As a journalist covering the book-publishing industry, when an editor reaches out to me about a story, it’s usually because there’s something dark lurking under the cover. The (now failed) Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger was a messy game of corporate maneuvers with the potential to leave employees and authors in the dust. The New York Times best-seller list is calculated with a secret formula that authors and publishers regularly attempt to cheat.
I usually have anonymous sources falling all over themselves to spill industry secrets, so you can imagine that when I was assigned to investigate the methodology behind Barack Obama’s annual lists of book recommendations, I set out to expose a secret apparatus of industry shenanigans. What I found was much more shocking.
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