Leveraging the Backlist

Medium Mines the Gold

Not to brag too much, but I’m kind of a seer. I see what you guys do not. I have a third eye of perception. It wasn’t opened through meditation or some super trendy ayahuasca trip, my powers came to me after eating a box of Slim Jims and drinking a lot of instant decaf coffee. I know, it sounds improbable, but trust me. I have the power of foresight.

In 2017 I wrote the following in a post called “How Do We Leverage the Backlist?”

In publishing, the backlist used to underwrite current authors. Where would Grove Press have been without its backlist of evergreen, softcore pornography? Old titles are supposed to keep you afloat so that you can take risks with new material.

But there is no backlist on the Internet. Something published on Medium last week might as well have been published last year. Once a story or post dips below the algorithm’s time horizon, it ends up in a literary Hades, blowing around like autumn leaves in an underground parking garage with the shades of other offerings.

I understand that. I don’t like to see “old” things in my feed. I get really annoyed when I am offered posts that I have already read, but I am game to read old posts that I have missed. I guess I could mine backwards on individual authors. That might be the best way to do it.

But how, mathematically, is this supposed to work? Is Medium really willing to concede that all of the writing on the site only has a shelf life of…