Seth Godin wrote a post that often comes to my mind, about frontlist and backlist. He coins and defines both these terms:

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.

Seth wrote this in 2008. If he wrote it today, he’d say TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Hacker News, etc. are 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.

Seth also shared a clear strategy for how to make the two work for each other. I’m summarizing it here:

1. Create frontlist material to serve the people who like your work. Ask them for permission to stay in touch via email.
2. Promote your backlist. Take the money you would have spent on promoting your frontlist, and instead invest it in distributing your backlist. (Not just money—time, resources, energy, etc. as well.) Consider this the core of your business.
3. The frontlist material becomes backlist material. Keep repeating this cycle so it scales.

From a tactical perspective, you can also make the frontlist actually promote your backlist as well. Consider these two ideas:

Improve your frontlist offer with backlist products: When you are releasing a new book (the frontlist product), create a bundle that includes five copies of your new book as well as a couple of your old, related, digital courses (the backlist product). It costs you nothing to do it, and all of a sudden, you can make a much more valuable offer. Let’s say your new book cost $25 (5 copies would be $125), and one of your old courses cost $200 (each! So $400 total), and you price this offer at $75 that would contain $525 worth of value. The best thing about an offer like this is the people who buy it will be encouraged to give away copies of your books to their friends—promoting the frontlist product that will turn into a valuable backlist product.

Promote your backlist with your frontlist products: You can create a new frontlist product to promote your backlist material. A new season of a TV show is the best example of this—if you enjoyed the second season of something, you may go back and watch the first. Same goes with a series of books, a series of courses, etc. These don’t have to be literal sequels (e.g., “ABC Part 3”), but more like the latest in a product line. For example, as Creative Doing becomes a backlist product for me, I could choose to make a new book that is still related to creativity, but not literally a second part of that book.