Pre-order to profit: strategic insights for business authors
Your review copy is approved and the email arrives: the book is now available for pre-order. Do you tell everyone immediately, or hold back? The answer depends far more on your visibility than on the book.
What pre-orders actually are
Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble and others let readers order and pay for a book before its launch date. On launch day it dispatches automatically, or downloads instantly for ebooks.
The caveat that changes everything
How visible are you? Known individuals with an engaged community, a large following and thousands of email subscribers have far more room to manoeuvre. Those with smaller communities need to be far more selective, because you only have so many people to sell to while chasing a goal such as an Amazon bestseller title.
The advantages
Buzz: pre-orders let you make the grand entrance early and build momentum through to launch day, gauging interest and generating word of mouth.
Bookstore visibility: Amazon ranks new books under 30 days old in Hot New Releases, giving you a window of placement alongside established titles.
Big lists: the New York Times and Wall Street Journal count pre-orders towards rankings.
Testing: a notification to a smaller group tells you whether your audience knows about and wants the book, and lets you tweak the description, tagline and unique selling points before the wider push. Pre-orders can also raise capital upfront if you are self-publishing.
The disadvantages
Pre-orders can hinder Amazon bestseller status. Every pre-order sale is one fewer sale on launch day, and launch-day concentration is what earns that title.
You can also burn the hype early. If engagement is thin when you post about pre-orders, interest dies before the book exists, and there may not be enough new people seeing the post to rebuild it.
How to decide
Weigh your overall book goals, your reach and your capacity. Both strategies are correct in the right context. What is never correct is choosing by default.