Another Go at Pre-Orders

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

This is my third post on pre-orders. As you might remember, I wasn’t much of a fan of them when I tried them (over much of 2016).

This time I decided not to run a long-term pre-order.

I didn’t like the pressure of feeling like I was under the gun to deliver. It’s been a while since I wrote for a traditional publisher and maybe I’ve gotten used to my deadlines getting softer.

This time I waited for my book to be finished and then put it up for a very short pre-order while the book was being edited (knowing I had plenty of time to finish my edits before uploading the final version).

I put the book up on both Amazon and Draft2Digital’s retailers (some of which are set-up for pre-orders, some aren’t) on January 2 for a January 17 release. I picked a Tuesday, since a lot of traditionally-published cozies are launched on Tuesdays and many savvy readers have an eye open for releases.

It took a while before I started seeing any sales happening. At first, I had a hard time even finding my book on Amazon.  By the 10th, the book was showing at around 50,000 in the best sellers rank, so it was finally being discovered. I’m not sure if Amazon sent any emails to my readers to notify them of the pre-order, but the sales did seem to come at once.

Sales at Draft2Digital retailers, judging from my ranking on the different sites, were also occurring.  The D2D dashboard doesn’t reflect pre-order sales but reports them after the release.

Draft2Digital does make the process very easy.  You can set pre-orders there without the need to upload a draft (as opposed to Amazon, which doesn’t allow ‘asset-less’ pre-orders). As D2D states: “You can set up pre-orders to nearly all Draft2Digtial store partners as far out as ninety days to a year in advance of your chosen release date. You aren’t even required to have a final manuscript or cover, as long as you upload those things no less than ten days before release. We recommend pre-orders as a way to capture readers’ interest prior to the book’s launch and build up a powerful boost to your sales rank on release day.”

What I did like about the pre-order is the ability to upload everything and then work on getting all the details ironed out….the better-formatted book description, getting the ISBNs worked out,  creating a newsletter with active buy-links, deciding on pricing, etc.

Another nice thing was having live links when I finally did announce the release in my newsletter. In the past, I’ve sent newsletters without the print link, since it takes a while longer for printed books to show up live at retailers.

I also like that when the book finally did release, the Amazon page was quickly populated in the ‘customers who bought this also bought’ section, which introduced my book to more readers.

Amazon has a few requirements regarding pre-orders (some of these requirements are new):

There is a minimum amount of time you can schedule a pre-order.  So if you were thinking of having a week-long pre-order, that won’t be permitted by Amazon: “Pre-orders must be scheduled 10 or more days (from midnight GMT) before the book is released.”

Pre-orders are available in all Amazon marketplaces (except for India).  The books release at midnight in the local time zone.

The deadline for your final version of the manuscript is 3 days before the release.  Or, more specifically: “The final version of your manuscript that you want to use for your pre-order eBook must be uploaded and republished at least 3 days before the release date you set, with the last day for upload starting at midnight, GMT. For example, if you were releasing an eBook on September 20, you would need to upload and republish it by 11:59 PM GMT on September 16. To help prevent confusion from time zone to time zone, we’ve added a timer you can follow to see when exactly your book is due. We recommend you use the timer to see the actual deadline.” 

For those of us worried that some unforeseen disaster will make our release date impossible, Amazon does now offer an option to reschedule the release.  This option is through our KDP bookshelf  (click the ellipses under Book Actions).  Under ‘Pre-order’, click ‘edit release date.’  Save and submit.  Amazon allows this action one time for as much as 30 days past the original launch date.

However, if you cancel the release altogether: “If you choose to cancel the pre-order, you may unpublish your eBook from the Bookshelf. When you unpublish an eBook in pre-order, you will be unable to list any eBook for pre-order for one year.” 

This particular go at pre-orders was successful enough (and Amazon’s new flexibility was encouraging enough) for me to plan other short pre-order periods for future releases.

Have you tried out pre-orders? How did it go?

Giving Pre-Orders Another Try:
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Photo via tookapic via Visual Hunt

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