you can do it, put your back(list) into it

or: your 2022 book isn't dead, you just stopped inviting it to the party

Today’s post is for the eldest and middle book daughters. It’s for the ones that paved the way, were expected to do the work, taught us everything we needed to learn, and are now hanging out in some dusty corner of Amazon just hoping for their day in the sun. Again.

I am, of course, talking about your backlist.

Those books that had their moment (or didn’t, no judgment, we’ve all been failed by a Tuesday¹) and which, somewhere along the way, you quietly decided were finished. You didn’t announce it. There was no funeral. One day you just… stopped posting about them, stopped thinking of them as for sale and started thinking of them as already happened. The window closed. You moved on to the shiny new baby of the family and the older ones went to live on a metaphorical farm upstate where books go when their authors get bored of them.

Here’s the rub, though: readers don’t know that book is old. Truly. Not even a little.

There is no publication date stamped on a post. Nobody scrolling past a gorgeous trope graphic at 11pm thinks "okay but is this… new?" A reader who discovers you today has almost certainly never seen a single one of the 200 posts you made in 2022. They didn't see the launch. They didn't see the sales push. They didn't see you cry in your car about the sell-through. To them, your entire catalogue was published this morning, and honestly? Lucky them. Imagine finding an author you love and learning they already have SEVEN books waiting for you. That reader isn't sad your book is three years old. That reader is thrilled there's a backlog.

Publishing and social media has a frontlist obsession². The whole machine is built to point at the newest thing, the preorder, the cover reveal, the release week. But the average reader does not have a frontlist. The average reader has a TBR pile the size of a small appliance and zero awareness (or care) of your publishing calendar. Your "old" book and your new book are sitting on the exact same shelf in their mind (and physically), which is to say: unread and just as appealing.

And because I wouldn't be me if I didn't hand you the business case, the little bit of proof we all need before we'll trust the advice: your backlist is the only inventory you own that requires (probably) zero new writing, zero new editing, and zero new cover art to sell. Every backlist sale is (almost) pure margin on work you already lived through, already paid for, already survived.You gave your blood sweat and tears, and now you get to enjoy your mimosas in the backyard looking out at your gorgeous garden. The frontlist builds the audience. The backlist pays the mortgage. One of these is glamorous and one of these is quietly keeping the lights on, and you need those lights, friends!

why we abandon the backlist (an honest reckoning)

Boredom, mostly. And maybe a little bit of shame.

You’ve talked about that book SO many times. You’ve written the caption, tweaked the caption, deleted the caption, posted the caption. Promoting it again feels like showing up to a party in an outfit everyone has already seen you wear. Twice. To two different parties.

But you know what I’m about to say. Nobody remembers the outfit. Nobody was taking notes on your outfit. Your most loyal, ride-or-die, comments-on-everything follower saw maybe 10% of your old posts, because that is roughly how much of anyone’s content any of us ever actually see.³And the stranger who found you yesterday? They saw zero. Zip. Nada. Nuthin’. To them, your book isn’t an outfit you’ve worn before. It’s a dress they’re never laid eyes on and they wants to know where you got it.

You might be bored of your book. Your new audience has never even met it. Those are not the same problem, and only one of them is real.

five ways to put the backlist back to work (you BETTER work):

• Market the trope, not the birthday. Stop framing old books by their age. “My 2021 release!” tells a reader exactly one thing, and it’s nothing helpful. Frame them by their hook instead - because hooks, like a good wine, are ageless. “Grumpy small-town vet x sunshine baker who will not stop trespassing on his property” is eternally, gloriously fresh. Tropes don’t expire, and, in fact they have renaissances and resurgences and ebbs and flows in popularity. Lucky you! A forced-proximity snowstorm is just as compelling today as it was the year you wrote it and it’ll be just as compelling three years from now. So make trope-forward content for your backlist titles exactly the way you would for a brand new release, because to the algorithm and to the reader, there is genuinely no difference. The date is in your head and virtually never on the shelf.

• Build the funnel. If you write a series or interconnected standalones, book one is not a product but it is a doorway. Price it low, or free if you’re indie and playing the long game, point ALL of your discovery content at it, and then let sell-through do the heavy lifting you’d otherwise be doing by hand. Roxie Noir does this MASTERFULLY. A reader who finishes book one at $0.99 will buy books two through five at full price without a single additional marketing touch from you. They’re not waiting for your next post. They’re already one-clicking at midnight because they needs to know what happens. That is the most efficient funnel in all of publishing and it is built entirely out of books you have already written and is owned ENTIRELY by you. (This is also, spoiler, where you get that reader onto your email list, because it’s always the email list. Book one hooks them, the newsletter keeps them long term.)

• Use the frontlist as a backlist billboard. Launch weeks are backlist harvest season, and most authors leave the whole crop rotting in the field⁴. New readers arriving for the new book are, at that exact moment, more interested in you than they will be at any other point all year. And they are actively, desperately looking for something to read while they wait for the thing they came for. So tell them. “Loved the sound of [NEW BOOK]? [OLD BOOK] has the same slow-burn yearning, plus 30% more texts.” Cross-promote it in your launch newsletter, your pinned post, your back matter, or your link-in-bio. Every single frontlist eyeball should trip over the backlist on its way out the door, like that pair of shoes that never seems to have a place and you’re always stumbling over them and so you may as well wear them as you run out the door and then you realize they’re actually wildly comfortable. You paid for that traffic in blood and preorder anxiety. Make it work a second shift.

• Find the seasonal on-ramp. Every backlist book has a moment on the calendar when it is suddenly and urgently relevant again. The Christmas novella in November. The summer camp romance in June. The hockey romance in October, when the season comes back and everyone remembers they have feelings about a man in a jersey.⁵ The vacation read the week everyone starts booking flights for spring break. Put these into your content calendar ONCE and then reap them every single year, forever, for free⁶. Seasonal re-promotion is the rare kind of selling that doesn’t read as desperate, but it reads as helpful. “It’s officially cozy season, so here’s the book to match” is a service, not a sales pitch, and readers will thank you for it like you did them a favour.

• Give it a glow-up when the vibes have shifted. Sometimes a backlist book underperforms because its packaging is speaking a dead dialect. Like if Christopher Nolan made “The Odyssey” in ancient Greek and then wondered with the 70MM screenings didn’t sell out.

  

  This is your backlist yelling “LET ME OUT! I PROMISE I’LL BE GOOD!”

  The cover trend moved on and left it behind. The blurb buries the hook under way too much bloat. A recover, a rewritten blurb, even a fresh subtitle can genuinely relaunch a title from scratch. Indies, you can just do this, today, this is your entire superpower and you should use it more. Trad authors, this one’s a conversation for your agent, but the marketing framing is still 100% yours to change whenever you want. You are allowed to reposition a book. You are allowed to decide it was mismarketed the first time and try again. You are EMPOWERED to speak about your works as you see fit. The words inside the book don’t know what the outside looks like, and they will not be offended.⁷

Pro Level Move: add one recurring slot to your content calendar called backlist Friday. (Or Saturday. Or Wednesday. I’m not your calendar’s boss.) One post a week about a not-new book. That’s 52 backlist touches a year for essentially no additional creative effort, because you can rotate the same trope graphics you already made. Canva makes it embarrassingly easy to keep a folder of these on standby. Just because a post didn’t result in gangbuster sales in 2022 does not mean it can’t help now, in front of a completely different room of people who have never seen it. The 2022 version played in front of an audience that doesn’t exist anymore. Give it a fresh jury.

but I don’t have time for ALL of that (you say, you decree, you bemoan)

I know. I know. You’re one person, you already can’t keep up with the frontlist, you have a day job and a family and a book due and need to eat and sleep (allegedly), and now I’m out here telling you to also run a full re-marketing campaign for books you finished emotionally processing years ago and you’re thinking okay Ada that’s very nice and all but whatdoIactuallydo?!

You do the backlist Friday slot. That’s it. That’s the Tweet.

You don’t have to relaunch everything. You don’t have to recover a single cover this week. You pick ONE title, you make ONE trope graphic, you schedule ONE post, and you let compounding do the rest. The seasonal stuff you set up once and forget - genuinely, get in there now, block 4 hours of a Saturday, create a handful of posts, and SCHEDULE THEM NOW. The funnel pricing you change once. This is the least effort-intensive marketing you will ever do, because the hardest part (writing the book) is already behind you. You’re not building anything new. You don’t need to put a whole marketing campaign behind this. You’re just turning the lights back on in a house you already own, maybe opening a window to let some air in.

the reframe

Stop thinking about your catalogue as a timeline with one live book blinking at the end of it. Think of it as a storefront, and every title should be sitting at eye level for somebody who hasn’t walked in yet. The authors who treat their backlist like inventory instead of archaeology are the ones quietly building careers that survive a flop, an algorithm change, or a slow, scary, why-did-nobody-buy-anything-in-March kind of year. Your backlist is the thing that catches you during the hard times, and can be that cherry on top during the good. But only if you leave it on the shelf where people can see it, instead of burying it because you personally got tired of it.

Your homework⁸: pick your most neglected, most unfairly forgotten title. That book that you just KNOW slaps, but it didn’t find its audience or you know better now or you just know that based on what people are loving these days, it would do NUMBERS. Make ONE trope-forward post about it this week. Zero mention of its age. Not one word about what year it came out. Make it ageless. Just the hook, the vibe, the promise, the essence.

Ice Cube would be proud.

xo Ada

1. A Tuesday release, a Tuesday in general, a Tuesday that had the audacity to exist. Tuesdays owe several of us an apology, honestly. SEE YOU NEXT…well…

2. And I mean Obsession like in that new horror movie where it’s not some over-exaggeration but is actually legitimately terrifying

3. Illustrative, not a peer-reviewed statistic, before anyone @s me. The actual number is "way, way less than you think and it hurts my feelings to know the real figure so I don't look it up.

4. THANK YOU to my son’s The Martian obsession for giving me ANY semblance of crop metaphors. You’re a real one, Mark Watney.

5. OR when a certain Season 2 of a certain show that rhymes with Shmeated Shivalry comes out…

6. Ish

7. A note here: if your backlist book was published when your style of writing was much different or you don’t feel it is particularly strong, revisiting or reediting it is also on the table. And if you had very “of the time” references in there - like Vine (RIP) - going in to updated/white label those references is worth the time

8. I know, I know, it’s summer, homework is LAME