Let us now praise the backlist, the foundation of American book publishing, the source of most of its profits. Humble and often overlooked amid the dazzle of new best sellers, yet steady and sure, it is a seemingly endless treasure vault filled with classics and the classically entertaining, good scholarship and good reads.
Virtually every publishing house has a frontlist and a backlist. The frontlist consists of new books from the publisher in any given year. The backlist is everything else — all the books that the house has in print.
With frontlist books, publishers are often looking to hit a home run. They yearn for buzz, a big splash and huge sales. It’s a risky business, though. For every selling-like-hotcakes book, there are dozens that land on bookstore shelves and just sit there.
The backlist is much less volatile. Indeed, it’s not volatile at all. Books such as “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage), “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff (Norton) and even the 161-year-old “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville (University of Chicago) have long been mainstays on their publisher’s backlist, bringing in a consistent, easy-to-estimate, easy-to-plan-on stream of revenue — and without the costly and time-consuming marketing campaigns that best sellers usually require.
No wonder the backlist accounts for anywhere from 60 to 85 percent of sales for many publishers. And no wonder new publishing houses have such a difficult time getting started: no backlist.
Indeed, Stuart Applebaum, spokesman for Random House, which has a backlist of 23,000 titles, says, “One of the strong attractions for our parent company, Bertelsmann, in deciding to bid to acquire Random House was the fact that it had one of the great backlists of the industry.”
That’s because backlist books are publishing’s version of a renewable resource. “Everyone thinks the frontlist is the sexy part of the business,” says Anne Messitte, publisher for Vintage Anchor, the trade paperback arm of the Knopf Publishing Group, itself a branch of Random House, “but a backlist book is new to anyone who’s never read it before.”
Adds Applebaum, “Every time we enjoy an author for the first time, we’re able to go on-line or go into a bookstore and get the author’s earlier work.”
Never has that been truer than today. In fact, this might be called the golden age of the backlist.
Sure, some book industry observers fear that the increasing dominance of conglomerates intent on making a quick killing through best sellers will undercut backlists. Yet, never have publishers had better means to get the word out about their backlist books and get them into the hands of readers — and at less financial risk.
For one thing, the whole idea of superstores such as Border’s or Barnes & Noble is to provide customers with a vast array of titles to choose from, most of which are from publishers’ backlists and many of which wouldn’t be able to find shelf space in smaller, more traditional bookstores.
Internet Web sites, in particular such on-line bookstores as Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and alibris.com, provide a growing number of book buyers with ready access to millions of titles from the combined frontlists and backlists of hundreds of publishers. And not only for new books, but for used copies as well.
And now with the increasing use and refinement of print-on-demand technology, publishers in the near future won’t have to take even the financial risk of printing 1,000 or so copies of a backlist title only to have them grow dusty in a warehouse somewhere. New titles now are routinely being digitized, making them available for use when a short print-run is needed and even for individual sale to e-book users.
In fact, Messitte says, publishers are going to hang onto their backlist titles much longer — and perhaps forever.
Which isn’t to say publishers will stop trying to win new readers for backlist books with new covers, anniversary editions, tie-ins to newer works by the author and promotions linked to movie or television versions of the works.
Messitte notes that, four years ago, Vintage re-issued “Independent People,” a 1946 novel by the Icelander Halldor Laxness, and sold more than 50,000 copies of it in the first 12 months. It has been, she says, the model for other books in Vintage’s Rediscovery Series: “a backlist book that had fallen off of everybody’s radar.”
In essence, W. Drake McFeely of Norton says, such efforts are aimed at turning a backlist title into something like a frontlist book for a new season.
Typically, with such reissues, McFeely says, “In the first year, we’ll probably see a doubling of sales. Sometimes, it’s four to six times the usual number of sales.”
When it comes to backlist, though, few can top the Baltimore-based Black Classic Press.
Founded in 1978 by W. Paul Coates, the publishing house specializes in books on the African-American experience by the likes of David Walker, Martin R. Delaney and Bobby Seale that have been long out of print or recently dropped by mainstream publishers. In other words, virtually its entire catalog is a backlist of books dropped off other companies’ backlists.
This works, Coates says, because readers come to the house’s catalog knowing they have nearly 100 books of black literature to choose from. It’s also possible because Coates uses print-on-demand equipment to provide only those copies that he needs to fill orders. In addition, selling just a backlist keeps headaches to a minimum.
“We know we’re going to sell X amount each year,” Coates says. “It’s an evergreen approach.”
