Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Welcome to the Frequently Asked Questions page for the Penguin Random House Backlist Vault site!

If you cannot find an answer to your questions on this page, please email us at:

syurch@penguinrandomhouse.com

TITLE AVAILABILITY ON THIS SITE

As of October 2023, Juvenile and Young Adult titles are included in the Backlist Vault.

Backlist is any ISBN that has been on sale for more than one year.

The entire PRH Adult catalog lives on this site. However, the majority of collections and lists comprise backlist titles. In some cases, a more recently-published title (frontlist) may be valuable to include in a list, so we don’t strictly adhere to the backlist/frontlist rule.

Every list is manually created, accounting for rate of movement, inventory availability, and direct relevance to a topic. In very few cases will titles with low ROM be included on any list. You and booksellers can be assured that these lists consist of backlist titles that consistently sell well.

COLLECTIONS

Categories and tags can be used to narrow down results when browsing collections. Categories refer to broad topics (e.g. “Holidays”, “Award Winners”, “Move & TV Tie-Ins”, etc.); tags refer to more specific subtopics within these (e.g. “Halloween”, “National Book Award”, “Fall 2019 Movie & TV Tie-Ins”, etc.). On the “All Collections” page, click on any category or tag on the left side of the page to view all collections applicable to each topic or subtopic.

All collections are sorted by rate of movement. The first title that appears on any pre-made list or collection has the highest rate of movement on the list, and the last has the lowest.

USING THE SITE

Use the Search function to look for blog posts or collections that have already been created. If you’re unable to find a list you need, email us at backlist@penguinrandomhouse.com and we’ll direct you the list you’re seeking, or create it.

Yes, you can! Within any list, click on the small heart icon underneath the titles you wish to include in your refined list. When finished, click on the “Wish List” icon at the top of the page. A new page will open showing only the titles you’ve selected from the original list. You can download your new collection into Excel or a PDF using the download icon located toward the top of the page on the right.

Yes! All roads lead to Edelweiss! Every Blog Post, as well as every Catalog on the Catalogs & Sell Sheets Page, allows users to click through to an Edelweiss markup. For title lists, or lists you create yourself, you can export into Excel and create your own Edelweiss collection.

If you don’t want to use one of the collections already created on the site, you can create a customized collection using Search. However, the only titles that will surface using the Search function are those with the word you’re searching in the title, body copy, or author name. It’s the same type of Search that happens on myhouse or other Sales sites.

In the meantime, tap the heart icon next to any book you wish to add to a list. The heart will fill in when you’ve added that book to your Wish List and you can see number in your cart increase in the header. (Tap the heart again if you wish to remove the title from your Wish List.)

Visit your Wish List before you leaving the site to download your collection of books as either a PDF or Excel file. You can then email this collection to yourself or to a colleague.

Note: depending on your computer preferences (i.e. you need to allow cookies), your Wish List may not be available the next time you visit the site so please download your Wish List before you leave. Also, the download functionality may be impacted by the browser you’re using; in our tests, we noted that Chrome seems to work best. If you’re using Firefox, please “save” the Excel grid to your desktop before you open it.

Good news, though! Sometime in 2020, this will change, and titles will be tagged for promotional opportunities and other themes. At that point you’ll be able to collect more targeted and specific title lists.

DOWNLOADING TITLE LISTS

The number of titles in your title list or wish list impacts the amount of time it can take to download that list. We’ve identified the current maximum number of titles for each format (900 for Excel, 450 for PDF) because larger lists don’t download properly.

There are also varying download results by browser type. We’re still testing this feature but what we’ve discovered is that Chrome has the most consistent and fastest downloads for both Excel and PDF. If you’re using Firefox, please “save” the excel grid to your desktop before you “open” it to avoid error messages. We’ll update this page as we continue to test the site.

We built out 4-across format list in PDF as we thought that format was the best combination of legibility and efficiency.