Publish & Prosper
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Publish & Prosper
Extend Your Books’ Shelf Life with Backlist Book Marketing
In this episode, Lauren and Matt are ready to inject new life into your backlist book titles. We share ideas for using your backlist to experiment with new formats and distribution channels, turning your older books into lead magnets, and generating passive income from your content long after launch.
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💡 Listen to These Episodes
- Ep #15 | Can You Really Support Your Business With Just 1,000 True Fans?
- Ep #41 | How to Drive Book Sales Without Offering Discounts
- Ep #56 | The Indie Author's Guide to Going Wide With Your Book Distribution
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Sound Bites From This Episode
🎙️ [10:37] “Your backlist is a great resource for you if you want to experiment with either going wide with your book sales or moving your books onto a different ecommerce platform than what you're using right now.”
🎙️ [29:26] “Anything you can do, anything that doesn't affect the integrity of your content, your book to drive more sales of more of your backlist titles or titles in general then you should try it for sure.”
🎙️ [34:09] “Especially for some of these low lift versions of backlist book marketing where it's costing you little to nothing to do them. Ten new emails from something that cost you two hours of your time and zero dollars is a win.”
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Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to publish and prosper today. We are gonna be talking about something that…I am just gonna right up front make the pun that I'm gonna otherwise try to make a million times during the episode. Which is despite all evidence to the contrary, books actually do have a shelf life.
Matt: Well. Yes, more importantly they have a sales life.
Lauren: And that’s Yeah, but that's not as fun of a pun.
Matt: That's true. You're right. Okay. Let's go back to that.
Lauren: Thank you.
Matt: You can edit out what I just said.
Lauren: No, I appreciate it you actually…
Matt: They do, They do have a shelf life. That's a good pun. I love it.
Lauren: Thank you.
Matt: Yup.
Lauren: But yeah, books, despite the fact that technically they don't expire, unless they are dated material. They do generally have a known sales cycle.
Matt: A retail shelf life.
Lauren: A retail shelf life.
Matt: How about that?
Lauren: Perfect. But that doesn't mean that you have to just ignore all of the books that you've published in the past, once they've kind of run the gamut of being a new release.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So today we're going to talk about your backlist and backlist book marketing and how to make the most of the titles on your backlist.
Matt: Yeah. And for some context here, or just to further sort of, I guess put a spotlight on why this is important. It's not just self-published titles, by the way, that have a retail shelf life.
Lauren: Oh, for sure.
Matt: Obviously, right? People always make the distinctions between traditional and self-published books, no matter what the topic is. Whether you're talking about, you know, how you publish, the print quality, like, everybody wants to distinguish between the two. This is one of those things where I don't, I don't really care who your publisher is, there's not much difference in the retail shelf life, depending on the marketing efforts that are put behind it. The average retail sales life, shelf life of a traditionally published book is three to six months. Right?
That's, you can find that as verifiable data. Now that's an average and of course things, you know, affect that. But it's also pretty much the same for self-published books, at least in our data. And so, you know, we publish hundreds of thousands of books per year and we see those sales trends. And then we also have access to data from some other imprints and things. So you know, across the board, the average sales life or sales cycle or shelf life, however you want to refer to it, is about three to six months. And that's probably with average marketing. And for traditionally published books, by the way, all the numbers I see say about 80% of their sales come within that first year.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And so after that first year, they're definitely falling off, right? So -
Lauren: And - sorry, you go.
Matt: No, go ahead.
Lauren: Obviously, that is not always the case.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: We see, we see outliers, and sometimes it's the books that are the most popular that we see that – It Ends With Us came out like a decade before it, it was like a really, really, like New York Times bestselling title that had a movie and stuff like that. The ACOTAR series, Sarah J. Maas had like eight or nine books out already before she started… And like, her books did well when they were first released, but like, the insane fame that they're having right now came out well past the point that these books…
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So we're not saying that there aren't outliers, that’s this doesn’t –
Matt: No no no.
Lauren: But we're talking about standard –
Matt: But you're also talking about two different things.
Lauren: Well yes, that too.
Matt: I want to make sure people understand. We're talking about the sales life or sales cycle from launch.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Right? So what you're describing is the phenomenon that's happening right now as more and more people all over the world are discovering romance, romantasy, fantasy, and some of these other things. And so what's happening there, that's completely different.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: These are titles where authors are experiencing a new sales cycle based on certain things, whether it's virality that happened on BookTok or other things. So that's completely different. What we're talking about is there is a shelf life, a retail shelf life or sales life for a book at launch. And it's on average, less or more, three to six months.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah. I don't care how it was published.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: So at that point, most people just consider it relegated to the backlist. And so what we're going to be discussing is how to, to market your backlist and do a better job of keeping those books alive, even if they're kind of on the back burner, while you have something new simmering on the front burner, right?
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Okay, perfect.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: All the stuff that's going on right now with some of these authors like you mentioned and these ones that are experiencing like a resurgence of their old stuff based on things that are happening right now, and new things maybe they wrote which made people go and look back at old things, or even It Ends With Us and stuff like that. I mean, there are so many other factors at play there that were out of control of the author or the publisher themselves even, right? You cannot account for virality and you cannot make that happen? That's why it's called virality.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Or going viral. Like you can't, there's nothing you can do. So you can't even really talk about that or factor that into this. But we're talking about the first twelve months of a book, what happens. And then after that, it's typically relegated to the backlist where you want to keep making money from it. So how do you do that?
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Completely agree with that. And that's why I think it's just so important to clarify that right up at the top.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: We're talking about things like, like we've made the point repeatedly about how important like, your pre-launch marketing is, and making sure that you're capitalizing on that window of time and that opportunity, because if you wait until your book is already published, you've already kind of missed the ball.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Dropped the ball?
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Missed the boat. Who knows?
Matt: Those are both right.
Lauren: Who knows.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. You can drop the ball and miss the boat at the same time.
Lauren: We got a comment on our – I don't remember which episode it was, but on the, YouTube video for the episode where we debated my use of the phrase exactly what it says on the tin. Somebody commented on it and said that that is a Britishism.
Matt: Ah.
Lauren: So, that might be 0
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Which I did pick up a lot of Britishisms as a kid from reading like, Harry Potter and other UK author fantasy series as a kid –
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: – or not fantasy series. So that's –
Matt: That would make sense
Lauren: That would make sense. But shout out to whoever left that comment on YouTube because I felt so justified immediately. But yeah. Yeah, so, you know, talking about what you can do now once your book is past its prime, perhaps?
Matt: Well, I mean, that's…
Lauren: Not past its prime. Actually, what we're doing, what we're talking about here is how to prolong your book's prime. And just to just to clarify, when we're talking about your backlist, books on your backlist can either be just like, anything that is not your most recent release. So if you are somebody who's putting out books at a fairly rapid and consistent rate, then anything outside of your last three months' window of release is probably going to be your backlist.
But even if you do have titles, like you have a list of titles and your most recent book came out two years ago, I'm still going to argue that that most recent two years ago release is not a new release anymore. So your entire list at that point is your backlist.
Matt: Yeah, for sure.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And as a side note, the person that left that comment was Aleksei Vashchenko, and goes by compelling people on YouTube.
Lauren: Thanks, Aleksei.
Matt: Thanks, Aleksei, for clarifying where that phrase came from so that Lauren sounds a little less crazy today.
Lauren: I appreciate it. It's going to go downhill from here, so.
Matt: I'm pretty sure that's the phrase that was uttered when you graduated college.
Lauren: Oh, I'd say probably high school.
Matt: Okay. Yes, I would agree with, with what you said.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: No notes, 10, 10 out of 10. There you go.
Lauren: Yeah, because we've talked about the sales cycle and the shelf life. We've talked about in other episodes, the idea of staggering your format release –
Matt: That’s right.
Lauren: – and staggering your book release in order to prolong that cycle.
Matt: That's right.
Lauren: But eventually you are going to reach a point where you've exhausted all of that.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You have released every possible format of this book. You have marketed it to everybody in your known audience that is going to be a possible buyer and reader for this book. You've done the, the earned media outlet –
Matt: That’s right.
Lauren: – you've done…so now what?
Matt: Well now it's time to focus on a new book, right?
Lauren: Well, hopefully.
Matt: So technically you don't want to be running campaigns and all of that work for two years after the release, unless you don't plan on writing another book for a while. Then fine, you know, spend that time and money continuing to promote that, that release and get as much juice out of it as you can. But I think most of the time after a year, year and a half of really going at it hard, yeah, put that thing on the back list, put some of these strategies in play we're gonna tell you about and move on to the next book.
Lauren: Yep, for sure. And this is a great way, the strategies we're gonna talk about in here, are a great way to implement them and have your backlist be making, hopefully making, passive revenue for you while you're working on that new project.
Matt: Yeah, we like making money when we sleep.
Lauren: Yeah, I mean that's the dream, right?
Matt: Yeah, well, I mean, that's what a backlist does, right?
Lauren: Yeah, if you play it, right.
Matt: It should be.
Lauren: All right, so first thing I wanted to talk about was actually coming off the back of the episode that we did recently on going wide.
Matt: The first thing I'd like to talk about is what your bracelets say today.
Lauren: Oh, okay, we can do that. My bracelets say Cross the Bridge.
Matt: Not gonna ask.
Lauren: It's okay, I'm not gonna elaborate.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Hi Barbie.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: An oldie but a goodie.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: And Nice!
Matt: All right.
Lauren: I was trying to aim for colors.
Matt: I see that.
Lauren: That's what I've been doing as I've been choosing the - like, not choosing them by words.
Matt:You're already abandoning the random sort of –
Lauren: I’m not –
Matt: Yes you are.
Lauren: – I'm not good at not matching.
Matt: Now I notice too, one of those, if not all of them match your shirt pretty well.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: There's no more randomness happening, is there?
Lauren: I can't clash that badly. It would drive me crazy. If I was wearing a pink and blue and yellow and purple shirt and like, a red and green bracelet. It would just drive me crazy.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Okay.
Matt: All right, that's fair.
Lauren: I'm doing my best.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: All right.
[10:26]
Matt: You wanna go back to using your backlist to go wide?
Lauren: Yeah, let's talk about that.
Matt: All right.
Lauren: And we did talk about that a little bit when we talked about experimenting with going wide and stuff like that, your backlist is a great resource for you if you want to experiment with either going wide with your book sales or moving your books onto a different ecommerce platform than what you're using right now.
Matt: Yeah, well, they're great for experimenting with a lot of things.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Those things as well. If you're not selling direct, it's a great way to experiment with selling direct. It's also a great way to try out new forms. Like, if you've not tried audiobooks yet, take one of your backlist titles, run it through an inexpensive AI audio generation tool and just see what happens, so. These are great titles to experiment with for lots of different things. If you've never experimented with foreign rights sales or things like that, or translations, and getting into foreign markets, you know, again, backlist titles are great for those things because there's less of a chance that you're going to damage the initial sales cycle when you're getting full retail price for your books, and or a lot of hopefully public attention on those titles.
Lauren: Yeah, for sure. You can also experiment with different formats, not just an audiobook, but if you want to try to do something cool and fun for your fans with that.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So if you want to try doing a collector's edition of a title, you probably have more success doing a collector's edition of a beloved title that your fans already know they love than you will with a brand new book that they haven't read yet.
Matt: Yeah, it also makes it cheaper to do a really cool special edition from a title you've already got the files for. There's a lot less formatting that has to happen. And really all you're talking about is a new cover generated.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Potentially.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And there are, I mean, there are different ways that you can approach that if you want to. You know, on the one hand, maybe you have a series – and again, this is as often is with us relevant to both fiction and nonfiction.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: This isn't focused in one direction or another.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: On one genre more than the other. But let's say you have a collection of titles, nonfiction titles that are all related to each other, or you have a series, three or four books in a fantasy series or romance or mystery or something. And maybe it didn't perform as well as you hoped it would the first time around. Maybe that's the group of books that you use to experiment with a new format release or a new sales distribution option or something.
Or alternatively, you take your old reliable bestseller and say, this is the one that I'm gonna try releasing a collector's edition or releasing an audiobook and putting out a new version of this into the market.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You've got options with how you do that. You know your own backlist and your own audience better than we do, but there are a lot of ways that you can use your backlist to experiment with broadening your horizons, your sales formats, your book formats, all that.
Matt: Yeah, you have a point here in the outline that I think should go with what you just said. It's a really good point, which is the reason why we say experiment with your backlist also is that if this experimentation comes easier on the heels of a title where you may already have some fans that enjoyed the book and might be more willing to spend a little money to get a new copy of it that is a collector's edition, or special edition, or a different format, versus experimenting with a new title you're putting out there that maybe people know nothing about and they'd be less inclined to gamble with their money on a nice fancy special edition of a book from an author that maybe they haven't read yet or they don't know anything about the book.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: So I thought that that's a good point.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we've made that point repeatedly that we specifically are the target audience of people that will buy reprints of books that we love.
Matt: I bought, speaking of which this weekend, I went to Quail Ridge and bought copies of Stephen King's The Shining and Carrie. Obviously I have copies of those., but –
Lauren: Oh I don't doubt – I don't doubt that you have more than one. But are they like really cool additions?
Matt: I mean, yeah, they're just alternate additions.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: You know, they're not like super crazy, you know, foil and gold and all kinds of. But the covers were cool and they were different. And actually, quite frankly, I can't, can't find my version, my other version of The Shining. But anyways, the point is, yeah, I mean, we are the target market.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Like, I didn't go in there expecting to buy copies of books already owned or things like that, but there they were and they looked really cool. And they're some of my favorites. So. I walked out with them.
Lauren: There's something to be said for a really cool looking book.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Just saying.
[14:53]
Lauren: What else can you do with your backlist books though, not just experimenting with new formats and stuff like that?
Matt: It's a great way to experiment with different types of marketing. You know, we talk about this all the time and we get it. A lot of authors, if not most authors, you know, one of their least favorite things to do is the business sales and marketing side of their books.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: And marketing can sometimes be more monotonous and boring than sales, believe it or not. Marketing these days, for most people, has become so algorithmic and programmatic that there's just no real fun left in it, you know?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: It's all like, oh, I gotta go buy a bunch of Amazon ads today, or Facebook ads, or whatever, and no real creative energy seems to be going into marketing these days, which is a shame. But nonetheless, it's a great way to start experimenting with some cool marketing types of activities to help drive more sales, and sort of reinvigorate those backlist titles. Doing things like, hopefully you're already working on building an email list. If not, this is a great opportunity to kickstart that. I think nothing motivates people more than a free book from an author that they either like or in a genre that they like. And if that just means they have to give you their email address, nine times out of ten, they're going to go ahead and do it.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Matt: So if you have one of those backlist titles – and now I know some people are like, I'm not going to get my book away for free, but giving a free book away for the opportunity to potentially secure a reader who will become a buyer for the rest of your books, to me, is a no brainer. Now, yes, it's a gamble, of course. It's a 50-50 shot they're going to like your book and or want to purchase any other books. But if the book is just sitting there anyways, why not? Especially if you're giving away a free ebook to get their email address. I mean, at that point, are you really coming out of pocket for anything?
Lauren: Yeah, definitely when we're talking about giving away free versions of your books, we're talking about ebook.
Matt: Most of the time, yeah.
Lauren: We're not talking –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: There's, in this specific example.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: When we're talking about using your backlist as enticement to get people to sign up for your mailing list, or maybe as enticement for a pre-order campaign.
Matt: That's right.
Lauren: You know, you want to say to people, hey… I hate to keep using Onyx Storm as an example, but it is still timely and relevant. I haven't read any of the books in the Fourth Wing series. So if somebody wanted to try to convince me, you should buy this new book that just came out. It's the third book in this series. If you buy it today, we'll send you an ebook of the first book in the series for free.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent.
Lauren: That could work.
Matt: So again, most people are pretty well motivated by a free book. At least your audience will be. I mean, the average person out there maybe not, but we're talking about your targeted audience.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: So yeah, I think the offer of a free ebook, maybe the first in a series, is pretty motivating for most people. So getting that email address is crucial. And that's why we say selling direct is a pivotal game changer for your business. But then when you start building that email list, now you have that email address. And so you send them a free copy of the first of let's say a trilogy, you know, give it a little bit of time, a few weeks, and then hit them with an email. Hey, hope you enjoyed that free ebook of whatever, whatever, you know? If you'd like to get the other two books, there's a link right there.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: You can get them at a discounted rate of 10% off since you enjoyed the first one so much, or since you gave me your email address or whatever. So again, this is how we're saying you can generate more revenue from your back list while building your email list at the same time, while also reducing your dependency on third party retail platforms.
Lauren: Yup. All of these things go hand in hand with each other. These are all opportunities where, like Matt’s saying, get creative with your marketing, which also for the record helps you stand out in a sea of authors that are…
Matt: Yeah dude.
Lauren: It is, because I agree, everything is so just rote these days. And so like, it's just the same thing over and over and over again. And when somebody does something a little bit audacious or even just a little bit personalized or a little bit fun, that automatically makes me go like, oh, oh cool. Cool, this person's trying something. That's cool.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I like that.
Matt: It's the beauty of… it's the beauty and the beast of social media, right? So, you know the top 1% that are hitting that virality, that they're you know, part of the BookTok craze or – yes, of course they're generating tons and tons of book sales now. They probably went from nothing to like, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, whatever, that's great. But that is like, the top 1%
Lauren: Right.
Matt: And so the beast side of social media is that that's what you're seeing every day. And so for most other people it's, it's almost a demotivator. And what you don't always see is that those people probably spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on ads and other things just to get their books in front of certain influencers or things like that. And so if you're not willing to pump that money into the front for that short term return, that's okay. Don't let what you're seeing on social media dictate some bad business decisions. If this is something you want to do long term, take the slower, more patient approach.
Do some of these things we're telling you with your backlist. These are inexpensive to no cost ways to continue generating passive streams of revenue off your backlist titles while growing a new audience base. Yeah, it's great to build an audience base overnight off some viral BookTok video or something else. That's typically not a long-term business plan. And those typically are a flash in the pan that fizzle out after a while. But if you do these things and slowly build your reader base – an owned reader base, they're in your email list – nobody can wake up one morning and decide that they're gonna kick you off their platform and you lose everything. Those are all your email addresses of people who gave those email addresses to you or they bought something. So look at the larger picture. Yeah, it's great to see these people achieving viral success. We love to see any author be successful, but we also love the more realistic and I would say long-term approach to building an author business. And these are some of those things.
Lauren: Absolutely. Absolutely, that's hopefully your goal and hopefully this is how you do it.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And again relevant for fiction and nonfiction.
[21:04]
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Matt: Of course.
Lauren: There are great opportunities, if you're nonfiction, with something like this. Let's say you published a book on general social media marketing, you published a book a couple years ago that is just like a broad overview of social media marketing best practices, and now you have a book coming out in the next six months that is a deep dive into Instagram marketing.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Pull out just the section on Instagram from your first book, offer that as an excerpt, as a free incentive to people, say hey, I've got this new book coming out. If you preorder it today, I'll send you this excerpt right now. That'll be, you know, three to five chapters. It's still valuable information. Or sign up for my newsletter so you can learn more about this –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And, and I'll send you an excerpt of this book. There are ways to use your content. And to that point as well, like it's not, we're not exclusively saying you have to sell the whole or give away the whole book. You can pull excerpts from it and just do that.
Matt: Yeah, it's true. And if you've not started on some of these other things like building your own email list or having your own direct sales site, there are really cool platforms and tools out there. We recommend BookFunnel.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: We like them. They have a really great platform for doing exactly this type of activity and helping you build an email list through the process. So that's great. But there are others out there too, if for some reason you don't wanna use BookFunnel, but we recommend them. And this is exactly part of what they do and what they facilitate for authors.
Lauren: Yeah, yeah, for sure. You can also consider, if you're still reluctant to give a book away for free I understand, you put a lot of hard work and time and money and effort into that book. I get it. You can also consider just, bundling them and discounting them –
Matt: That’s a great idea too.
Lauren: – a little bit.
Matt: Yup.
Lauren: And then you're still making some money off of it. Buy my books right now at full list price for $20 each if you buy them individually, or I'm going to bundle them together and they wind up being $17 each instead.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, again, look at this as a way to acquire new readers, or retain existing readers for longer. So yes, the goal is to make money, but it's also to gain more buyers, more readers for long-term success.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Right? So yeah, bundling is really cool. I would argue you could discount even a little deeper.
Lauren: Sure.
Matt: Because again, the goal here is to get them to buy, but to buy in such a way where they get the content and actually read it. And so there's a sweet spot there, I think, with pricing to a degree with bundling, right? If you give it away too cheap as a bundle, there's a chance that it might not get read, or fully read, right? Because if I buy a bundle, let's say it's two books, four books, it doesn't matter. But if I get it like, a rock bottom price, I don't feel as bad if it sits on my shelf –
Lauren: Sure.
Matt: – for longer than normal or my TBR pile if it hits the bottom versus the top. But you know, if I paid a medium amount of money for it, it's going to go up a little bit higher on my to be read pile. So when you're bundling, pay attention to how you're pricing your bundles, because pricing will often affect, subconsciously, how quickly those titles get read, which means it affects how quickly they might come back to you for more, so. But bundling is great.
Lauren: Absolutely, and it also, it does sometimes work, psychologically, just the idea that they're bundled together influences people every now and then.
Matt: Sure, yeah.
Lauren: I used to see that all the time when I worked at the bookstore and they would have the box sets of books that were the same price. It was not a different price to buy all three copies of The Hunger Games books bound together in one box set versus buying the three individual paperbacks together.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: They were the exact same price.
Matt: Yep. Which you know, that's a rabbit hole. I'm not going to go down there.
Lauren: Yeah, no, we've done that.
Matt: I will say –
Lauren: We've done that rabbit hole too.
Matt: I will say I walked into a Barnes & Noble the other night over the weekend and they had a whole table towards the back of all box sets that were on clearance because nobody wanted them, so.
Lauren: Oh yeah. I used to dust that display once a month when I worked at the bookstore because that's how much nobody ever touched it.
Matt: Be cautious when going into a box set project.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Because it could cost you some valuable time and money to have the sleeve designed and some of the other things you want to do. And you know, quite frankly, we just don't see a huge return on that. All of us, even as collectors, would be like, yeah, I'd love to have that box set. But honestly, I take the cardboard sleeve off and toss it.
Lauren: Oh, 100% of the time. Straight into the garbage.
Matt: It just has no place on my bookshelf or anywhere else.
Lauren: Nope. No.
Matt: Bundles are great. Trilogies, series, whatever, they're all great. Bundles, I think, are the best way to go. Box sets are, it's a clever idea, and it's been done for years and years and years. But invariably, you always find them on clearance tables at the bookstores.
Lauren: And yeah, I want to be clear that we're talking about those as distinct things.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Just to make sure, like –
Matt: Yep.
Lauren: We're talking, when we're talking about bundling, we just mean like –
Matt: Yep.
Lauren: You can order on my website all three books together as one checkout purchase, instead of –
Matt: For a discounted price.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: That's why I wanted to make that distinction between a box and a bundle. A box set being, you know, has a sleeve and there’s all this other stuff that goes along with it, typically for an increased price.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Yep, for sure.
[26:23]
Lauren: I totally just… my train of thought just went right out the window.
Matt: Not mine. I was just taking a big sigh because I ate a big salad for lunch and I don't know.
Lauren: It was a good salad. Well, I had the bowl –
Matt: For some reason it’s making me sleepy.
Lauren: Not a salad, but.
Matt: Yeah, I don’t know.
Lauren: It was good.
Matt: So we're talking about marketing now, and how your backlist titles are often great experimental assets to try different marketing ideas and things. One of the things I would say, I don't think this is specific to backlist, because remember if you're, if you're self-published, if you're an indie published author, you can update your interior files whenever you want. And then every book sold after that or purchased will have the new interior file.
So if you don't include references to your other books in the front or back of your new releases, that's fine. For nonfiction, that's probably a big mistake. For fiction, you know, you should still do it, but whatever. Some people do, some people don't. But what I would do is if you didn't, for whatever reason, include references to your other books, or links to them, or things like that, once they hit your backlist, I would go in and update those interior files to include those references and links.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: You never know how people are going to get a hold of your books, especially once they hit your backlist and you are doing a bunch of experimentation. So you always want to make sure that there's some way for them to find you and your other books, just in case it was forwarded to them by a friend. If it's an ebook or, you know, if it's a printed copy, if I read it and then I gave it to you, there should be something in the front or back of that book that shows you how to get in touch with the author to either buy more books or get on their mailing list or whatever.
Lauren: Yes, absolutely. I feel like that's something that should be included in the front or back matter. Generally, I would argue back matter, but front matter as well.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: In any print copy of any book.
Matt: I would say back matter too. It's always annoying when I see it in the front, but whatever.
Lauren: Yeah, I'm always like, come on, let me get to the good stuff.
Matt: Personal preference, but yeah.
Lauren: Yeah. But yes, I think that is a missed opportunity to anybody that doesn't include that in the print books. But it's really powerful in ebooks. And I know that that's a touchy subject, but it is something that can be very effective in ebooks. I cannot overemphasize how often I get sucked in by the first chapter of another book by that author being included at the end of an ebook that I'm reading.
Matt: It works for –
Lauren: Whether it's the next book in the series or…
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: A separate series or like something, it works way more often than it doesn't when I'm reading books.
Matt: It's about 50-50 for me. I find that when I get to the end of a book, either I'm gonna read more of their books or I'm not. It's… 50% of the time I might read that next page which is the first paragraph or a couple of pages, which is the chapter, you know, from their next book. But again, more often than not, including that content, I'd say maybe 40 to 50% of the time influences whether or not I get their next book or another book from them. I've usually already made up my mind, but nonetheless, it's not a bad idea, of course.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: I think it's a good idea. Anything you can do, anything, that doesn't affect the integrity of your content, your book to drive more sales of more of your backlist titles or titles in general then you should try it for sure.
Lauren: Absolutely. And it is something that you can, especially if you're doing it with your ebooks and not as much with your print books, it is something that you can try and then pull back on if you decide that it's not working out for you. I believe the statistic is that more than 10% of a content change is considered enough of an update that you need to reissue your ebook. So like if you're like…you need a new ISBN for something, if you, if you've changed more than 10% of the… Unless your book is like 100 pages long and you're adding a ten page chapter.
Matt: I was going to see if you got that.
Lauren: Math.
Matt: Yep. There you go.
Lauren: You're in the clear to add a few pages of a chapter to the end of your ebook. Test it out for a little while. See if it boosts your sales. See if it doesn't. Maybe try switching it out for a different one. Maybe you've got a new book coming out, that you've had for a while in your other ebooks: keep an eye out for this new book coming out in March of 2025 and then in March of 2025, you go in and you replace that copy in the back of the book with the first chapter of the new book.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You can change those things around without making like, a large impacting change to your actual ebook. And one of the great things about self-publishing is that you can make those changes immediately.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You don't have to worry about trying to do it through a traditional publisher where those have to get reissued and added into the production timeline. And it might take six months or maybe longer for that change to be made. You can do this immediately.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah.
Lauren: I also am always – again, huge sucker for this, and this is probably exclusive to fiction authors so, sorry, nonfiction authors. But oh, man, does a cameo work on me like all the time in a book. I don't – I am very good, not to toot my own horn, but I am very good at recognizing when that's happening. Like more often than not, if I'm reading a book and I'm like, hmm. This character is just a little bit too interesting to be a background character. Like this is not a throwaway bit character. He's got just a little bit too much pizzazz or she's just a little bit too like, bubbly on page. There's gotta be something. And I go and look up other books by that author. Nine times out of ten that character either has like, they're the next book in the series or there's already another, like from another series. And if it's done well…if it's done well, it's not gonna hurt your readers in any way. And it's only gonna potentially hook more people into reading your other content. So never underestimate the power of a cameo.
Matt: We'll take your word for that one.
Lauren: I’m sure you will. Look, it gets me. I'm just saying.
[32:16]
Matt: This next one we talked about briefly at the top of this episode, but there are ways to repackage and republish your backlist titles. So, you know, maybe you only did them in ebook the first time around. Time to introduce them as a new format and maybe do a special cover or things like that. Or, you know, maybe include a cameo in the interior file, update it with a cameo from a book you have coming out soon or things like that. But there's a lot of cool stuff happening right now in the world of print where you could do some really cool things with the cover. Also, equally, a lot of cool things happening on the ecommerce front, where this is a great time to experiment with direct sales if you haven't already, or do a Kickstarter or something like that. Or try something even more creative, take a trilogy, combine them into one and add some extra things around it and call it something new. I think when you have an established fan base, regardless of the size, whether you've got 10 loyal readers or 10,000 loyal readers, you'll never know till you try these things. And we find that more often than not, they're fairly successful for people. And again, any income you generate off your back list without having to put much money up front, invest it into it, that's a win.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: You know? Even if you only gained a net new ten email addresses off one of these marketing, that's ten people that may be willing to buy books from you in the future. I would not discount that. Don't let these high social media follower accounts of other people discourage you. I mean, 5,000 followers with 1,000 of them heavily engaged in purchasing them. Versus 50,000 followers and only 500 people purchasing? Again, do the sales math there. I would take the 5,000 with the more engaged, financially-friendly followers than the higher follow account with less conversion and engagement. Run one of these experimental campaigns, put out a new cover, put out a new version, again netting ten, fifteen, twenty new email addresses, that's a win.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Especially for some of these low lift versions of backlist book marketing where it's costing you little to nothing to do them. Ten new emails from something that cost you two hours of your time and zero dollars is a win.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Absolutely. A lot of these ideas, you can put them together and kind of do them at the same time or use them to support each other. So you want to experiment with selling direct. You want to experiment with going wide with your book sales. You want to use your backlist to do that experimentation. So you're going to repackage a couple of titles from your backlist as new covers, with a new forward. Or you might go a little further in and do a whole new edition.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Ann Handley released her book, Everybody Writes, a few years ago. And then based on feedback… Actually I don't remember what conference we were at, but she actually like, very openly talked about re-releasing it, at one of the conferences. It might have been Inbound. I don't know, but she like, flat out said, based on some reviews that I got from readers, I like, took a good hard look at the book and was like, you're right, there are some things about this that I could change. And she wound up doing a revised edition and released a second edition of it a few years later. You know what, I own both. Like. Good for her. It worked.
Matt: I think I brought you a copy of the second.
Lauren: Yes, you did.
Matt: She's talked about several different conferences and different interviews and things like that. But yeah, the concept is still, I agree. Absolutely.
Lauren: Yeah. And so, you know, it can be different levels of this. You can, you can release a new edition of your book. You could do something as simple as: had a new cover designed, and now we're selling print copies of it from my own website. Go test this out. Something to help you boost your sales while you’re hard at work on the next one. I don't know.
[36:00]
Matt: The next little one we're going to talk about, I think I touched on very briefly, but consider creating anthologies –
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: – from your work if you have series or trilogies or things like that. So, this is similar to the whole repackage, republish idea, but republishing them as an anthology or an omnibus edition, I think for some audiences makes a lot of sense.
Lauren: Sure.
Matt: For some, maybe not, still worth maybe an experiment, as long as it doesn't really cost you any money upfront. There are some audiences that love these types of releases, obviously mostly in the fiction realm, but, you know. Packaging a series together just makes it fun, easier, more convenient. Some people just wanna read the whole thing straight through. This is also really obviously popular in the world of graphic novels and comic books and things where, you know, they might take thirty single issues of comic books and put them into one little anthology as a graphic novel. That's typically how I would always read comic books, by the way, I'd never really buy the single –
Lauren: Oh, yeah.
Matt: – I would always wait and they'd get, you know. Especially it was real popular with like, Batman in the New 52 series, what they would do is they, you know, after about twenty of them they put them all into one little anthology, and I'd go buy that.
Lauren: I don't have the patience for those weekly releases.
Matt: Now, and I – yeah, it's yeah. So I think those are a lot of fun and if you're artistically inclined or you have a friend or a colleague who is that could do a really cool new cover for you, or maybe you could trade out or you know pay a designer to do it if you have the money. But that's always really cool. For nonfiction you could do the same thing, if you're somebody who writes incremental content around various different topics, combining them all into one is not a bad – you have an idea here that just, you know, as a title like, the complete guide to.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And could be something like, marketing for authors, where previously you released a bunch of short books or little books, whatever you want to call them, on various different parts of marketing as an author, putting them all together as a complete guide to, or things like that, I think is really, those are cool ideas.
Lauren: Yeah, I think you can have a lot of fun with that. And it's, again, just like this idea of repurposing your own content while you're working on creating new content as well. But I think there's also a really good opportunity in this situation to work with other authors.
Matt: Right. Yeah.
Lauren: And in both fiction and nonfiction. Something that the publishing company that I used to work at would do, they do it around the holidays every year, actually. They always had at least one book come out around the holidays that was a novella collection. And it would always be four authors, different four authors. But it was always the same kind of formula of two bigger name authors and then two new authors –
Matt: Right.
Lauren: – that we were promoting new books of theirs coming out in the next year.
Matt: Stephen King does that a lot too.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So it's a great opportunity that if you're a really big fan of this author and you're going to buy everything that she writes, you're definitely going to go out and get her annual Christmas novella.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: And then hopefully one of the other three authors included in that is going to strike your fancy and get you interested. Absolutely.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I've seen it work. So there's great different marketing opportunities and content creation opportunities in that.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: But that's also something that you can do with nonfiction as well. And that's something, maybe, you know, the example that I gave earlier of, you’re publishing a book on Instagram marketing. Maybe you and five of your friends that are all Instagram experts each contribute two chapters from your existing books.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: To a book that you're gonna publish together. Give people a little primer on Instagram marketing from six experts in the industry. And then if people want to dive deeper into any of those topics –
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: They can come buy your book dedicated exclusively to just your content on it.
Matt: Yeah, I think those are all great ideas.
Lauren: Yeah.
[39:54]
Matt: I want to touch back real quick, before we close. There're also, you know, like we talked about platforms and tools that can help you do some of the stuff. The easiest ones, the most popular ones are, you know, kind of these discounting and promotional platforms. We talked about BookFunnel giving you the opportunity to be able to start building an email list, blast out different promos or sample chapters or even free ebooks to gain new readers. There are other platforms, BookBub, Written Word Media has a bunch of different platforms you can use for marketing and promotions, sending out discounted and or free ebooks and things like that. So there are a lot of tools that you can use and platforms you can find to help you do this, or at least help you get started. And then otherwise, you know, there's several other episodes that we've talked about some of these things and I'm sure you'll link to them in the show notes.
Lauren: Definitely will.
Matt: Perfect.
Lauren: Yeah. And I'll also link to BookBub, BookFunnel, and I think I have an article in here from Written Word Media on how to use BookBub for Authors, so.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You'll find some resources regardless of which direction you want to go in with that.
Matt: Yeah. All of those are low cost platforms. So we like that.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I mean, that's the hope with all of this is that this is this is an opportunity for you to give your older books new life and hopefully boost your revenue, even if it's just passively, or create some opportunities for yourself where you're doing lead generation with these older titles.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That will hopefully help you boost your book sales for your next release or find some new clients and customers for you.
Matt: Or all the above.
Lauren: Or all the above if we're really doing it right.
Matt: That's right. That's the goal.
Lauren: There are so many opportunities here.
Lauren: So yeah, just really, I mean, basically I think really the whole point of all of this is; books have a shelf life. That's the reality of it.
Matt: You just wanted to say that again.
Lauren: I did. But that doesn't mean that you have to let them die once they've hit that expiration date.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: There are plenty of ways to make use of those titles after they've run the course of their sales cycle.
Matt: I agree.
Lauren: Yay.
Matt: Great job.
Lauren: Thanks. Thanks for humoring me on this one.
Matt: Yeah, if you actually enjoyed any of that, please subscribe, hit the like button, give us a review.
Lauren: Yeah, let us know. And if you didn't enjoy it and there's something else you want us to talk about instead, you can let us know about that too.
Matt: Yeah, or you could just listen to a different podcast. Either way.
Lauren: No, I want them to keep listening to our podcast.
Matt: All right.
Lauren: So let us know what you want to hear about. Email us at podcast@lulu.com, check us out on YouTube. Clearly we read our YouTube comments.
Matt: It’s true.
Lauren: So you can leave us notes there. Shout us out on Lulu's social media and we'll be back next week with another episode. Thanks for listening everyone.
Matt: Later.