is to make sales projections. And one of the big tools there is called a comp or comparable title.
Basically, they come up with a selection of similar books, stuff by the same author on the same subject, and they use that to estimate the potential demand. Tom thinks of comps as sort of a necessary evil. I can't tell you how many books I've been pitched that are like just as Michael Lewis did in Liars Poker, I will do for the whatever industry. And it's just like, no, it's not going to happen like that.
Michael does his own thing and his book appeared at a particular moment in history and became a phenomenon for its own unique set of reasons. But all the institutions involved do need some kind of metrics to think about stuff. And even though individual comp is anecdotal, you can paint a picture of how big a potential market might be when you look at 10 similar books in a similar category. Tom wouldn't say which exact books he used as comps to come up in Morton's bid.
But he did say he looked into books put out by other prominent podcasts. And in Google, that includes things like the 99% invisible book, which became a New York Times bestseller. So that is how they come up with revenue that money they estimate might come in. Next, they gotta think about the cost of publishing the book.
There are, of course, the cost of manufacturing and marketing. But the lion's share of the bid will be the advance against royalties. Generally, in the publishing world, the advance helps an author cover their costs while writing the book. And if the book sells enough copies to pay back that advance, then they can start to accrue royalties on every additional copy sold.
So the bigger the advance, the more copies the publisher needs to sell in order to get back into the black. And if the book doesn't end up selling well, the author keeps the advance and the publisher has to eat that loss. So for the first round of bidding for the Planet Money book, Tom and Steam are trying to figure out how big of an advance they should offer. And in addition to their own calculations, they have to think strategically because they know they're competing against as many as 22 other editors who are doing the same math.
Some of them are surely from the big five. And that is daunting because the big five publishers have much deeper pockets than Norton. You know, there's Harper Collins owned by News Corp of Rupert Murdoch fame. There's Penguin Random House and Macmillan, which are each owned by huge German conglomerates.
And Tom says, unlike those companies, Norton is employee owned. We have to be more thoughtful about when we make a bet on a book because we're not playing with a conglomerate's money or a private equity money, anything like that. We're not playing with house money when we are bidding on a book we're bidding with literally our own money. So Tom and his team consider all these things, the expected sales, the possible advances, what the competition might be up to.
And they finally come up with a number. On Tuesday, March 28, 2023, the bidding window set by Jane and Laura finally opens. Publishers will have until 11 a.m. the next day to submit their bids by email.
The next morning at an office building near the flatiron in New York, Laura and Jane are nervously waiting for the offers to start rolling in. The first one hits their inbox around 9.45 a.m. And then they just started to trickle in boom, boom, boom, over the next hour or so, the bids keep coming. But Jane and Laura do receive word that one publisher has decided to exit the race.
They also hear from a few editors that they won't be submitting a bid because fellow imprints within the same corporate conglomerate had trumped their own offers. And as all of this information is trickling in, Jane and Laura are pacing back and forth between their two glass offices in plain sight of all their colleagues. And it was exciting for everybody? Yes, because our colleagues knew that we were having this auction and they could see us and they could see us and they're like, okay, where are you?
What's happening? Oh, that's great. We like that person. Like they have opinions because they have books with these editors.
It was good to be able to have them around. They were rooting for their favorite horses and race. Well, they're shocked. I can't believe they bid.
I can't believe they dropped out. You know, a lot of feelings too. It was pretty dramatic. When the bidding window closes at 11 a.m., Jane and Laura have received 16 bids on the book, which is pretty high for a book auction.
Now they have to tally up the numbers and figure out which bidders would advance to the next round. They're obviously looking at the top line number, the advance. But each bid is not just the advance. Each bid is a specifically tailored potential contract that also includes a mix of things like the rights to translate the book or to sell it into different international markets.
And those are based on each publisher's actual strategy for selling the book, all of which means Jane and Laura have to do some math comparing these different packages. And when they finish, they find there are roughly enough ties for 10 editors to make it to the next round. So we went back to those 10 people and said, good news. You've made it to the second round.
And so by 3 p.m., we would like your next bid. We told them what our top bid was at that point. So they knew where we were. And that is all we said.
We didn't say nine other people have made that. So they didn't know how many people had advanced. They want to know. Jane and Laura then turn to letting everybody else know that they've fallen out of the race.
And they have to do this delicately because Jane and Laura are in this high school dance for the long haul. They need to maintain their reputation so they can pitch the same editors a different book next week. So they reached out to the editors no longer in the running. And said, we're really sorry.
We're so grateful your interest and support. But you did not make the second round. Well, we're there responses. There were a couple of who were literally shocked.
They were shocked. Yeah. Shocked that they had not made the second round. Because they had offered what they thought was a very big amount.
So that's, you know, that's book business, baby. Yeah, exactly. As for Tom Mayer over at Norton. At the end of the first round, Jane and Laura called me and said, you made the second round.
I said, yes. Wow. All right. Oh my god.
Now what? Especially because not only had Norton advanced, Tom learned that the amount of money he'd offered in the first round was actually the highest bid setting the new floor for the next round of the auction, which is both a cool feeling and a scary feeling. Yeah, we're winning. But also like, oh my god, did I pay too much?
Yeah. The fear that Tom is describing here has a name in economics. It's called the winner's curse. The idea is that the winner of an auction will often overpay for something, especially if there's a lot of competition and the object in question is difficult to put a value on.
With the specter of the winner's curse on their minds, Tom and his competing editors all have to come up with their bid for the second round of the auction. Norton's bid from the first round had set the new minimum bid that all the publishers now had to beat. So all 10 competing editors are now going back and double checking their models to figure out exactly how many more clams they're willing to shell out. And for all involved, including Jane and Laura and the Alex's, the stakes are high.
But for the editors like Tom who are putting so much on the line, this moment is especially emotionally fraught. You're thinking about what's going to happen. If I win, I'm going to be doing this project for three years. I'm really emotionally attached to it.
But if I lose goodbye, I never see them again. Yeah. Like so you have this like very heightened sense of emotions around the moment. It does feel a little bit like getting a bit more over a house and you have to like somehow figure out a emotional piece with either outcome.
Yeah, if you win, you win. Oh my God. The bottom falls out of your stomach. What have I done?
What have I bought? I've just spent all this money on this thing. Or nope, somebody else bought it and actually know you don't live here. Devastating.
It can be really devastating. Every editor has memories of books that they've lost. And there are books that you lose that fail miserably. And you think, whoo, dutch the bullet.
And then there are books that you lose that go on to sell really well and you're kicking yourself for the rest of your life. So with all that emotional and financial baggage and toe, that same day, Tom and the other editors in the auction put the rest of their chips on the table, hoping their pile would be just tall enough to beat out their competing editors, their comp editors, if you will. And as it turned out, things were then very close again at the end of the next round because everyone had improved their bid by roughly the same amount. And that's when the beauty contest began.
The beauty contest is what happens at the very end. It's the end game of a book auction where the numbers are basically the same. And you go back to that value in the chemistry. Did the author like you?
Is your plan better than somebody else? Is your vision and strategy more compelling to them than not? In the case of the Planet Money book, the last round of the auction, the beauty contest, came down to two final contestants, Tom's team at Norton, the Dolphin, and one of the big five publishers, a whale. The big five publisher only offered to print a two-color version of the book, but they also offered more actual money upfront, a full court publicity press, and a tried and true way of getting the book into airport and indie bookstores around the country.
This was the closest thing to a sure bet you can ask for, the opportunity to ride a whale, potentially all the way to the top of the best seller list. Norton, on the other hand, was offering slightly less money, but they did offer full color. And the thing that was really different about their pitch was this gambit. In addition to their normal retail book business, Norton is also a big player in the world of textbooks.
So they were offering to get the Planet Money book, a retail book, into educational courseware and textbooks. This could potentially mean more sales in the long run, but it wasn't something Norton had really tried before, so there were a lot of unknowns. At the end of the day, it was up to Planet Money's executive producer, Alex, to make the decision. Jane and Laura explained the last offers and their competing visions for the Planet Money book, and Alex says he was racked with indecision.
Norton's educational pitch was compelling. We really liked that because we have an educational mission, right? We want as many people as possible to understand the economy. So doing it directly like that was really appealing, but there was no apples to apples to make.
It was like, I don't know what that's worth. How much is that equal to in advance? Basically, Alex's decision was between going with Norton and gambling on selling textbooks to the students of tomorrow, or taking more money up front and going with the whale. When was the moment that you knew the auction was over?
When Alex Goldmark told us. Yeah, when Alex Goldmark said, I want to do this. I want to marry this publisher. Right.
After several days of going back and forth, Alex finally made the call. I remember going, OK, OK, we're going with Norton, and it felt like this huge thing that I didn't know it was going to be good or not. I didn't know it was right or not. It felt right, but it felt great to just have made that decision.
Laura and Jane called Tom to deliver the news. And I said, heck, yeah, let's just, I was so excited. I mean, we wanted to publish this book. We put so much work into bidding on it and getting excited and making our offers and the auction had been so tense.
So we celebrated. Everybody got together. We were like, yeah, we did it. We won.
That's great. You made it through the gauntlet of the wedding cake and plenty of money said I do. Yeah, they said I do. And we popped the champagne.
And what was the bid? I'm not going to talk about numbers. Is it a corporate secret? Yeah.
In general, there are ways in book publishing that people signal how much they paid for things. Yeah. Like there's publishers, marketplaces, a clearing house of deals where you can post a deal and you know, you can say it was a big deal, a major deal, a, you know, there's various adjectives that like indicate levels of a dance. As a policy, we don't talk about how much we paid in this publishing house.
We believe every deal is a major deal. Yeah, sir. Yeah. So publishers are generally not in the habit of disclosing how much they've paid for their books, which makes it difficult to know exactly what an average advance might be for a major book deal.
But there are self reported surveys of authors on the internet that estimate the average advance for a major deal may be somewhere around $60,000. Still, I wanted to know what the Planet money book had sold for. So I put the question to the agents, Lauren Jane. So what was the winning bid?
We can't talk about money. No, let your imagination. Agents don't really kiss and tell when it comes to how they do these things. Well, it's not our information to share.
That's right. It's my client's information. I'll run it by my grand boss. You're free to ask him every week.
We're not. We can say. Right. Sorry.
Finally, I did put the question to my grand boss. Who was only slightly less invasive? We got a lot of money, Lexi. It was seven figures as Norton put in a press release around the time of buying the book.
More than a million dollars. But less than two? Yeah. I think we could say less than two.
Yes. Maybe book two. Maybe it'll do so well. We'll get that for book two.
Once we shop and auction off 50 Shades of Green, we're going to be rolling in the dough. Once Alex signed on the dotted line, Planet money's agents Jane and Laura got the first installment of their commission. And it was time for them to hand off the baton to pass the Planet money book on to the next stage. You give the bride or the groomer, too, the other person.
I'm going down the path up. Yeah. Up until we sell the book, we've kind of been driving the process. And then afterwards, it is the editor who becomes the leader.
With that, Planet money's agents had successfully walked my grand boss, Alex, down the aisle to put a contractual ring on the finger of Tom Mayer of House WW Norton, emerging of two humble dynasties. How similar or dissimilar was it to the feeling of proposing or getting proposed to for marriage? Way faster and more like a shotgun, but in kind of situation, right? Because I'd only met these people like a week earlier.
Nevertheless, Planet money had sealed the coveted book deal. But now for the hard part. That's just it. Guess what?
Then the next day you pick up the phone and you say, hey, let's have a meeting to talk about how we're going to write this book. Like suddenly, you have to do the whole thing. And so then it was like a kickoff meeting where it's like, you know, the first day you sort of enter your new home after your wedding and everybody else is gone and you just have like a confetti on the floor and mess and you're like, what do we do now? Like, how do you actually make a book?
Yeah, how do you actually make a book? That's next week on Planet Money. One thing I should mention, my grand boss, Alex, will have a con-nip-tion if I don't remind you all. For all of this to work out, for that big advance to be worth it, people need to actually buy the book.
And so Alex has come up with some incentives. First one, if you pre-order the book before April 7th, you'll get a free poster based on our laws of the office episode. Or if you'd prefer a more personal touch, you can come see Planet Money live on stage around the country. We'll get a copy of the book, a tote bag, and see us do our thing, IRL.
I'll be doing a show and tell about the anatomy of the book in Albuquerque and Boulder, for all my high desert real ones. And I'll be sharing some pictures and video I took while reporting this series. To pre-order the book or get ticket info, go to planetmoneybook.com or check out the show notes. This episode was produced by Will Arubin with help from Sam Yellow Horse Kessler, who was edited by Jess Jane, fact-checked by Sierra Waddes, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez.
Alex Goldmark, my grand boss, is our executive producer. I'm Alexi Horwitz-Gazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.