1738: How Often Should You Publish by Seth Godin on Advice on Content Creation Guidelines

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[00:00:30] This is Optimal Work Daily. How Often Should You Publish by Seth Godin of Seths.blog How many movies should you star in next year? How many records should you release? How many songs should you write? How many times a week should you post to your blog? And when should my next book come out or your next newsletter or that next cartoon? What about Nike? They launch more than one product every day. Is that too many?

[00:00:57] A lot of the stuff marketers make is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk that consumers merely tolerate. But some of it is not spam. It's content. Stuff worth reading, worth paying for. At the very least, worth paying attention to. So, how often? This discussion is usually filled with superstitions, traditions, and half-truths. Daily comics come out every day because that's when newspapers always came out.

[00:01:24] And newspapers came out once a day because it was too expensive to publish three times a day. And advertisers and readers wouldn't support the extra expense. When movies were met with great fanfare and often stayed in the theaters for months, it was suicide for a big movie star to do three or four movies a year. But in a DVD YouTube world, there's not a lot of evidence that this pace makes as much sense. Saturday Night Live was on every week because there's only one Saturday a week. But if it had launched today, it's hard to see the benefit of it being a weekly.

[00:01:54] I'd like to propose that you think about it differently. There's frontlist and backlist. Frontlist means the new releases, the hits, the stuff that fanboys are looking for or paying attention to. Frontlist gets all the attention, all the glory, and all the excitement. They write about frontlist in the paper and we talk about the frontlist at dinner. Dig is the frontlist. Siskel and Ebert is the frontlist. Backlist is Catcher in the Rye or 1984.

[00:02:22] Backlist is the long tail, the idea, and now the long tail, the book. In a digital world, backlist is where the rest of the attention ends up and where all the real money is made. Backlist doesn't show up in the news, but Google is 95% backlist. So is Amazon. Sitting in a meeting yesterday, I brainstormed a term, Haystack Marketing. I Googled it to see if someone else was using it. You guessed it, number one match was an article I wrote eight months ago.

[00:02:52] Google doesn't forget, even if you do. So here's the strategy. 1. Assemble a tribe, a group of true fans, followers, people who have given you permission. Give them all the frontlist they can handle. Make it easy for them to spread the word, to dig you or bring a friend to your movie, or buy your new book for their friends. If you create too much content for this crowd, then you're publishing too much. They care, and they want to hear from you. 2.

[00:03:21] Promote your backlist. Invest significant time and money to make your backlist available, to recirculate it, to have it adopted as a textbook in English class, or featured on Netflix, or part of a retrospective on TV. Take all that money you waste in frontlist marketing and spend it on the backlist instead. 3. Repeat. Frontlist becomes backlist. Backlist grows. Fanbase grows. It scales. Frontlist reaches your fans.

[00:03:49] Your fans spread the word, and eventually your backlist reaches everyone else. The backlist turns some people into fans, who then look for the frontlist. The best-selling fiction authors, with one exception, all got hassled by their publishers for writing too often. Earl Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling. All but one had to write under a pseudonym because their publishers said they wrote too much. Nonsense. They wrote for their tribe. They give their followers just barely enough to read. Not too much.

[00:04:19] Not by a long shot. And then they were lucky enough to have persistent and talented publishers that managed to get their backlist read over and over by millions of people. People who turned into fans. Key assertion. You don't publish it unless it's good. You don't write more blog posts than you can support. Don't ship more variations of that software than your engineers can make marvelous. But given that you've got enough bench strength, enough remarkability to spare, now what?

[00:04:48] When I look at my work, I think I'm in sync with my readers. One blog post a day feels right. While ten, which some bloggers pull off, wouldn't work for us. One book a year feels right. While three a decade, which Malcolm Gladwell does, wouldn't work for me or my core readers. On the other hand, I do a lousy job of self-marketing my backlist.

[00:05:09] I have no doubt that a more patient push of the dip would have doubled the numbers of books I sold, but posting about quitting all the time would have annoyed you guys to no end. It's still selling well, but given the base of sales, a big front-list launch can lead to even bigger backlist, of course. More focus on the backlist would have been a profitable choice. The thing is, organizations can do this far better than an individual author can. Example, in the last month, four of my books have been mentioned in the New York Times.

[00:05:38] The Dip, All Marketers Are Liars, Meatball Sunday, and Small Is The New Big. All backlist, all to people not in our tribe. This is far more useful, and surprisingly predictable, than the hit-or-miss nature of front-list promotion. In my case, I think I'm putting my skills to better use when I'm writing, but that means I need to figure out how my backlist is going to get noticed.

[00:06:00] If you've got a team, part of the team should obsess about the backlist, honing it, editing it, and promoting it, while the rest work to generate, as opposed to promote, the front-list. The opportunity isn't to give in to temptation and figure out how to recklessly and expensively market the front-list. It is to adopt a long and slow and ultimately profitable strategy of marketing your ever-growing backlist.

[00:06:25] You just listened to the post titled, How Often Should You Publish? by Seth Godin of Seths.blog. And big thanks to Seth, who is a super popular writer with 19 best-selling books. He's also the creator of Alt-MBA, which is an online leadership and management workshop. Alt-MBA uses digital tools to engage with small groups of 120 students in an intense four-week process.

[00:06:54] It's been going on since 2015 and has transformed the lives of more than 4,500 people in more than 70 countries. And a little more about Seth, he has been writing daily on his blog for over a decade now, and more than 60,000 people have taken his online courses. He also has five TED Talks. His site is definitely worth checking out. He's got a lot to offer there. You can find his massive blog, but also books, podcasts, speaking, and so much more, all right there on his site.

[00:07:24] But I think that is going to do it for today. I thank you as always for being here and being a subscriber. And I'll see you back here tomorrow, as usual, where your optimal life awaits.