Long-range thinking

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.”