Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

Collecting posts I’ve written about the writing life and managing a writing career

On Velocity Models and Leading With Your Backlist

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Back when I pulled together the Brain Jar Press writer guidelines, I specifically called out that we use a backlist driven model of publishing. It’s one of those phrases that generates a lot of questions from new authors, and there’s been a project where the author in question wasn’t interested in pursuing publication with us once I laid things out (Side note: this is a good thing: I lay things out because publishing with a small press whose practices are a small fit for your expectations is likely to be frustrating for everyone).

What’s really interesting at the moment is the way backlist versus front list models are coming into focus because of the current problems with publishing supply chains, particularly in the US. It often means people have to articulate what a front-list model looks like, and why it runs into problems.

My favourite description comes via Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s analysis of the current supply chain problems in publishing:

“Traditional publishing, as I have written many times, is built on the velocity model. Books must sell quickly out of the gate, and then taper off later.”

There’s a lot of complexity packed into that word velocity, from the legacy models trad pub clings to through to the realities of storing, shipping, and selling books in physical spaces with limited capacity. And I think it’s worth noting that velocity models do make sense in a world where that’s the only way to sell books, and it served big publishers well for several years.

But it’s also a very fragile business model, easily broken with just a few changes to the ecosystem. Tansy Rayner Roberts recently wrote her own response to Rusch’s article on twitter, noting the ways disruptions to the velocity models shaped Tansy’s career and the way she thought about the success and failure of certain books she’d written.

When Brain Jar Press 2.0 launched, I used the phrase “Backlist Focused” intentionally to describe our approach to publishing. I’m incredibly disinterested in velocity in publishing, and more interested in producing books that people find their way to over time. My perspective of publishing is shaped by doing RPG ebooks in 2005, then watching them continue to sell for sixteen years despite the industry moving on, my leaving the industry behind in 2007, and the books receiving very little advertising or updating after that point.

Ostensibly, the ability to be backlist focus is the strength of digital publishing, but it’s astonishing how often the conversations and strategies among people who use it focus on replicating the velocity model. They devote tremendous amounts of energy and advertising budget to launching big and ‘tickling the algorithm’ to get Amazon to sell one’s work, particularly among the parts of the indie publishing industry that have doubled down on the Kindle Unlimited model.

A good, backlist driven publishing model is more characterised by patience than anything else. It’s all about building connections between works, creating a web of marketing that allows you to move readers from one book they’ve enjoyed to another on your list, and regularly casting out leads for the kinds of readers you want to attract. It’s about being willing to sell twenty books at launch, confident that each of those readers will gradually talk about that book and find you twenty more, with slow exponential growth ticking along over a period of years.

Strong launches aren’t the only legacy of velocity publishing that people replicate without question, though. Velocity publishing concerns and limitations drive the conventions of a good back cover synopsis, and rarely get questioned. But those conventions are focused on getting a potential reader exciting about this particular book, because the reader’s primary relationship was with the product in their hand rather than the author.

That convention perfect sense in a world where backlist is hard to trace, and the book has two or three weeks to sell copies, but less sense in a world where books exist as part of an ongoing relationship between writer and reader. Especially given that relationship expands beyond the books, spreading across social media, convention appearances, and other forms of engagement.

An Intriguing (and Discouraging) Take On Substack’s Business Model

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

My favourite headline doing the rounds right now: 

Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel?

It seems to originate from Julian Novitz’s article over on The Conversation, taking a quick dive into Rushdie’s decision to publish his new novella through Substack on a Pro deal (where Substack pays creators with a certain profile to use the platform and build up the service’s profile, rather than paying based on how many paid subscribers a writer brings to the platform).

The answer to the question, of course, is “No,” but the original article is worth reading because Novitz is primarily interested in using Rushdie’s decision to publish there as a lens through which to examine the current state of the Substack platform and business model.

The interesting thing about the question posed in the headline is how familiar it is. People have been looking towards digital reading platforms and considering it for about two decades now, and the answer is always no. Books are a remarkably resilient piece of technology, and with a few rare exceptions, the folks on the digital end keep reinventing the same wheels in slightly new variations.

Personal Sidenote: As someone who spent a good chunk if time vetting ‘new and innovative publishing platforms’ around 2010 to 2014, it’s astonishing how many of these innovations start with “let’s resurrect the serial format”. Back when I reviewed new concepts pitched at the Australian Writers Marketplace, every second ‘new innovation’ pitch was a distribution platform for serials (The others were usually ways of gussying up the vanity publishing business model). All of them usually started from the perspective that they would get writers involved, then the writers would bring the audience.

It’s not the most effective model. I mean, there’s a reason ebooks didn’t take off as an idea until Amazon used the kindle as a loss leader, then made ebooks attractive to writers and publishers who wanted access to a growing new audience. Substack, for all my concerns about the platform, seems to be smart enough to think about audience first, using paid authors with strong readerships as their loss leader. /End Sidenote

So whether Rushdie is killing the novel isn’t an interesting question, but Novitz’s insights into the platform are worth reading. Particularly this point, made towards the end, which presents an oddly grim picture of the platform from a writing point of view.

Recently Jude Doyle, a trans critic and novelist, has abandoned the platform. They note the irony of how profits generated by the often marginalised or subcultural writers who built paid subscriber bases in the early days of Substack are now being used to fund the much more lucrative deals offered to high-profile right-wing writers, who have in some cases exploited Substack’s weak moderation policy to spread anti-trans rhetoric and encourage harassment.

It could be argued Substack Pro is evolving into an inversion of the traditional (if somewhat idealised) publishing model, where a small number of profitable authors would subsidise the emergence of new writers. Instead, on Substack, profits generated from the work of large numbers of side-hustling writers are used to draw more established voices to the platform.

And, look, there’s a lot of things that I dislike about traditional publishing business models and processes, but the inversion of the “our whale authors help us take a chance on new authors” approach isn’t one of them. For all that Substack Pro feels like an incredibly smart marketing ploy on Substack’s end, that’s… well… not a dynamic I’d want to be codifying if I’ve got an eye towards long-term growth. 

Substack intrigued me for a while—less for the monetization of newsletters, and more because they’d created a newsletter system that introduces social spaces and comments, which felt an awful lot like blogging. Alas, every time I dug into the platform, I found something that gave me pause, which eventually sent me to Patreon (a more mature platform that’s already through its first round of venture-funding fueled shitfuckery) and ultimately reinvigorating my blog.

I can’t say I’m regretting that decision.

First Envision, Then Figure Out The Compromise

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I’ve got a long history of advising writers to clarify their goals and vision around writing, and a recurring question is often how? It’s too big a question to tackle in blog posts, but something that occasionally gets some clarity during the longer, face-to-face (or email-to-email) conversations that take place with friends.

One insight is this: envisioning a career is a two-step process.

The first step is envisioning the kind of career you’d like to have—how much you want to write, what kind of work you want to do, what kind of readership you’d like to develop. Looking to benchmarks—writers whose career (not necessarily work) like to emulate in terms of approach and schedule—then doing research to figure out whether their current approach to work represents the way they built their profile up in the early days.

No writer comes out of nowhere, and overnight successes are often the product of decades-long effort and build.

The second step is figuring out where you’re willing to compromise and the circumstances in which you’ll do so. If your principal goal is “doing good work,” how far are you willing to compromise that to make working at writing full time happen? If your heart is set on working in a particular genre, are you willing to switch genres—or go to non-fiction—in order to achieve other parts of your goal. If you’ve set yourself the goal of writing one book a year, in order to really give it your focus, are you willing to do two or three if publishers really want you to push the pace? Are you content to write to a small audience, or do you crave recognition and large crowds?

Are the things you were unwilling to sacrifice as a single author the same when you have a working partner, or a family who needs your support? What happens to your vision of what productive means as a writer if you get sick, or develop a chronic illness? Do you want to build your career fast, or would you prefer to take your time?

We all make bad comprises over the course of our careers and only learn we’ve crossed a line in retrospect. Moments when we look up from the long, hard slog of a project and wonder, “what the hell was I thinking? This is making me miserable!”

Bad compromise is inevitable. (And doing work that makes them miserable is a boundary plenty of writers will compromise on if the trade-off gains them something else they desire; I use it because it’s frequently the area I don’t want to compromise on). 

But thinking about your boundaries in advance—the permeable goals that will shift and mutate because of circumstances—helps you cut back on the mistakes, and gives you a clearer vision of what each opportunity represents and what it costs you to say yes. 

Want more insights into building a writing career, but don’t want to mess about digging through blog archives? You Don’t Want to Be Published compiles some of my best writing-about-writing from this website, along with articles and essays I’ve written for other publications.

Available in print and ebook direct from Brain Jar Press, or from your favourite bookstores.