The F Words: October Rules

In September of 2022 The F Words moved from a frontlist book to a backlist book. A publisher’s backlist consists of all the books it still carries that were published a year ago, or longer. Some books a publisher carries go out of print. Others stay in print forever, bringing in revenues to the publisher at a steady pace. Consider the Harry Potter titles, or the Boxcar Children series, or  Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

When an author’s book goes into backlist, that doesn’t mean the author or the publisher stop promoting the book. In fact, the day of The F Words passing from front to back (September 15, 2022) would have made barely a ripple in my work day.

Except for the fact that I had just attended a webinar hosted by a branch of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) — a webinar on how to promote backlist titles. Wow! Talk about coincidence. One of the most encouraging things I learned was that so much of what I had done to promote The F Words in 2020 and 2021 also applied to promoting backlist titles. 

In particular, relating The F Words to relevant “awareness” days, weeks, or months was a good way of calling attention to it. And, I thought as I listened to the webinar, I was ahead of the game because way back in 2020, before The F Words was even published, I had made a long list of relevant awareness events. 

So I found that list again and studied it, this time with the idea that I would use Canva (see The F Words: Canva Posters) to make a poster for each awareness event, starting with October.

What a shock I had when I glanced at the list of awareness events. Some months had nothing that related to The F Words. Other months had two or three. But October — October had a dozen relevant events! There’s National Teachers Day; National Poetry Day; National Stop Bullying Day; National Prevent Bullying Week; National Transfer Student Week. And so on and so forth.

This meant that I would spend the last two weeks of September creating social media posters for each of these events. And then scheduling these posters to appear on social media.

Talk about initiation by fire. Or perhaps I should say initiation by pumpkin, because not only was there a National Pumpkin Day in October (natch), but it turns out that the official color of anti-bullying awareness is orange. So there’s a lot of orange in my October awareness posters.

I’ve posted three of my Canva creations in this blog. I hope you enjoy them. As for me, I’ve already created my November awareness posters and am starting to create the December ones — all of which I hope keep The F Words selling.

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The F Words is available wherever books are sold: from the publisher, City of Light Publishing; from IndieBound, the site for independent bookstores; from Barnes & Noble; and from Amazon. To get updates and the latest news on The F Words, subscribe to Barbara Gregorich’s Newsletter.