In this paper, we propose a sequential and incremental precoder design for downlink joint transmission (JT) network MIMO systems with imperfect backhaul links. The objective of our design is to minimize the maximum of the sub-stream mean square errors (MSE), which dominates the average bit error rate (BER) performance of the system. In the proposed scheme,we first optimize the precoder at the serving base station (BS), and then sequentially optimize the precoders of non-serving BSs in the JT set according to the descending order of their probabilities of participating in JT. The BS-wise sequential optimization process can improve the system performance when some BSs have to temporarily quit the JT operations because of poor instant backhaul conditions. Besides, the precoder of an additional BS is derived in an incremental way, i.e., the sequentially optimized precoders of previous BSs are fixed, thus the additional precoder plays an incremental part in the multi-BS JT operations. An iterative algorithm is designed to jointly optimize the sub-stream precoder and sub-stream power allocation for each additional BS in the proposed sequential and incremental optimization scheme. Simulations show that, under the practical backhaul link conditions, our scheme significantly outperforms the autonomous global precoding (AGP) scheme in terms of BER performance.