Backlist

The co-head of Curtis BrownSee Curtis Brown listing Heritage contributes to our Q&A series

Describe your job
I represent the literary estates of around 150 dead writers - my sole purpose is to keep their work alive and to get it into the hands of new readers.

The backlist boom which surged during the pandemic continued with a mighty push from TikTok in 2022, as nearly two-thirds (£1.19bn) of Nielsen BookScan revenue last year came from editions published in 2021. This is the second-highest share of revenue for a TCM 12-month period coming from titles released prior to the beginning of that year.

A BookTok clip about Cain's Jawbone has had 4.2 million views, gained over 1 million likes, has attracted 5.300 comments and has been shared over 36,000 times on rival social media platform Whatsapp.

Launching a book is difficult and book launches are getting more difficult.

For as long as I have worked in publishing, I have wondered what makes some books work and others don't. I am sure everyone who works publishing books wonders the same things. When things shift, like they did in 2020, you wonder a little more-what is still true about your incomplete view of how it all works.  Read more

Open Road has published some 10,000 titles to date, and is currently producing around 2,500 a year. At LBF it has been excited to announce its Alan Sillitoe deal which will see it publish 24 of the celebrated British writer's backlist as ebooks, as well as the third volume of Sillitoe's "Start in Life" trilogy, the unpublished Moggerhanger, which it will publish in both print and digital.