by Steff Green
Here are some ideas on what you can do with a big backlist of books:
1. Monthly price promotions – running free and $0.99 sales on different books and boxsets. You can do these simply by messaging your newsletter followers about a sale, or stack up ads and newsletter promo to give a sale a push.
2. Author collabs – putting together themed book bundles, group price promotions, newsletter swaps, promo FB groups, and other collaborative activities with other authors. Your fellow authors aren't your competition – they are some of the best resources you have, especially when you all work together.
3. Promote backlist books to your newsletter – got nothing to talk about? Intro your readers to book one in a backlist series. Guarantee heaps of them haven't read it.
4. Cover or content refresh – I've re-edited books in old backlist series to give them a better shot. I recently re-did some old covers to help my launch of the series from KU to wide. Be strategic about it and it can be worth it, but sometimes it's not.
5. KU/wide – experiment with a different strategy for a backlist series.
6. Website organization/landing pages. I'm doing a bit of this right now - making landing pages to collect books in the same genre/tropes/elements together. Eg, if you have lots of Christmas books, put them all on a landing page and it's a cool asset to use in your newsletters, or even link to in your backmatter.
7. Series starter boxset. They often don't earn as much as another boxset, but boxsets are cheap to produce and they always do well. I'm just about to put together my own bully romance series starter boxset. Excited!
8. Similar tropes boxset. I like to do these as limited-editions with tons of books in them. (10 books for $9.99 but it's only on sale for a month. Even $0.99 on these can work a treat.)
10. Easter eggs. Put cameos of backlist characters into your current books, and try to lead readers back to those old stories.
