As an author, it isn’t only important to get people to buy your latest release but to also get new readers discovering your backlist of books.  Keeping the momentum going on previously released books after the launch day is long past will help keep a more consistent income coming in so that you are not only making a living off your latest book and feeling like you must publish every 2-3 months to make it work.  Below are some ideas on ways to promote your book backlist to help new readers discover them.

Let’s start! Here are just 5 ways to market your backlist

Schedule Promotions for Backlist Books Around your Releases

So this seems pretty obvious but I want to explain a bit more here.  Don’t just wing it.  Don’t just randomly decide that you should do a sale or freebie of a backlist to boost sales and new readership. Plan it. Look at your year ahead of you, what months are you planning to release new books?  By taking that into account then sit down and decide when a good time to promote older books would be. Do you have a new book in a series coming out and want to push sales of the first book maybe a few months before, then maybe a sale of the last book currently out in the series right before the release of the next book? Look on the calendar decide when that should be.

Look at holidays and special features or promotions you can be doing that might not necessarily mean putting a book on sale but highlighting it with a new short story of the characters and having it featured on a blog, in a group, in your newsletter, etc.

Think of all these possibilities and PLAN THEM OUT. Plan the entire year and have this figured out ahead of time so that you know what will happened when, if you need to try for a BookBub feature, or go for an ad, when you need to have more money set aside for advertising or graphics, etc.

Plan out this schedule for your release and backlist promotion and you will be flying less by the seat of your pants and have more consistent exposure for not just new releases but prior books too.

Promoting Previous Books with Your Welcome Email Sequence

Do you have a mailing list?  No??!!? Okay sorry I know but for real you want a mailing list and need to be growing it from day one and it offers a massive opportunity for exposing your back list to readers.  So what is a Welcome Sequence?  When a subscriber joins your list you should have a custom welcome email that they get, and in some cases you should do a sequence of 2-3 emails to onboard your new subscribers to all the awesome that is you. How you set up your welcome email or sequence I believe depends on how you aquired the new reader.  If most new subscribers come from warm sources (your website, your books, social media) you can get away with one email, two if you are feeling extra in the marketing mood.  However, if you are getting a lot of new subscribers from giveaways or book freebie downloads (InstaFreebie / BookFunnel) then I think a 2-3 email welcome sequence is important and the perfect spot to talk to new to you readers about your books/series that are currently out.  If you don’t do this then I honestly fill it can be a missed opportunity.

Market your Backlist by Using your Frontlist

I know this seems common knowledge but it is important and I have some twist on this for you.  So the biggest push for your backlist is grabbing new readers with your frontlist (essentially your new releases that hook some new readers will funnel them back to your backlist) but I’m not just talking about your current books. I’m talking about creating fresh content  consistently to push your backlist. This can be done in more ways than just new book releases.

• Newsletters with newsletter exclusive stories

• Blog posts that keep people coming to your site and reading you.

Keeping Your Back Matter Updated with Samples of Your Other Books

Your new release can feed into a sample of an older book, your older books should all have samples of other books/series in them as well.  They’ve just finished your story, loving it enough that they continue reading your sample that is short and sweet but has a great hook and with that you’ve fed them into picking up your older books.  This is another form of your frontlist promoting your backlist, but it isn’t just your newest book, but all your books promoting another of your books and this is HUGE.  If you haven’t done this yet with your

Keeping your Backlist Front and Center with Social Media

Utilize Throwback Thursday on Facebook and consistently promote your backlist with teaser, freshening them up from time to time. Do the same on Instagram and even Pinterest.  Your new releases get a lot of marketing effort in the build up to launch but you don’t want to forget the past books during the lull between releases on Social Media, and with this some consistency will be key in enticing potential readers into checking out these books just as you would do for your new release.