“Take care of your backlist, and your backlist takes care of you”

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Lawrence Block
Crime writer Lawrence Block.

At an AWP panel discussion in 2014, Lawrence Block related a bit of wisdom he’d learned from another author: “Take care of your backlist, and your backlist takes care of you.” He added the advice had served him well over his writing career.

By that point, I’d been writing fiction for several years. I’d met many authors (aspiring and published), attended numerous workshops (formal and informal) and worked with many writing teachers in different genres. Yet, in all that time, I’d never heard this piece of advice. I found Block’s advice to be quite sage, and I continue to believe in it. (It’s also a rare example of writing lore that is worth paying attention to.)

The problem was, in 2014, I didn’t have a backlist. How could I take care of that which does not exist?

(Quick terminology clarification: The standard use of the term “backlist” or “back catalog” refers to a publisher’s catalog of titles released in prior years but still in print or stock. I took Block’s usage to indicate the sum of an author’s work, in print or otherwise.)

He went on and told the panel audience that, when he investigated Amazon’s Kindle Publishing, he realized he could release all his out-of-print books in electronic form and sell them direct without having to shop them around for a publisher. He went through his old contracts and reacquired rights for books his publishers had let lapse. He even paid his agent fifteen percent of the royalties he earned on his direct-sale ebooks “because it was the right thing to do.”

This is a great example of taking care of one’s backlist.

In many ways, Lawrence Block persuaded me to jump onto the Kindle bandwagon. On my way home from the conference, it occurred to me that I was selling myself short. I’d published several short stories in literary journals in the U.S. and Britain, enough to put together a story collection. A few years earlier, a small non-profit in Oakland published a short run of a novella they’d commissioned from me. A big-name author might not call it much of a backlist, but for a small-fry like me, it was a start.

And it was a significant start. I turned my oh-so-modest backlist into two Kindle ebooks. The experience reinvigorated me to finish my first novel, a book I’d been working on and stewing over for nearly fifteen years.

Today, I’ve written seven novels, and have an eighth on the way. I’m hardly an active blogger, but over the last decade-plus, I’ve put out over three hundred blog posts, including many book reviews and critical analyses that I’m proud of. All of that is backlist.

Eleven years after first hearing it, Block’s advice returned to me when I decided to “go wide” and move my backlist to Kobo. And I was thinking of Block when I sent an email to MX Publishing in London inquiring if they’d be interested in taking on A Man Named Baskerville, which I’d already put out as an ebook and in paperback. They accepted—and produced a hardcover and a fantastic audiobook edition, which I brag about to everyone I know, even strangers on the street.

The words you’re reading right now are from my backlist. Years ago, I took a stab at running a Substack. It didn’t work out, but a few of those newsletters are still pertinent, including this one. I freshened it up and posted it here.

Taking care of your backlist

Anything you’ve written and published—an old blog, a book review a university journal printed, that thing you wrote for a neighborhood newsletter—is part of your backlist. Scour your computer’s “Documents” folder. Dig up old clippings. Make a list of everything you’ve written to completion.

Some ideas for taking care of your backlist:

  • If you’re building a book series, bundle them into a ebook boxed set edition.
  • Take a hard look at your older books. Is it time for a fresh cover? Is that title really catching the reader’s attention?
  • Also take a look at your books’ metadata—are they listed with the right keywords and categories?
  • Is there a publisher out there that might be interested in taking on one of your old books or series?
  • Is it time to go wide and make you books available in more markets?
  • Collect your short stories into a book. That short story you couldn’t place? Dig it up and polish it as well. Even the short story collections of big name writers often include unpublished work.
  • Convert your blog into a book. Over the years, I’ve written a number of entries on book, film, and television. I’m thinking about gathering them up and producing an essay collection.
  • Work with writers you know, who live in your area, or who write in the same genre. Assemble a collection of short stories or first chapters as a sampler. Each author can include a short bio and links for readers to buy more of their work.
  • YouTube, audiobooks, translations, Substack, and podcasts offer new ways to make your work available.

What’s the point of all this? Will it make you money? Will it sell more books?

Maybe…and maybe not. Don’t overlook using your backlist to increase your exposure. Short story collections don’t sell particularly well—they never have—but you can offer a collection as an incentive for people to sign up for your mailing list. Services like Patreon are always asking you to think creatively about sharing premium or subscriber-only work with your patrons. Plus, a few additional titles on your web site and social media profile doesn’t hurt.

You never know when one of these side avenues piques a reader’s interest and leads them to try your more recent work. Even one new reader is a success. I rejoice every time someone reads one of my books. For me, that’s the whole purpose of this crazy focus in my life.


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“A Man Named Baskerville” audiobook available at Apple Books

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Audiobook cover of "A Man Named Baskerville" by Jim Nelson

I recently learned that the audiobook version of A Man Named Baskerville is now available on Apple Books. This is great news—if you’re an Apple or iPhone user, it’s now even easier to listen to the audiobook on your device, as the player is already installed and ready to go. I also see that Apple is offering it for a substantial discount over the Amazon USA sale price, so that’s a nice bonus.

The audiobook is narrated by Michael Langan, a respected voice talent who brings his skills in producing Received Pronunciation voice-overs. This is especially important for Baskerville, as the main character’s ability to shapeshift among the upper-classes rests on his 19th century posh British accent.

If you’re not familiar with the book, A Man Named Baskerville is my retelling of the classic Sherlock Holmes mystery. The novel’s antagonist recounts his life story for the reader, from growing up on the streets of the Brazilian coast, to the jungles of the Amazon and the beaches of Costa Rica. He winds up honing his skills as a con man and murderer in Victorian England, where he encounters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson during Jack the Ripper’s Autumn of Terror.

Learn more here, which includes a sample of the praise the book’s received from reviewers.

If you’d like to preview the audiobook, you can find previews available at Amazon, Audible, and Apple Books. Remember, Amazon Prime members have special perks with Audible, and may be able to listen for free.


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No, they won’t get permission first

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Cover of "Everywhere Man" by Jim Nelson

In 2011, I wrote a novella about a Silicon Valley startup that trains its virtual reality software from tourist photos it scrapes off the Internet. Millions of these photos are stitched together to create a virtual cable car ride across San Francisco.

This story became Everywhere Man, which was also recorded as an audiobook that you listened to while riding the actual, real-life cable cars. It was one of several literary tours that Oakland-based Invisible City Audio Tours offered. Their idea was to see cities through the lens of literature, and not as a mere collection of landmarks and commercial sights.

During the development of the book, Invisible City’s publisher asked me: “Wouldn’t the startup need to get permission from the people who took the photos?”

Fourteen years later, we’ve received the answer to her question: “Yes, they should get copyright permission. No, they won’t do that, though.”

Of course, today the startups in question are not producing virtual reality tours. They are AI companies feeding massive amounts of copyrighted data into their Language Learning Models (LLMs), which in turn powers their artificial intelligence behemoths—Chat GPT, Claude, Grok, and so forth.

And just like my fictional Silicon Valley startup, these AI companies are being challenged in regard to their use of intellectual property. Shouldn’t these companies have to get copyright permission before using creative works to build their software?

The answer, predictably, is that they don’t believe they need to:

  • Nick Clegg, former executive for Meta (Facebook): Asking artists’ permission before AI companies scrape copyrighted content will “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
  • In a statement from Open AI, the creators of Chat GPT, they assert “the federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the [People’s Republic of China] by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.”
  • Meanwhile, “OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI ‘is a matter of national security.'”

It’s not even a matter of asking permission at this point—these companies have already trained their LLMs with copyrighted material and made their AI available to the public. Their earliest defense was that training on copyrighted material was “transformational” and covered as Fair Use. Later they began to frame the argument as a matter of national security. (OpenAI is particularly prone to this claim.) At some point, they’ve all stated publicly, in so many words, that needing to obtain permission from content creators would destroy their business model. (In Nick Clegg’s case, it’s not even so many words. He came right out and stated it.)

Facebook went so far as to use a massive database of flagrantly pirated texts (called LibGen) to train its AI. An internal company document reveals that they kept the source of their texts secret because “if there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.”

The Atlantic has helpfully produced a searchable database to see if an author’s work was included among LibGen’s trove of pirated texts. Sure enough, three of my books are in the set: Bridge Daughter, Hagar’s Mother, and—you guessed it—Everywhere Man, a book about a Silicon Valley company using stolen intellectual property to train their software.

There is a familiar smell about all of this. In a recent video on typeface piracy (a practice which goes back hundreds of years), designer Linus Boman observes “every time there is a massive technological shift, intellectual property rights suddenly, and very conveniently, become a blind spot. … Is it only considered piracy if the people who do it lack resources and respectability?” Apparently so.

Maybe it’s time to stop telling ourselves that AI will never produce a passable novel, song, or movie—that AI lacks the fiery human spirit to produce creative work of value. Maybe we should concede that AI is more than capable of producing better-than-mediocre works of art.

The open market tells us this is the case. Writers have been caught using AI to produce tens, even hundreds, of novels, all profitable bestsellers with attentive and loyal fan bases. The reason this is true is that AI is a master of imitating others’ work.

Couldn’t an AI be trained only with public domain texts published on or before 1929, the current cut-off point for copyright protection in the United States? Well, it could, but then all those romance novels it produced would read like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. That’s not going to sell many copies.

AI has practical, world-bettering applications in the sciences, healthcare/medicine, mathematics, and beyond. I’m not arguing against AI as a general technology. But it seems all avenues of creating works with AI leads to less-than-optimal market conditions for AI companies and their users if copyright protections are upheld. Why, though, do their short-term profit margins suddenly erase basic copyright law, a legal concept that goes back to the time of Shakespeare?

Ask yourself: Are you better off reading AI-generated novels? Or listening to AI-produced music, or watching AI-generated movies? I see no evidence that AI-produced work is being sold at a lower price than human-generated content, or offering a better experience. What’s in it for me? Lower-quality mass-produced books sold at the same or higher price than before? How is this progress?

Alternate cover of "Everywhere Man" by Jim Nelson

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Entire Bridge Daughter series now available on Kobo

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Hagar's Mother by Jim Nelson

Following up on earlier announcements, the final two books in the Bridge Daughter Cycle—Hagar’s Mother and Stranger Son—are now available for purchase on Kobo. This completes putting my back catalog up on that site. As before, all these books remain available on Amazon.

(The only book not available on Kobo yet is A Man Named Baskerville. Some time after my next book is published, I’ll probably move it over to Kobo as well.)

The entire Bridge Daughter Cycle is here on Kobo.

For more on why I’m going this route with Kobo, check out “Kobo & Me” and “Going Wide,” where I discuss the options I weighed and why I finally decided to spread my wings.

Stranger Son by Jim Nelson

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Audiobook’s first month & an update on the hardcover edition

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A Man Named Baskerville by Jim Nelson

Two pieces of news:

First, the audiobook of A Man Named Baskerville has been well-received. It currently holds seven 5-star reviews on Audible and sales have been brisk. MX Publishing released their top audiobook sellers for the month of February, and Baskerville ranked fourth out of 24. It’s the only novel in the top five (the rest being short story collections).

Second, the hardcover edition of Baskerville releases tomorrow! I’ve proofed this edition, and it’s exciting to see my story now available in hardback with a slipcover. If you prefer reading books this way, you can order your copy now.


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More books now available on Kobo

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Bridge Daughter by Jim Nelson, displayed in paperback and ebook editions

As I discussed before, I’ve been slowly moving more of my back catalog to Kobo. Two more books are now available there: Bridge Daughter and In My Memory Locked. If you’re a Kobo reader, or considering trying them out, they’re ready to go.

Praise for Bridge Daughter:

“Bridge Daughter is the sort of surprising gem in a sea of fairly ordinary you occasionally run across as a reader of contemporary speculative fiction—smart, highly original, and emotionally brutal.” – John Blair, author of Bright Angel and American Standard

“The thought-provoking story blends action, introspection, and social commentary in a stark but indirect critique of efforts to control female bodies and restrict reproductive rights.” – Publishers Weekly

Praise for In My Memory Locked:

“Ingenious plot…cyber-noir is the right descriptive, and the read is well worth the while.” – T. Mohr

“First-rate cyberpunk…I had no choice but to finish the book straight through.” – brujaja

In My Memory Locked by Jim Nelson

More books are coming to Kobo—watch my blog for future announcements.


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“A Man Named Baskerville” audiobook now available

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Photo of headphones atop an open book
Marco Verch (CC-2.0)

The audiobook of A Man Named Baskerville dropped this week on Audible! I’m excited beyond words about this development—I’ve long wished to see one of my novels brought to audio format. On top of this good news, I see that the audiobook has already received a five-star rating from an early reader (listener?).

It’s narrated by Michael Langan, a seasoned voice talent with a long list of audio work under his belt. Michael specializes in Received Pronunciation voice-overs, which is vital for a book like Baskerville. The main character’s chameleon-like ability to mix with aristocracy and the upper-class hinges on the RP accent his father instilled in him when he was young. Michael exceeded all my expectations.

If you’ve been thinking about picking up A Man Named Baskerville and enjoy an audio experience, I hope you check out this new edition. A free sample is available, and Amazon Prime members enjoy special perks with Audible.

Audiobook cover of "A Man Named Baskerville" by Jim Nelson

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