How many movies should you star in next year?
How many records should you release? How many songs should you write?
How many times a week should you post to your blog?
And when should my next book come out? Or your next newsletter or
that next cartoon? What about Nike–they launch more than one product
every day. Is that too many?
A lot of the stuff marketers make is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk that consumers merely tolerate.
But some of it is not spam, it’s content. Stuff worth reading; worth paying for (at the very least, worth paying attention to.)
So, how often?
This discussion is usually filled with superstitions, traditions and
half-truths. Daily comics come out every day because that’s when
newspapers always came out. And newspapers came out once a day because
it was too expensive to publish three times a day (and advertisers and
readers wouldn’t support the extra expense.)
When movies were met with great fanfare and often stayed in the
theaters for months, it was suicide for a big movie star to do three or
four movies a year. But in a DVD/YouTube world, there’s not a lot of
evidence that this pace makes as much sense. Saturday Night Live was on
every week because there’s only one Saturday a week, but if it had
launched today, it’s hard to see the benefit of it being a weekly…
I’d like to propose that you think about it differently. There’s frontlist and backlist.
Frontlist means the new releases, the hits, the stuff that fanboys are looking for or paying attention to.
Frontlist gets all the attention, all the glory and all the
excitement. They write about frontlist in the paper and we talk about
the frontlist at dinner. Digg is the frontlist. Siskel and Ebert is the
frontlist.
Backlist is Catcher in the Rye or 1984. Backlist is the long tail (the idea) and now, the Long Tail (the book). In a digital world, backlist is where the rest of the attention ends up, and where all the real money is made.
Backlist doesn’t show up in the news, but Google is 95% backlist. So is Amazon.
Sitting in a meeting yesterday, I brainstormed a term, “haystack marketing.”
I googled it to see if someone else was using it. You guessed
it–number one match was an article I wrote eight months ago. Google
doesn’t forget even if you do.
So, here’s the strategy:
- Assemble a tribe, a group of true fans, followers, people who
have given you permission. Give them all the frontlist they can handle.
Make it easy for them to spread the word, to Digg you or bring a friend
to your movie or buy your new book for their friends. If you create too
much content for this crowd, then you’re publishing too much. They care, and they want to hear from you. - Promote your backlist. Invest significant time and money to make
your backlist available, to recirculate it, to have it adopted as a
textbook in English class or featured on Netflix or part of a
retrospective on TV. Take all that money you waste in frontlist
marketing and spend it on the backlist instead. - Repeat. Frontlist becomes backlist, backlist grows, fan base grows, it scales.
Frontlist reaches your fans. Your fans spread the word, and
eventually your backlist reaches everyone else. The backlist turns some
people into fans, who then look for the frontlist.
The bestselling fiction authors (with one exception) all got hassled
by their publishers for writing too often. Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha
Christie, Stephen King, JK Rowling… all but one had to write under a
pseudonym because their publishers said they wrote too much. Nonsense.
They wrote for their tribe, they give their followers just barely
enough to read. Not too much, not by a long shot. And then, they were
lucky enough to have persistent and talented publishers that managed to
get their backlist read, over and over, by millions of people. People
who turned into fans.
Key assertion: you don’t publish it unless it’s good. You
don’t write more blog posts than you can support, don’t ship more
variations of that software than your engineers can make marvelous. But
given that you’ve got enough bench strength, enough remarkability to
spare, now what?
When I look at my work, I think I’m in sync with my readers–one blog post a day feels right, while ten (which some bloggers pull off) wouldn’t work for us. One book a year feels right, while three a decade (which Malcolm Gladwell does) wouldn’t work for me or my core readers.
On the other hand, I do a lousy job of self-marketing my backlist. I have no doubt that a more patient push of The Dip
would have doubled the numbers of books I sold (but posting about
quitting all the time would have annoyed you guys to no end). It’s
still selling well, but given the base of sales (a big frontlist launch
can lead to even bigger backlist, of course), more focus on the
backlist would have been a profitable choice. The thing is,
organizations can do this far better than an individual author can.
[Example: In the last month, four of my books have been mentioned in the NY Times. (The Dip, All Marketers are Liars, Meatball Sundae and Small is the New Big.)
All backlist. All to people not in our tribe. This is far more useful
and surprisingly, predictable, than the hit or miss nature of frontlist
promotion. In my case, I think I’m putting my skills to better use when
I’m writing, but that means I need to figure out how my backlist is
going to get noticed. If you’ve got a team, part of the team should
obsess about the backlist, honing it, editing it and promoting it,
while the rest work to generate (as opposed to promote) the frontlist.]
The opportunity isn’t to give into temptation and figure out how to
recklessly and expensively market the frontlist. It is to adopt a long
and slow and ultimately profitable strategy of marketing your
ever-growing backlist.
(Note: This post was republished from Seth Godin’s blog. Image source: wvu.edu and farm1.static.flickr)
