As I’ve written previously, this is a passion project, a novel about two writers I’ve read and admired and studied for years now. My book centers on a fictional meeting of hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler, banging out the manuscript to his debut The Big Sleep, and Nathanael West, himself working on his opus The Day of the Locust.
Chandler & West is also a love letter to Los Angeles, especially the L.A. during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Pre-release sales have been better than expected. They’re so good, yesterday I noticed the book sitting at #37 on Amazon’s U.S. Biographical Literary Fiction best sellers chart:
The Kindle edition is available at a special limited-time price of $2.99, which will go up later this month. A paperback edition is also available. And, Kindle Unlimited subscribers may read it for free.
It’s here—the Kindle and paperback editions of my latest novel, Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles, may now be reserved on Amazon.
The Kindle edition is available at a special limited-time price of $2.99, which will go up after the book has been released. If you order now, it will appear on your Kindle reader the day of its release (February 9th, 2026).
This is my latest passion project, a novel about two writers I’ve read and studied for many years now. It centers on a fictional meeting of hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler, banging out the manuscript to his debut The Big Sleep, and Nathanael West, himself working on his own magnum opus The Day of the Locust. Together, they scour the landscape of Los Angeles, 1939, which was a rich and dynamic time in the history of the city.
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.
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.
Following up on earlierannouncements, 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.)
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.
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.
Last time I wrote about publishing my back catalog on Kobo and making all my older books nonexclusive to Amazon. This is called “going wide” in independent publishing circles. I mentioned I had been meaning to do this for some time, but kept putting it off. If you’re wondering why, it involves a ten-year backstory about my rocky relationship with non-Amazon distributors.
My first push toward independent publishing came from attending the 2014 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle. Amazon was all over the conference, hosting multiple round table talks on Kindle publishing, seminars on how to publish on their platform, and handing out free CreateSpace print-on-demand samples. Although mildly skeptical, I returned home convinced it was worth an experiment or two.
The first book I published on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing was A Concordance of One’s Life. It’s a short story collection—essentially my MFA thesis put into book form. I had zero expectations of big sales or shooting up the bestseller list. If things went pear-shaped, I lost little.
The process was amazingly smooth. I slapped together a passable cover using photos from my phone. I published it on Amazon with ease, and lo, my first book was available. Sales were in the single digits. That’s fine, it was a start. My San Francisco novella Everywhere Man soon followed.
In 2014, it seemed natural that I should publish my books everywhere I could, and I began researching other options. Smashwords was my first stop.
Smashwords is an old-timer in the e-publishing sector, predating even Amazon (I believe). Its founder is an e-publishing evangelist who even e-published his own book to spread the good word. Unlike Amazon, which has quality standards they expect authors to follow, Smashwords accepts anything: Word documents, crappy PDFs, even plain text files. If it could be read, Smashwords wanted to host it.
This meant, of course, that my books were side-by-side with some truly awful options, both in terms of writing quality and reading comfort. The site’s layout was archaic, and had few options for book discovery.
What’s more, Smashwords offered no easy way to read the books or documents you downloaded. Amazon had free Kindle Reader apps and a Kindle standalone handheld device. Both automated buying, downloading, and reading books. With Smashwords, the reader was on their own.
Sales on Smashwords were nearly zero. The only way I was going to get people to find my books there was to spread links to Smashwords myself. If I was going to do that, I would rather send them to Amazon, which made it far easier to load my ebooks on a Kindle reader. For years I offered my first two ebooks for free on Smashwords. It made no difference in downloads.
I also tried Barnes & Noble. Unlike Amazon and Smashwords, B&N was immensely unfriendly in 2014 and reluctant to deal with an independent writer. They went so far as requiring me to file for a B&N vendor ID, which was the same ID used for selling goods in their physical stores, from books to candy to stuffed animals. I managed to get my first two ebooks up on their web site, but like Smashwords, they offered no way to make my books known to their browsing customers. What’s more, their Kindle-like handheld reader (“Nook”) was overly expensive, underpowered, and did not sell well.
Next came Apple Books. Like B&N, they were also reluctant to deal with independent writers. They made establishing a publisher account feel like I was dealing with a bureaucrat who could not stop rolling his eyes as I filled out the form. Worse, they don’t support buying a book on the Web—you had to launch their Books iPhone or iPod app to search the Apple Store. And, like the others, there was almost no way to get my books in front of people who might be searching for a title like my own.
That’s when I got to Kobo’s Writing Life, which is Kobo’s e-publishing system. Kobo was far more welcoming than Apple and B&N. Publishing books was almost easier than Amazon’s KDP. They offered resources for writing and editing their books, and links to print-on-demand publishers if I wanted to offer a paperback on their site.
Like the other non-Amazon platforms, though, discovery was again a problem. Once more, it was upon me to spread links to my Kobo pages far & wide so readers could find my books. And, I don’t believe Kobo at that time offered an ebook reader of their own, leaving readers on their own to load their purchased selections on a reader. (I might be mistaken about this last point, however.)
Ten years on
Reviewing these options over ten years later, it’s remarkable how little has changed.
Kobo remains the best of the non-Amazon bunch. Their publishing system is similar to the 2014 experience, but it was always easy to use and navigate, so I’m fine with that. It still has its publishing resources list, and its book details pages (where a reader can examine the book before buying) look about the same as before.
B&N learned their lesson the hard way and made publishing books on their web site much, much friendlier. Their publishing portal operates much like Kobo’s now, and it appears it’s easier for a new writer to sign up. Smashwords was sold to Draft2Digital, but the web site stands more or less as it was when I first logged in. Apple remains a cold and unfriendly business partner.
The biggest remaining problem with these platforms? Discovery. I’ve used the word a few times already. Let me explain what it means in this context.
If you go to the home page for any of these booksellers, you are presented with bestsellers and new books and old standbys from the Big Four publishers—Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins, and their numerous imprints. While Amazon also gives these big-name (and high-paying) publishers lots of screen real estate, you will also find titles from independent authors mixed in, especially on their Top 100 lists for the various genres: Westerns, science-fiction, biography, and so forth. Not so with the other platforms.
Amazon also offers independent authors the ability to advertise their books. Advertising can be set up a few different ways, but it’s usually a per-click price auction. The author gets to decide what search terms or what kind of content the ad should be placed near. This is an amazing way to let readers know of your work.
Per-click advertising is unavailable on the other platforms. Kobo toyed with the idea, but never followed through.
Likewise, Amazon will advertise your book—for free—through “Others bought these similar books” and “Suggested titles” lists it shows on book detail pages. This is another great way for readers to discover new books—if someone enjoys cyberpunk, it’s likely they’ll at least want to know about my take on the genre.
The other platforms only offer a “More titles by this author” on a book page. That’s it. Worse, this feature is broken, and has been broken for over ten years. Here’s why.
Amazon has a concept of author pages, where a writer can group their titles under their name and biographical blurb. It’s sort of like a bookshelf of all the author’s works. That’s why you can click the link to my name on any of my book pages and go right to my Amazon author page.
None of the above platforms—including Kobo—have such a concept. Their “More titles by this author” lists are nothing more than a lazy search of all books on their site with the same author name. When you have a name as common as “Jim Nelson,” that means books by complete strangers are presented as mine.
This was annoying, but forgivable, in 2014. It’s maddening in 2025.
I wrote Kobo support about this in 2021. As with per-click advertising, they said author pages were something “we are looking into the possibility for the future.” They’ve yet to follow through. Remember, their systems know which books are mine—I uploaded them to their servers through a single account! Yes, things get more complicated when a single author has multiple publishers, but that doesn’t excuse using a simple keyword search to locate an author’s books.
Year after year, Amazon has listened to independent authors and improved their publishing system to accommodate our needs. Is it perfect? Not in the least. But I do see a continuous process of refinement unseen on the other platforms. That demonstrates to me a level of commitment the others are not making.
I’m not here to tell you that Amazon is a wonderful company. You may have real issues with their size, their sales model, their profits, their international scope, their practices, or their founder’s politics. I won’t argue with any of that.
But for ten years now, Amazon has treated me more like a business partner than any other publishing platform out there. Not a peer, perhaps, but at least a partner of sorts.
That’s an awful lot of grumbling on my part. Why move my books to Kobo now?
My Kindle Unlimited page reads have dropped considerably in the past two years. Sales have dropped too. I don’t write the kind of books that move big numbers of copies. That throne is currently held by romance, fantasy, and hard science-fiction multi-volume series, with lots of battles and excitement, and plenty of sex and plunder. I prefer standalone novels centered around one or two characters, and stories with a solid beginning, middle, and end.
On the advertising front, the booming Kindle publishing market has brought with it inflated per-click prices. I’m seeing $2+ per-click(!) auction prices for certain high-value, high-margin book categories, a price I’m unwilling to pay, since a click is no guarantee of a sale.
With my back catalog having a harder time finding an audience, it’s time to expand their availability, especially since I’ve learned that folks in Commonwealth nations seem to prefer Kobo.
