The Promise of the Backlist
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Elena Ferrante
11 min read
The article cites 'My Brilliant Friend' as the quintessential example of a runaway mega-bestseller that transforms a press's fortunes. Understanding Ferrante's mysterious pseudonymous identity and the unprecedented global phenomenon of the Neapolitan novels provides crucial context for why this success is so exceptional and difficult to replicate.
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Ruth Lilly
10 min read
The article references Ruth Lilly's donation to Poetry magazine as an 'extreme example' of major donor support. Her $200 million bequest to the Poetry Foundation in 2002 was one of the largest gifts ever to a literary organization, and understanding this case illuminates why such windfalls are transformative yet unreliable as a sustainability strategy.
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Per Petterson
7 min read
The article specifically mentions how Graywolf 'parlayed the unexpected success of Out Stealing Horses into a remarkable expansion.' Petterson's novel becoming an international phenomenon after winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award exemplifies the unpredictable breakout success the article discusses as transformative but unchartable.
Since I process the orders via our website every day or two, I’ll pick up on little runs of orders for a semi-obscure backlist title of ours. Occasionally this adds up to a significant number of direct sales—say 40-50 copies of a title initially published a decade ago, all ordered within a month—but usually the numbers are more modest, yet the pattern is identifiable. Like with the 8 copies of Juan Gelman’s Dark Times Filled with Light that we recently sold over a couple weeks. Or, pulling back a bit, the couple-year-long uptick in orders for two of our three Ingrid Winterbach titles: To Hell with Cronjé (2010), The Book of Happenstance (2011), and The Elusive Moth (2014).
Anytime this happens, I text Tony and Andy from Life on Books, a podcast that has generated, literally, hundreds of sales through our website. Almost always for backlist titles1—like The Brother by Rein Raud & Adam Cullen, or Rock, Paper, Scissors by Naja Marie Aidt & K.E. Semmel, two titles unlikely to be shelved at your local bookstore—and condensed into such a short window of time, making it incredibly easy to credit them with this sudden rush of interest. And for which I’d like to publicly thank them! Their podcast is one of the best book-centric podcasts out there, and the time and effort and passion they’ve put into it is inspiring. Plus, they obviously have good taste!
But neither Life on Books nor our periodic subject- or site-wide flash sales can account for all the various backlist blips that I pick up on. From a perspective of developing future marketing strategies it would be nice to know exactly what is driving an influx of orders for a book that’s been dormant for an extended period of time, but it’s pretty hard to pin down. Especially when you expand your scope to all book sales and not just the ones on our website. (Although to reiterate, given the nature of the bookselling business, at least 90% of our backlist is only available through special orders or online bookshops.) A sudden jump in sales for a particular title across sales channels could be the result of a mid-sized book club, an enthusiastic bookseller, a random TikTok, a mention on a local radio program, a plug by a famous author or celebrity, or, just something in the ether.
Knowledge is half
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