The “Slow and Steady” Approach to Building Readership

Back in the early 2000s, I had a letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times. At the time, I thought it signaled I’d arrived. I was a beginning writer and had had a dozen (or more) letters published in the local paper. So I started aiming for the “big time.” In that case, it was the LAT. After two previous attempts, my third letter was finally accepted. Hooray! I was so proud of that accomplishment that I framed the newspaper clipping. Now, almost 15 years later, I look back on that accomplishment and my unbridled glee, as rather juvenile. Yes. At the time, it was a huge step. But it’s now just one step in a very long journey.

I was thinking about that when I read the following two articles. You see, volume is becoming a huge issue for indie authors. Nowadays, the more writing one publishes, the more books in the chutes, the easier marketing becomes and the more discoverable one is.  Of course, there’s legitimate debate about quality v. quantity. Should we forgo quality just to develop a big backlist? Assuming that you needn’t sacrifice quality for quantity, I think there’s a lot of truth to this advice. Whether you’re an artist, musician, or novelist, putting out more and more stuff is the only way to build a career.

In her recent article Five Marketing Models for Self-Publishing Success, Jane Friedman touches upon this in her second point:

2. Always Be Producing

The more books you have out there, the easier the marketing game is. That’s because you have more options for giving things away for free, putting other things on discount, and bundling books together—or making them part of a multiauthor bundle.

This principle applies to any creative pursuit. The more work you put out, the more people will discover you. For example, bestselling novelist Bella Andre has said that her sales really started to skyrocket after she released the fifth book in her series. You’ll find the same story repeated across many authors’ careers; overnight successes are rare. However, some authors lack the patience to see their work build a readership over time, or they have only one book in them. This is of course problematic from a marketing perspective. (bold, mine)

SF / Fantasy author Cedar Sanderson comes at this from the angle of backlist. In her post The Importance of Being Backlist, Sanderson notes the parallel between the music and the publishing industry. While frontlisted album sales (newly released albums and bands) have taken a dive, “Catalog continues to be the biggest share of on-demand streams, with songs over 18 months old accounting for nearly 70% of all streaming volume.” Sanderson sees a parallel for authors,

Catalog is the music equivalent of backlist. So what you’re seeing here is more people accessing music backlist. Some of that is going to be people using streaming services to listen to bands they know and like (and may already possess in hardcopy, but this is more convenient.) Some of that are going to be bands who’ve been out for a while, but are just now being discovered by word of mouth. (Yesterday, an acquaintance on facebook was gushing about the artist they’d just discovered – Lindsey Stirling. She went big in 2012, and it took 4 years for her to reach this particular person, who in turn was enthusiastically recommending her to everyone they knew.)

This, then, is the rise of the long tail. It’s getting harder and harder to be discovered on release – but with unlimited shelf life, when people hear of you, they can find you and try as much as they want.

This is one of the great advantages that indies have over legacy publishers — we don’t require huge roll-outs and we’re not going out of print.

Sanderson concludes,

In summary, if publishing continues to mirror music, then streaming will continue to increase, but frontlist sales may continue to fall, and it become harder and harder to get discovered in the initial release period. However, backlist volume is growing, and people are discovering their way through the things that have been out there a while. So, while you can and should do some promotion of your latest release – if it fails to take off, don’t despair. Instead, write the next book, the greatest book you’ve written yet. Sometimes you make your money on the initial release surge, and sometimes, it’ll come in having a lot of things out there all bringing in an unsteady trickle.

And here’s where Sanderson and Friedman intersect.

• “The more work you put out, the more people will discover you.”
• “Sometimes you make your money [by] having a lot of things out there.”

As a notoriously slow writer, the idea of cranking books out and building a large backlist can be intimidating. Which is why Freidman is correct that “some authors lack the patience to see their work build a readership over time.”

I have by no means “arrived.” I still have a forty-hour a week job outside the home. Nevertheless,  I’ve managed to write six books and am slowly building a decent resume. The thing is, I would never have gotten here if I didn’t have a “slow and steady” approach to my writing. In part, being an indie author and not having to rely on the traditional frontlist, blockbuster, model of book sales has helped me. Knowing that I don’t need to make a ton of sales on the front end has helped me patiently build readership. Knowing that my backlist is more important than my frontlist has encouraged me to just keep plugging away.

I think a lot of us writers get impatient because “success” isn’t happening overnight. Our Facebook followers grow haltingly. Our book reviews trickle in. Our readership grows slowly. But in reality, you may be measuring your success on a rather faulty model. Why not just concentrate on getting stuff out there. Like the hiker, just focus on making the next bend or cresting the next hill. Because at some point, you’ll turn around a be surprised at how high you’ve actually climbed, at how fast those individual steps have added up. In retrospect, framing my letter to the L.A. Times was a silly thing to do. Nevertheless, it remains one of many signposts on a very long journey.