Support for Indie Authors discussion

I couldn't find any existing threads on this topic. What are your thoughts on this? Do it? Don't do it? How soon is too soon? Was it effective?

I've never used the feature because 1) I was always too eager to get the book out 2) Amazon wasn't offering it when I published. Now, should an author use it? Well, it's up to the author but one thing I can say is...Trad pubs do it so it must have its plus sides.

Quoleena wrote: "I couldn't find any existing threads on this topic. What are your thoughts on this? Do it? Don't do it? How soon is too soon? Was it effective?"

No, I don't believe it's ever come up before, but it's a great idea for a topic.

However, my response may not be helpful. I never consider setting up pre-orders as I often do not know when a piece will be done until it is and then, like G.G., I become anxious to get it out there.

The plus side is you can start marketing early. I have also seen ARC reviews and such posted on books before, even though the book wasn't officially yet for sale.

The bad part is all of your presales don't count towards your book rank in the Amazon store. So when your book officially releases, the preorder sales don't help you jump up any best selling list. Only orders AFTER you publish.

It's a tightrope. I didn't do preorder on my first two books, but I will with the 3rd. If you can wait around until mid-February, I'll let you know how it goes.

I made my upcoming novel Blood Ties available for pre-order through Amazon ahead of its Jan. 5 release, and I've noticed a couple things:

1) Since the post went live on Friday, I have gotten NO pre-orders (which, given how low sales are for my first novel, Bounty , I can't say I'm shocked). That's with some publicity on my end, too.

2) The pre-order is only for the Kindle edition; as far as I can tell, I can't do one for the paperback edition that I'm publishing through CreateSpace.

3) I've placed requests for advance reviews, and have heard NOTHING back. So maybe the problem here is more with me than the process, IDK.

Nathan wrote: "The bad part is all of your presales don't count towards your book rank in the Amazon store. So when your book officially releases, the preorder sales don't help you jump up any best selling list. Only orders AFTER you publish."

I know that preorder sales instantly go towards your Amazon ranking, instead of accumulating until the release day. The downside to this is if you only have a couple preorders, your ranking will be pretty low by the time it's actually for sale. So that's one of my own cons.

Another would be whether people will preorder a book from an unknown author in the first place.

I need deadlines, otherwise my procrastinator nature runs a muck. I'm ahead of schedule for my leap day release date, which is why I'm on the fence about whether or not to do it. If I do, it would be the first week of February. That'll help with the low ranking issue if it gets any preorders at all.

Still though, I'm not sure about it.

I guess it depends where you do it. If I remember right Smashwords accumulate them and they count as the people will download them, thus yes, it should help the ranking since most people who pre-ordered should get it the same day. I don't know about Amazon since it's newer for Indies. I didn't even know Indies could get reviews BEFORE the actual day it was out, I thought it was something reserved for trad pub (on Amazon).

Amazon made it available to all authors several months ago. I do like the Smashwords model much better. But my books have never fared well with them. Maybe this is just my version of being eager to get it out there. Perhaps ultimately, there's no downside as long as I time it right (well, other than Amazon penalizing me by not honoring the release date).

I've never done it because you need to have the book in over a week before it goes live - I can see why Amazon do it, but I can't see why I'd waste that time not having the book out. Maybe if I were famous enough to be able to drum up any kind of anticipation it would be worth it... but I'm not.

I've done it to have a set release date, but that's the only advantage that I can see. Ranking works exactly the same as with a live book. When the order is placed, you get the typical rank boost, so your best bet is a short period.
As far as how far out, you can set a preorder for less than ten days away, but it is then set. No changes can be made to your uploaded MS within ten days of release. Trying to make a change will actually get you banned from offering a preorder for a year.
Reviews are not allowed until a book is live. There can be some confusion, for example, when I put up my complete series, it appeared as if it had several reviews because of a glitch where it was pulling reviews from the already established first book, however, an email to support fixed that quickly.

Oh right. Amazon has that 10-day lockdown. I don't like that. Smashwords is way more lax in their policy, plus I like that any preorder accumulates until the release date. Also, Jacek made a good point about the likelihood of browsers skipping over a book that's not available to read yet for one that is. To me this is a bigger deal on Amazon, given their model of ranking and such. (Though this doesn't apply to popular authors. I've preordered the heck out of books before)

I've decided to go with Smashwords and do a standard release on Amazon. I don't expect to get any preorders there or on BN.com, iBooks, etc. I look at it as a placeholder on those sites. As for Amazon, I'll just chill and wait for February 29th.

Thanks everyone for your input.

Yeah, Amazon's policy could do with a rewrite - I mean, if you have a perfectly good manuscript there for them, then suddenly find a typo in it, would they rather all those customers downloaded the mistake?

I am currently doing a preorder for Code PINK which is releasing on the 29th of this month and it's been a nightmare. I suddenly had to make some last minute changes and had to pretty much rewrite half the story. The pressure to upload this by Saturday is staggering and God's truth, I will never put a book on pre-order with Amazon again until I have completely checked it over and I am sure there are no holes. Smashwords wants it tomorrow, but they emailed me and offered me an option to change the due date without messing with the pre-order date(I think) it's my own fault for getting ahead of myself in the interest of marketing the book. My first two are barely selling, which is driving me crazy, so I had hoped putting a pre-order on this one would help sell the other two. Also I am trying to get people interested in my new book. My fourth book will be out sometime next year, but I will be sure it's perfect before I even think of pre-order options.


Erica

L.S. wrote: "Yeah, Amazon's policy could do with a rewrite - I mean, if you have a perfectly good manuscript there for them, then suddenly find a typo in it, would they rather all those customers downloaded the..."

The same thing would happen if you simply released the book. I'm sure there is a reason for the ten day lockdown, but really, any time you upload and overwrite a previous manuscript, you run the risk of the wrong copy going live. That's anywhere, not just Amazon. Computers are not as infallable as we'd like to believe.

I am planning to do a preorder with my second novel coming out this spring, but I wouldn't set up the preorder until the book was 100% done and vetted - then I'd set it for the shortest lead time.

I was far too impatient to do a preorder with my first novel - but I chalk that up to beginner excitement. At some point, I need to be able to calm down, pace myself, and plan well ahead of time to factor in a preorder. The traditional authors do preorders, so I want to as well. I always try to pattern my publishing business after industry standards.

Christina wrote: "L.S. wrote: "Yeah, Amazon's policy could do with a rewrite - I mean, if you have a perfectly good manuscript there for them, then suddenly find a typo in it, would they rather all those customers d..."

Well, to a lesser extent. KDP processes my corrections within 24 hours, so not nearly as much time goes by with the mistake there to be seen. But in the case where the buyer hasn't even downloaded it yet, you have a chance to stop them from getting the bad file - but Amazon won't let you.

I set my new release up on a preorder simply because I wanted a buy link to build my release day promos with. I didn't want to wait until the day of release to get the info- I wanted to be ready and have my contacts who were blogging and tweeting about it to have the info ahead of time as well.
I set it up when I was finishing up my final edits and gave myself about 2 weeks. Amazon insisted that I upload my final draft 10 days before release day, so it helped light a fire under me to finish it up.
I like watching the preorders come in, but waiting that last few days was torture. I'm not very patient! haha