No other metric indicates the health and strength of a publishing program more effectively than the frontlist/backlist ratio," says Niko Pfund, academic publisher and v-p at Oxford University Press. The strongest academic programs at OUP pull about 75% of sales from backlist. Religion publishing in particular lends itself to backlist, since religion classics never go out of style. PW spoke with a dozen publishers serving the academic religion market to compare their approaches.
At University Presses
Backlist especially helps university presses because they must take risks in their primary function, to advance knowledge in academic disciplines. While important research may not command a large readership, titles that do can subsidize the less profitable books. Backlist "is the engine for academic research," says Carey C. Newman, director of Baylor University Press. "It takes years to build a wide, deep and enduring backlist." Three years into revamping a press that was faltering, Newman now hopes to cultivate a frontlist that will shift the current backlist/frontlist sales ratio from 20/80 to 70/30. Baylor's top backlist title, Toward BenevolentNeutrality: Church, State and the Supreme Court by Robert T. Miller and Ronald B. Flowers (1996) fills two volumes in its fifth edition, offering comprehensiveness and detail on every U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with the First Amendment.
"If we didn't have a backlist we'd be dropping faster than President Bush's approval ratings," jokes the Georgetown University Press director, Richard Brown. In any given year backlist provides 80% of the press's sales. It shapes acquisitions because the press assesses a book's long-term life before saying yes. "We're looking at the long haul, so we'll build our backlist brick by brick by brick," says Brown. The number of bricks in Georgetown's backlist is now 500 titles; it publishes 40 new books annually. Books by moral theologian Charles E. Curran—who paradoxically gained a reputation when he lost his teaching job at Catholic University in 1987—sell consistently in classrooms and religious bookstores.
Religion provides some of the strongest and deepest backlist at Princeton University Press. While backlist provides around 60% of sales overall, in religion backlist provides around three-quarters of the sales, according to Timothy Wilkins, associate director of sales. Princeton's list ranges widely among the world's faith traditions and includes social, historical and even economic analysis of religion. Al-Qur'an: A Contemporary Translationby Ahmed Ali (1988), with Arabic script on facing pages, sells more than 4,000 copies per year. Zen and Japanese Cultureby Daisetz T. Suzuki (1970), one of the 20th century's influential interpreters of Buddhism in the West, has sold more than 100,000 copies in paperback. Enduring titles get a makeover when scholars provide a new introduction for a fresh edition.
At Ivy League peer Yale, revenues only slightly tip toward backlist, according to press director Tina C. Weiner. Like other university presses, its list serves many disciplines. Weiner also differentiates her list by market appeal. "The same book might be handled in different ways for trade and course markets," Weiner says. Backlist also comes in handy when a major event suddenly makes a book topical. The death of Pope John Paul II revived Saints andSinners: A History of the Popes by Eamon Duffy. The 1997 original emerged in paperback, with new material, in July.
Cultivating an Academic Edge
Developing distinctive characteristics for a title that works in classrooms can be tricky. Some books can have introductory value, some work for reference, some authors age very well. "There are plenty of introductions to the New Testament out there," says Henry Carrigan, North American publisher of T&T Clark International, a Continuum imprint. "If you're going to do an introductory text that will last, whatever feature it has must really distinguish it." Though hardly introductory, one essential theological work that has been selling since it was translated into English in 1951 is Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. This mainstay at T&T Clark became a multivolume paper edition in 2004.
Another book faithfully selling in a second edition almost 20 years after original publication in the mid-1970s is Christian Theology by Millard J. Erickson (Baker Academic, 1998). The lengthy work—it's more than 1,300 pages—is evangelical and Baptist in orientation, yet has won readers across the theological spectrum, according to Robert Hosack, senior acquisitions editor.
The classroom isn't the only place where reference is needed, and sometimes it helps to fit in the pocket of a serious lay reader. IVP's Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms by Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki and Cherith Fee Nordling (1999) "continues to sell at a rate I would not have predicted," says Daniel G. Reid, senior editor of reference and academic books. The little book has amassed sales of 52,000.
Backlist at Sheed & Ward, the Catholic imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, is a gift of history. Sheed & Ward's backlist is filled with so many classics of Catholic thought that the publisher is developing a line of Sheed & Ward classics to distinguish these titles, reviving some oldies and goodies. Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Oct.), a biography of the British writer by the cofounder of S&W that was originally published in 1942, features a new introduction by Andrew Greeley. "Sheed & Ward resonates with Catholic book buyers and sellers, and there's a respect for and curiosity about that great backlist," says Jonathan Sisk, publisher of Rowman & Littlefield and Sheed & Ward.
Doing the Math
Academic backlist can take a while to establish itself, notes Stan Gundry, senior v-p and editor-in-chief at Zondervan. The typical lasting title has sales that grow each year, helping to amortize development costs over the first few years of a book's life. Though originally intended for lay readers, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart (2003) has moved into classrooms where Bible study and hermeneutics are introduced, thanks to the authority and accessibility of the text. "The success of this title suggests to me that a lot of writing by academics could be a lot less arcane and technical and still make an important contribution," Gundry tells PW.
At Harper San Francisco, deputy publisher and v-p Mark Tauber says the importance of backlist becomes obvious when you do the math. HSF specializes in a broad range of religion titles and has more than 800 active backlist titles, a handful of which still sell more than 25,000 copies annually. That kind of longevity tips the proportion of backlist sales to 60%. The World's Religions by venerable scholar Huston Smith has been selling steadily since it was first issued as The Religions of Man in 1958 and is one of the house's top 50 bestsellers. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster has sold more than a million copies since its publication in 1978.
Many Are Called
At Jossey-Bass, a number of key titles serve multiple audiences: trade, professional, academic. Authors Parker Palmer and Sharon Daloz Parks, whose work is rooted in the education field but whose real subject is human development and human needs, have produced books for both the classroom and the workplace. Palmer's The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life (1997) is the house's all-time bestselling book because it "sparked a movement," according to J-B executive editor Sheryl Fullerton. It is now used in health care and other professions where more attention is being paid to what Palmer calls the "inner landscape" of workers.
Some publishers see an intriguing change in what's being adopted for seminary and divinity school classrooms. Books like An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination by popular and prolific theologian Walter Brueggemann (Westminster John Knox, 2003) function as primary textbooks, and such titles individually rack up the largest sales at WJK, says Nicole Smith Murphy, product and special accounts manager. But works with a narrower focus make up in aggregate a greater overall share of the academic sales total. As theological disciplines teach more diverse perspectives, the result is more books being used per class. "Most of our textbook adoptions are not of the 'it looks and smells of a textbook' sort," says Murphy, who oversees marketing for WJK's academic titles.
Whether an author's reputation, a book's function or its suitability for multiple markets makes it endure, backlist is always in style, the basic black of academic publishing. Good backlist books, says T&T Clark's Carrigan, "continue to address needs that every generation seems to have."
