How to make a BOOK into a bestseller

This message comes from Apple Business. Now you can control how your business shows up across Apple apps. And starting this summer in The US and Canada, you'll have a new way to show up to an even wider audience of potential customers with ads on Apple Maps. This is Planet Money from NPR. If somehow, given everything that's going on in the world these days, you missed it, let me be the first to tell you. PLANET MONEY just published its first ever book. It was the culmination of years of work. We navigated the world of agents and editors and auctions, figured out how to manufacture a book during a trade war and get it to stores around the world from airports to cruise ships. And throughout that process, my boss's boss, my grand boss, Alex Goldmark, he and everyone else involved in the book had harbored this secret fantasy that if we played our cards right, maybe someday this book could reach the holy grail of commercial publishing. Maybe this book could make the New York Times bestseller list. So it was carrying all those dreams from my grand boss that I recently walked into the office of Planet Money's book editor, Tom Mayer, at the publishing house, w w Norton in New York. I was there about a week after the book launched to witness the moment of truth. Today is a big day. Today is the day when the bestseller lists are released. That's kind of as big as it gets in a way. Yeah. No. It's sort of scary in part because you have no idea if you're gonna get anything at all. And we're gonna find out today what the result is. I've got butterflies. I'm very nervous. Over the last week, bookstores from chains like Barnes and Noble down to independents like Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, they've been logging their sales and reporting them through some mysterious process to an anonymous department inside The New York Times. All day, Tom has been trying to get a sense of how close the book might be to cracking The New York Times bestseller list by nervously checking the sales numbers he has access to. I sort of feel like on election night when you're counting the votes in, you know, the various counties across the state. Tom's checking how many copies we sold in independent stores or on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You sort of have this constellation of data, but you don't know what else was sold this week. I know what my book did, but there were several other very good books published the same day that the Planet Money book was published. How well did they sell? We have no idea. The Planet Money book, Tom explains, is facing some extremely steep competition. It's up against New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe's new book, which has been everywhere in the press this week. It's up against a divorce memoir …