A backlist is a list of older
book
A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, ...
s available from a
publisher
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
. This is opposed to newly-published titles, which is sometimes known as the frontlist.
Business
Building a strong backlist has traditionally been considered the best method to produce a profitable publishing house, as the most expensive aspects of the publishing process have already been paid for and the only remaining expenses are reproduction costs and author
royalty
Royalty may refer to:
* the mystique/prestige bestowed upon monarchs
** one or more monarchs, such as kings, queens, emperors, empresses, princes, princesses, etc.
*** royal family, the immediate family of a king or queen-regnant, and sometimes h ...
.
United States
In the US, backlist and
midlist publications were negatively affected by the
US Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all Federal tribunals in the United States, U.S. federal court cases, and over Stat ...
decision in the 1979 case ''
Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue''. This decision reinterpreted rules for inventory depreciation, changing how
book publisher
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
s had to account for unsold inventory each year, and their ability to depreciate it. Because stocks of unsold books could no longer be written down without proof of value, it became more efficient tax-wise for companies to simply destroy inventory.
The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell.
This has been somewhat mitigated by the development of
online bookselling, which makes less popular titles more accessible to average readers. (For more on this phenomenon, see
The Long Tail
In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. The distribution could involve popularities, random n ...
.)
Other industries
Recording companies also have backlists of music titles they have published.
References
Book publishing
Lists of books
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