Keeping your backlist selling
A backlist is every book you have published that is not the new one. For most indie authors it is also the part of the business that gets no attention at all, because attention follows launches and a launch is over in a week.
That is the wrong way round. A book on sale indefinitely keeps accumulating the things that sell books: reviews, search relevance, word of mouth, and readers who arrive years after publication with no idea the book is old. Every new book you publish is also an advertisement for the earlier ones, because a reader who finishes something they liked goes looking for more of it.
The compounding is real and slow. Two books sell more than twice one book. Six sell considerably more than three. Nobody can point to the day it happened.
The maintenance list, in order of return
Link every book to the others, in the back of each book. This is the single highest-return thing on the list and the one most often skipped. A reader who just finished the last page is the most receptive audience you will ever have, and if the next thing they see is a blank page, that is what you chose to sell them. Put the other titles there, with a line about each. See The back of the book is where your next sale is.
It is also cheap. Back matter is a field, not a rewrite — you change the text, the book re-flows, and the only thing to watch is that the final page count may move, which is a cover matter rather than a crisis.
Keep the series fields consistent. Same series name spelled the same way, numbers in the same format, on every book and every store. Stores group a series by matching that data, and a book with the name entered differently simply does not join the set. See Series numbering, and getting the books to find each other.
Fix a description that is not working. One written the week the launch exhausted you is usually the weakest asset the book has, and it is free to replace now that you know what readers actually say about it. See How to write a blurb that sells the book.
Re-check categories and keywords. Markets move. Categories get split, renamed and repopulated; the terms readers type change; a subgenre that barely existed when you published now has its own shelf. This is worth a look once a year. See Categories and keywords, without the folklore.
Refresh a cover that has aged. Lower down the list than authors assume, because it costs the most and risks the most. But a cover that no longer looks like the category it sits in is actively working against the book. See Covers that age badly.
Fix the errors readers reported. The typo three people have mentioned, the wrong chapter number, the broken link in the ebook. Small, and it stops costing you a sentence in a review.
In the tools. My Books can duplicate a book, copying its design and settings into a new book, which is how a backlist keeps a consistent look without rebuilding anything — and a corrected interior gives you a fresh page count that flows straight into the cover. Start your book → · about the tools
When a refresh is worth doing
A book that sold and then stopped. Something changed around it — the category, the competition, what its cover promises — and the book itself is proven. This is the best candidate there is.
A cover that predates your current standard. If your newest book looks like a professional published it and your first does not, the first one is telling every browsing reader something untrue about your work. It is also the book most likely to be somebody's first.
A category that has visibly moved on. Look at the top twenty in your subgenre now. If your cover would have looked at home there five years ago and does not today, that is the whole answer.
When it is not
A book that never sold. A refresh is a multiplier, and a multiplier applied to zero is still zero. If a book had no readers from the start, the problem is usually the book or the fact that its audience was never assembled — not the packaging. Redesigning the cover is the expensive way to avoid finding that out.
A book whose numbers you have not looked at. Decide from what the book actually did, not from how you feel about it. See Tracking what actually works.
Hooks for an old book
An old book cannot be announced, but it can be mentioned, and a mention needs a reason. Seasons supply reasons for free: the book set at Christmas in November, the gardening book in March, the beach read in June. So do anniversaries — ten years since publication, the day the events in the book happened, a news story about the subject.
A new edition is the strongest peg of all, because it is genuinely news. A backlist title with steady sales and no audio edition is the usual candidate — the readership already exists, which is the condition audio needs and a debut never has. How an audiobook earns its money back is where to check the arithmetic before you spend anything.
None of this is a campaign. It is one post, one newsletter paragraph, one price promotion with a peg, several times a year, per book. See Promotion after launch week.
The arithmetic
A launch is a spike: weeks of effort, most of which stops working when you stop. A backlist is a floor. It does not spike, and it does not stop.
Six books each selling a copy a day beats one book selling six copies on release day and then nothing, and the first arrangement keeps happening while you write the seventh. That is the honest case for spending an afternoon on books you finished years ago instead of on the new one.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Promotion after launch week · More: Box sets and omnibus editions · When to redo a cover, and when to leave it alone · Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book