How to make a BOOK into a bestseller

May 1, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The New York Times bestseller list is famously opaque. The newspaper itself describes its methodology only in the vaguest terms, and the identities of the data scientists who crunch the numbers are not publicized. “It’s like we receive this email that’s like the smoke after a papal conclave,” says Laura McGrath, a professor at Temple who teaches a class on the history of the bestseller. “I’m not going to tell you how we got to this information, but here’s the list.”

Planet Money had just published its first book, and its editor, Tom Mayer, was nervously waiting for the weekly list to drop. “I’ve got butterflies,” he said. “I’m very nervous.” The episode follows the book’s launch and the strange, secretive system it had to navigate — a system that has inspired authors and publishers to try to hack it for decades, by hook or by crook.

The self-fulfilling prophecy of the list

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What you'll learn

1 (00:19) **The Setup: Planet Money's Book Launch** - The host describes the secret fantasy of making the New York Times bestseller list with the new Planet Money book.
2 (03:30) **The Power of the Bestseller List** - Explains why the list is so important and how it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
3 (04:00) **The Secret Methodology** - Reveals the opaque and mysterious process behind the New York Times list.
4 (09:36) **Chapter 1: "I, Libertine" and the Mass Hallucination** - The first major attempt to game the list was a prank by a radio DJ in the 1950s.
5 (13:46) **Chapter 2: Jacqueline Susann's Charm Offensive** - An author learned to target her sales efforts at specific bookstores.
6 (16:00) **Chapter 3: The Exorcist Author's Lawsuit** - William Peter Blatty's lawsuit revealed the list is protected editorial content.
7 (19:50) **Chapter 4: Bulk Sales and the Scarlet Dagger** - Modern attempts to hack the list involve buying massive quantities of books.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

In the world of commercial publishing, there are few crowning achievements more coveted than a place on the New York Times Best Seller List. But how does a book actually end up there? There is, of course, a playbook that publishers and authors use to try to gin up enough sales at the beginning of a new book’s life to launch it onto the list. But there is also a world of more shadowy techniques – a whole history of hacking shenanigans going back nearly a century.

Today on the show, the fourth episode in our series: Planet Money sets out to make the Planet Money book a best seller, and along the way, we uncover all the outlandish strategies that people have tried to hack their way onto the New York Times Best Seller List. There will be mass hallucinations, legal exorcisms, shady book launderers, and scarlet daggers. And we learn the hard way how trying to engineer your way onto the list, just might be the thing that keeps you from getting there.

Related:

- “Night People's Hoax On Day People Makes Hit With Book Folks”
- New York Times: “Jacqueline Susann Dead at 53; Novelist Wrote 'Valley of Dolls'”
- New York Times: “Blatty Sue Times On Best-Seller List”
- New York Times: “Court Bars A Suit Over Books List”
- Bloomberg Businessweek: “Did Dirty Tricks Create A Best Seller?”
- Episode 1: Inside a BOOK auction
- Episode 2: Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain
- Episode 3: BOOKstore Economics
- Series: Planet Money makes a book
- Laura McGrath’s new book: