On Velocity Models and Leading With Your Backlist

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.