Back when I was getting started, I had the privilege of talking to a number of long-established SF/F writers and writer/editors – Ben Bova, Gordon R. Dickson, L. Sprague de Camp, et al. One of the things I noticed sort of vaguely at the time, but really didn’t think about all that much, was the emphasis all of them placed on managing the backlist.
Part of the reason I didn’t think about it much was because at that point I didn’t have a backlist; I had one novel just barely in print, another in production, and a third under submission. I didn’t think any of that advice could possibly apply to me.
Fast forward thirty years, and I am now the hoary Old Pro with a much greater appreciation for what “managing the backlist” means, why it’s important, and why I should have been thinking about it a lot more carefully all those years ago. It’s my turn to pass the advice along for the latest generation of writers to ignore for a while. Hopefully a few folks will remember at one or more critical points in their careers.
First, a definition: for the purposes of this post, the backlist is all of a writer’s published work that’s over two years old, whether it’s still in print or not. Two years is kind of an arbitrary cut-off point; I picked it because if you have a hardcover/softcover deal, the book usually gets some sort of sales push on its initial publication in hardcover, then another push when the paperback comes out a year later. By two years in, it’s definitely no longer “frontlist.” If the book is a paperback original, it probably ends up being part of the backlist by one year after publication.
For a career writer, the backlist is important because it’s a potential source of free money, or almost-free money. You, or your agent, have to do some work to track it and to re-sell it, but compared to the amount of work it takes to write and sell a book in the first place, this is minimal. And these days, the backlist is even more important than it used to be, because of all the interesting new avenues for selling that the Internet has opened up, podcasts and e-books being only two of the most obvious.
One of the things this means is that an awareness of the importance of one’s eventual backlist is highly desirable from very early in one’s career. Everything that gets published will eventually be part of the backlist. If all you think about up front is the current part of the deal, figuring you’ll worry about managing the backlist when the title becomes backlist, you’re moderately likely to miss things that affect what you can do with a backlist title until it’s too late to fix them.
Example 1: Years back, a friend of mine wrote a trilogy that was canceled after Book 2. Annoyed, the author took the third book to a small press publisher, so that the current fans of the trilogy could finish it. The small press did a bang-up job, and everyone was happy…then. Ten years later, the author had to turn down a lucrative offer from a major publisher for the whole trilogy, because the small press publisher still had the rights to Book 3 and was perfectly happy selling 10 copies per year, and so wouldn’t revert the rights. If the author had been thinking about long-term possibilities, he could have made sure that the small press contract contained a reversion clause that would have made things simple – after ten years, or upon notification by the author if sales are less than 50 copies per year, or whatever.
Sorcery and Cecelia was originally published in 1988 as an “orphaned” book – the editor who bought the manuscript had left the company and there was no one at the publisher who wanted to push the book. It didn’t do well, and went out of print fairly quickly. Caroline and I got the rights reverted right away, as a matter of principle, even though there seemed to be no likelihood whatever that we could ever re-sell the title (lousy sales of the first edition tend to make other publishers less than eager to acquire a title).
Ten years later, things had changed and we not only sold Sorcery and Cecelia to a new publisher, we also sold two sequels, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician. Ten years after that (i.e., now), we were able to get them all issued as e-books by Open Road media.
The point about all this is that one never really knows what is going to happen in the future. The market is constantly changing; so are the readers. People whose books were once wildly popular are now completely unknown (quick! Who was #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list for the week of June 21, 1953? Annamarie Selinko’s Desiree, #1 for 21 weeks, that’s who. Google is a wonderful thing), and books that died when they first came out become sneak hits months or years or decades later.
A writer who keeps this in mind will aim for long-run flexibility, so as to keep as many options open as possible, for as long as possible. There’s no guarantee that one won’t make mistakes; it is practically certain that one will. If one thinks about the long range possibilities, though, one can at least make conscious decisions: “I would rather have a small but steady stream of e-book sales now than hold off e-publication on the chance that I’ll get a better deal in five years” works, for me, much better than “I want an e-book NOW!” and then, five years later, “Wah! If I’d only known there was a chance of this, I’d never have put out that e-book!” or “I’m holding out for a big deal” and then, five years later “Wah! Nobody’s interested in buying this; I could have had five years’ worth of e-book sales if I’d only done an e-book back then.”
Years ago, there was a column that talked about the bestsellers of many years ago and the science fiction novels of the same times. Many of the science fiction novels were still in print while most of the mainstream books were gone. I remember the columnist lamenting The Sand Pebbles as a book still worth reading but unavailable.
Look at the bookshelves — Asimov’s titles are mostly pre-1960. (Of course, there’s no guarantee that all F&SF will last that long.)
This is great advice – I know too many authors/writers who only think of the now, rather than the future. I’m hoping whatever agent I sign with will help me negotiate those pesky contracts 🙂
By the way, I borrowed Sorcery and Cecilia from a friend back in middle school/high school. Loved it!!! Spent years searching through used bookstores until I found a copy. Was super excited when I found one. And then, I was thrilled when I found out yall were going to publish more of the story. Glad you were smart about your backlist. 🙂
From time to time, on USENET (where you are sorely missed), people suggest that I should turn _The Interior Life_ into an e-book. So I finally asked if it was true what I’d been told, that Kindle (the elephant in the e-room) can’t handle different fonts. Someone said in effect, “Right. Stick to Arial, Times Roman, or Courier.” But apparently one could not use Arial *and* Times Roman *and* Courier, so that’s out.
Any ideas? I haven’t even tried suggesting this to my agent; in theory I still have one; in practice (since I haven’t written anything in a while) we never hear from each other.
Dorothy: What you want to talk to is either an actual e-book publisher to whom you can hand over the headaches, or, if you want to self-publish, an easy-to-use conversion program that you can play around with and test out and/or somebody who actually does this kind of formatting professionally or semi-professionally, who can advise you about formatting for different platforms (because you don’t want it only on Kindle; you want it on the Nook and iPad, too). Also, about 30 seconds of googling on “Kindle fonts” brought up a page that points out that while Kindle has only two default fonts, you can play with size, italics, underlining, spacing, and boldface all you want. It shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with three settings that are clearer than the original print publication. If you’re seriously considering it (and I agree with those who think it’d be a good idea), you should of course talk to your agent (especially if you’re considering going through an actual e-book publisher…and if you’re going to do that, you should bundle up ALL your OOP work and see if they’ll take the whole package).
The Interior Life! The ONE book that I hold up as an exception to my general statement of “look, don’t worry about fonts; people like to pick what they find comfortable”!
(Um, belated fangirling here. I still remember that book, and the absolute “OH HOW COOL! THE FONTS ARE BLEEDING THROUGH!” delight I had at some of the scenes. It was about the one book where I was as impressed by the font-technique as I was pleased by the story.)
Anyway. There are some e-readers (or at least e-reader apps) — I think the Kindle app on the iPad is one of them? — where you do have an option to use the publisher’s font choices. If you had a very LARGE and BOLD “turn publisher’s fonts on, please! or you will miss important plot points!” note, that might suffice.
You might be able to tweedle Font-size slightly.
I would, personally, avoid long stretches of bold, italics, and/or underlining if at all possible, because they fatigue the eye. Well, italics and underlining do, anyway. Not sure about Bold.
Hmmm. Margins can be tweedled, though that would only work with one of the segments that had no bleed-through into another (I think?)… And there’s a way to fake small-caps (use all-caps in a smaller size…), but Small-caps might be a tad fatiguing as well.
You might need to look into places that publish PDF, where you definitely control the fonts — or, if self-publishing… Lightning Source or CreateSpace.
Open Road seems pretty helpful and tech-savvy — if one wanted to approach an epublisher, I assume they’d be decent, and might have some solutions.
(…ahem. a bit more fangirling. I swear I’ll keep it quiet. eeeee!)
Aw, thanks.
I used (three forms of) italics only to indicate characters’ thoughts (or, in a few instances, telepathic communications, which is nearly the same thing). So there are few italics, overall, in the text, and no boldface at all.
The problem, as all here know, is that the typesetter Baen used chose three typefaces that looked way different to him/her, not so much so to the rest of us (including me). I got comments all the way from “Of COURSE there are three different fonts, and their names are….” to “Different fonts? There were different fonts?” and in one case, “Gee, if the different worlds had been printed in different fonts, it would’ve made it easier to keep track of them.” 🙂
Still trying to work up the gumption to email my agent and see what he thinks. Haven’t talked to him in years, because I haven’t finished anything in years. I have about six MSS that all taper off around chapter Three.