Inside a BOOK auction

14:27Caitlin Kenney:I was at my desk and I got a call from Laura Nolan and Jane Van Miren and they said we've got something really exciting. Tom is an executive editor at W.W.

14:36Jacob Goldstein: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 A Clockwork Orange, and all sorts of heavy-hitting nonfiction, like Michael Lewis's Moneyball or The Big Short. We should say Norton, Penguin, HarperCollins, 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 guppy, 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.

15:14Jacob Goldstein: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 prospective book like a new prospective investment and check how it would fit into their overall portfolio.

15:33Caitlin Kenney:A publisher is kind of like a basket of stocks. You know, we publish 150 books in 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 keep the whole portfolio moving upwards. But it is a balance 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.

16:06Caitlin Kenney:20 percent of the books make 80 percent of the money. Many, many books don't sell.

16:10Jacob Goldstein:Are you thinking about risk mitigation in your own annual list of books that you're acquiring sort of thing of like, OK, 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.

16:26Caitlin Kenney: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.

16:56Jacob Goldstein:Now, book editors Tom Explains wear 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.

17:26Caitlin Kenney:I did the math a couple years ago, and I discovered that I receive 500, roughly, proposals from book agents every year. Wow. 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 culled, I end up signing up 2 % of the things that are sent to me.

17:57Jacob Goldstein: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, an industry built 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.

18:24Caitlin Kenney: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 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 has emailed 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.

18:54Caitlin Kenney:You know I'm chasing that literary high. I need my next fix. Give me that good. I want that uncut nonfiction.

19:02Jacob Goldstein:When the Planet Money book proposal hit Tom's inbox, he did not read it right away. It took a few days and 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.

19:18Caitlin Kenney:I immediately said this is a book for Norton. You know, we've published 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.

19:29Jacob Goldstein:Tom knew and liked Planet Money. He knew the show had a big following. And he knew that NPR listeners generally buy books.

19:36Caitlin Kenney:And I said, this book is going to be big, I hope, I expect, I think. And I want to share it 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.

19:50Jacob Goldstein: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 and 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...

20:08Caitlin Kenney:Honestly, the biggest challenge is what is the valuation? You know, Planet Money is a household name. They've got lots of followers. This book will sell more than zero copies. Yeah. Which is the potential fate of many books. Zero copies sold happens.

20:21Jacob Goldstein: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 them 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?

20:57Jacob Goldstein: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. It wasn't clear when we sent it out how many people were going to respond.

21:25Caitlin Kenney:If we had one publisher only and everybody else didn't like, but one publisher loved 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 have ever had in my career.

21:43Jacob Goldstein: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.

21:55Caitlin Kenney:But we get to do it all on Zoom now. Hooray! And I think it was like 17 meetings, or maybe it was 27 meetings. I remember there being a seven in there.

22:02Jacob Goldstein: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 pitch the idea of making college courseware based on the book to get it into classrooms and onto economic syllabi. But Alex says the whole thing was kind of a blur. For Jane and Laura, all this interest means one thing.

22:40Jacob Goldstein:They've got enough potential buyers to hold an auction. If they play their cards right, they should be able to turn this hot hand into cold, hard cash.

22:53Caitlin Kenney:Laura and I were behind the scenes talking and strategizing about, OK, 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.

23:12Jacob Goldstein:After the break, Jane and Laura come up with an auction plan, and this Little Planet Money book goes to market.

23:35Caitlin Kenney:purchase, including everyday items you buy online or in store, when using their Apple Card with Apple Pay. Not an Apple Card customer? You can apply in the Wallet app on iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at apple.co slash benefits.

23:56Jacob Goldstein: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's-style paddle party or a rowdy cattle auction...

24:21Caitlin Kenney:It's not like the auctioneer who's like, give me your bid, give me your bid, give it. This is all done by email. Oh, man. I know there's something.

24:31Jacob Goldstein:I want that fast-talking gavel-toting kind of flavor.

24:36Caitlin Kenney:Unfortunately, there's not that. Maybe we'll move in that direction. It can make it a lot more entertaining. 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.

24:52Jacob Goldstein: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 there are 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.

25:29Caitlin Kenney:Oh my god, everybody in town is bidding. All the publishers want this book. What are we going to do next?

25:34Jacob Goldstein: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.

25:51Caitlin Kenney:It's sort of a classic poker game style of bidding in which each person can top the prior bid in turn. So one publisher bids$10 ,000, the next person says$15 ,000, the person after that says$20 ,000, 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.

26:10Jacob Goldstein: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.

26:24Caitlin Kenney:One shot. You put your best foot forward, your best offer, and you just hope you win. Bidders, they have like almost no information. You don't know what the baseline price is. You don't know what 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.

26:47Jacob Goldstein: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 tiers of bidding, and the pool of bidders gets smaller each round, like the layers of a cake.

27:23Caitlin Kenney: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. Cute, but very adversarial. Yeah, a little bit. Kind of, yeah. Not unlike marriage. It's a complicated relationship, Alexi.

27:42Jacob Goldstein: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.

27:52Caitlin Kenney:And so now I'm thinking, we gotta come up with a strategy to get into that second round. That's the most important thing.

27:58Jacob Goldstein: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 irrational heights. He's got to confab 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.

28:31Caitlin Kenney:I can't tell you how many books I've been pitched that are like, just as Michael Lewis did in Liar's 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, you know, 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.

29:04Jacob Goldstein:Tom wouldn't say which exact books he used as comps to come up with Norton's bid. But he did say he looked into books put out by other prominent podcasts. Scanning 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, the money they estimate might come in. Next, they gotta think about the cost of publishing the book. There are, of course, the costs 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.

29:40Jacob Goldstein: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 his team 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.

30:17Jacob Goldstein: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 HarperCollins, 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.

30:38Caitlin Kenney: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 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.

30:52Jacob Goldstein: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, boom, boom, boom, boom.

31:27Jacob Goldstein: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.

31:53Caitlin Kenney:And it was exciting for everybody, yes, because our colleagues knew that we were having this auction and they could see us, so they could see us and they were like, OK, what happened? Where are you? What's happening? Oh, that's great. We like that person. And like they have opinions because they have books with these editors.

32:06Jacob Goldstein:So it was good to be able to have them around. They were rooting for their favorite horses and braids.

32:11Caitlin Kenney:Well, they're shocked. I can't believe they bid. I can't believe they dropped out. You know, they had a lot of feelings too.

32:15Jacob Goldstein: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.

32:51Jacob Goldstein: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.

33:01Caitlin Kenney: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 this place, too.

33:20Jacob Goldstein:Oh, so they didn't know how many people had advanced. No, no. And they want to know.

33:23Caitlin Kenney:They want to know.

33:25Jacob Goldstein:Jane and Laura then turned 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.

33:46Caitlin Kenney:We're so grateful your interest and support, blah, blah, blah. But you did not make the second round.

33:51Jacob Goldstein:What were their responses?

33:52Caitlin Kenney:There were a couple of people 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.

34:01Jacob Goldstein:That's book business, baby.

34:02Caitlin Kenney:What are you going to do? Yeah, exactly.

34:04Jacob Goldstein:As for Tom Mayer over at Norton,

34:07Caitlin Kenney:at the end of the first round, Jane and Laura called me and they said, you made the second round. I said, yes. Wow. All right. Oh my God, now what?

34:15Jacob Goldstein: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.

34:25Caitlin Kenney:Which is both a cool feeling and a scary feeling. Because you're like, yeah, we're winning. But also like, oh my god, did I pay too much?

34:31Jacob Goldstein: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.

35:07Jacob Goldstein:And for all involved, including Jane and Laura and the Alexes, the stakes are high. But for the editors like Tom who are putting so much on the line, this moment is especially emotionally fraught.

35:19Caitlin Kenney:If 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. So you have this very heightened sense of emotions around the moment.

35:32Jacob Goldstein:It does feel a little bit like getting in a bidding war over a house. And you have to somehow figure out how to make emotional peace with either outcome.

35:39Caitlin Kenney: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, no, 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, whew, dodged a 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.

36:07Jacob Goldstein:So with all that emotional and financial baggage in tow, 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. They're comp editors, if you will.

36:24Caitlin Kenney: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. 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?

36:50Jacob Goldstein: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 up front, 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 bestseller list.

37:28Jacob Goldstein: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.

38:04Jacob Goldstein:Jane and Laura explained the last offers in their competing visions for the Planet Money book, and Alex says he was wracked with indecision. Norton's educational pitch was compelling.

38:15Caitlin Kenney:We really liked that because, like, we have an educational mission, right? We want, like, as many people as possible to understand the economy. And 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?

38:32Jacob Goldstein: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.

38:49Caitlin Kenney:Yeah, when Alex Goldmark said, I want to do this. I want to marry this publisher. Right.

38:55Jacob Goldstein:After several days of going back and forth, Alex finally made the call.

39:00Caitlin Kenney:I remember going, okay, okay, we're going with Norton. And it felt like this huge thing that I didn't know if it was going to be good or not. Like, I didn't know if it was right or not. It felt right, but it felt great to just have made that decision.

39:12Jacob Goldstein:Laura and Jane call Tom to deliver the news.

39:15Caitlin Kenney:And I said, heck, yeah. I was so excited. I mean, you know, 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. You know, everybody got together. We were like, yeah, we did it. We won. It's great.

39:30Jacob Goldstein:You'd made it through the gauntlet of the wedding cake and Planet Money said, I do.

39:35Caitlin Kenney:Yeah, they said, I do. And we popped the champagne.

39:38Jacob Goldstein:And what was the bid? um i'm not going to talk about numbers is it a it's like a corporate secret yeah in general there

39:47Caitlin Kenney:are ways in book publishing that people signal how much they paid for things yeah like there's publishers marketplace is 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 what you know there's various adjectives that like indicate levels of advance yeah as a policy we don't talk about how much we've paid in this publishing house

40:07Jacob Goldstein:we believe every deal is a major deal. Yes, 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, Laura and Jane. So what was the winning bid? We cannot tell. We can't talk about money. No.

40:44Caitlin Kenney: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.

40:54Jacob Goldstein:I'll run it by my grand boss.

40:56Caitlin Kenney:You do. Yeah, exactly. You're afraid to ask whomever you want to. We're not, we can't say. Right, sorry.

41:02Jacob Goldstein:Finally, I did put the question to my grand boss. that was only slightly less evasive.

41:07Caitlin Kenney:We got a lot of money, Alexi. 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. Yes.

41:21Jacob Goldstein:Maybe book two. Maybe it'll do so well, we'll get that for book two. Once we shop and auction off Fifty Shades of Green, we're going to be rolling in the dough. Once Alex signed on the dotted line, And 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.

41:42Caitlin Kenney:It's like you give the bride or the groom, whomever, to the other person and let them go down the path. 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.

41:57Jacob Goldstein: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 W.W. Norton, emerging of two humble dynasties. How similar or dissimilar was it to the feeling of proposing or getting proposed to for marriage?

42:21Caitlin Kenney:Way faster and more like a shotgun wedding kind of situation, right? Because I'd only met these people like a week earlier. Right.

42:29Jacob Goldstein:Nevertheless, Planet Money had sealed the coveted book deal. But now, for the hard part, that's just it.

42:36Caitlin Kenney: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, confetti on the floor and a mess. and you're like, what do we do now? Like, how do you actually make a book?

43:01Jacob Goldstein:Yeah, how do you actually make a book? That's next week on Planet Money.

43:13Jacob Goldstein:One thing I should mention, my grand boss Alex will have a conniption 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. You'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 a book in Albuquerque and Boulder for all my high desert real ones.

43:52Jacob Goldstein: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 Willa Rubin with help from Sam Yellow Horse Kessler. It was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark, my grand boss, is our executive producer. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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