The Backlist

A book starts as a dream, an idea, a hope.

If you’re inspired and committed enough, it becomes the draft. If you’re brave enough, it becomes the query and the first rejection. If the stars align and you’re determined enough, it becomes the published.

That book is then your debut, and it’s back to dreams and hopes as it’s released into the world.

Dreams and hopes that may take off.

Dreams and hopes that may never reach the lofty potential you dare them to be.

In that scenario, the debut doesn’t become a worldwide instant bestseller, sparking movie adaptions, and multi-book deals. In realistic reality, it barely makes a blip outside of your forever-thankful-for friends, family, and small social media following.

Initial sales are strong. More people buy it than you expect. Good reviews trickle in. You see others—people you don’t know—post about having bought your book. You may even tick off the childhood dreams of seeing it on a library and bookstore shelf.

Within months, weeks even, those sales, posts, and once-thought-unbelievable goals slow down. They then stop.

Months go by. Then a year.

The book didn’t take off like you thought it would. The expectations borne from seeing every other author around you succeed raised your hopes too high.

That was their journey, you tell yourself. Your time will come.

You move onto new drafts and new dreams, but that debut still lingers in your mind.

Was it everything you thought it would be? Did you really do the best you could?

You wonder if you should rewrite it with your raised skill levels and all you now know about books. Or should you just leave it and let it be a tome of its time and your baby-writer skill level?

Is it as poorly written as you now suddenly convince yourself it is? It must be to not become more than it did.

Suddenly, that debut that once filled you with such excitement and joy is tinged with sadness.

The could-have-been. The should-have-been. The hopes you had when you first put pen to paper, and the dreams you held when it was published, are now a distant, delusional memory.

It didn’t get there straight off the bat like it seems books do for everyone else. It’s not selling steady numbers years later. Sales are months between. Reviews, years.

It’s not a colossal success, but it’s not quite a failure, either. It can’t be when you did what hundreds of others wanted to do, tried to do, started to do, but never achieved.

You released a book.

Now that book has achieved a milestone writers before you have already realized. That book is now your backlist.

It might not have done what you thought it would, and it didn’t suddenly take off on the first anniversary of release or via a random event, such as a social media algorithm actually showing others your book posts.

Now it’s been multiple years and the sales have almost petered out. The occasional new review and the consistent promos you tirelessly post aren’t breathing any new life into awareness of the book, but you still hope it will have its day.

It might be on the tenth anniversary, or it might be with another generation of readers. You might finally enjoy that celebration fifteen years from now or the book might forever be a legacy put into the world that only you and a handful of others truly enjoy.

As a backlist, it is now the book that started your writing journey rather than the star. It’s the to-be-discovered-later debut, not with a rocketing burst or runaway success, but with a slow burn.

It’s also the lessons you learned and the skills you gathered that will give the next book a bigger shine, the one after that the extra oomph, the next that secret sauce, and the one after those the hoped-for recognition and reward.

It’s time to pursue those dreams now, but they won’t exist without that first dream, idea, hope, draft, query, rejection, debut—and the now forever start of your backlist.

— K.M. Allan

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