What You Need to Know About Pre-Orders (For Hybrid or Self-Published Print-On-Demand Books)

As an author of a hybrid published or self-published print-on-demand book, you may be wondering if pre-orders are important or how they can fit into your overall strategy for your book. 

If you’ve chosen hybrid publishing and a print-on-demand distribution, your publisher most likely has an established process and point-of-view about pre-order campaigns. In most cases, hybrid publishers do not set up print-on-demand titles for pre-order campaigns, or, if they do, it’s for a limited time or for the ebook only. There’s no sales or distribution advantage to a pre-order campaign for these books because retailers will not be ordering copies in advance of the publication date.

If your hybrid published book does not have a pre-order period, you can instead expect that your publisher will load your files a few days before your planned publication date/launch date. Your book may be available before your launch date, which gives time for Amazon’s algorithms to recognize your product, ensuring that it will show in categories. This may take a few days, and you may feel frustrated by the uncertainty of this process.

There are, unfortunately, a few downsides to this approach: 

• You’ll miss the opportunity of adding your retailer links to the book page on your website in advance of launch, which may cause a last minute scramble. 
• If people are curious about and anxiously awaiting your book, it may not seem as real until it’s available through retailers. 
• If you’re pitching for podcast interviews or other media coverage, the journalist won’t be able to find your book through an online search. 

For these reasons, I typically recommend that self-published authors set their books up for pre-order. 

Currently, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing does not allow for print books to be set up for pre-order, only ebooks. As a result, authors who want to set their print books up for pre-order typically select to distribute their books through IngramSpark. This can be a clunky process, sadly, but should allow you to have your book widely distributed to online retailers with the option to pre-order both the print and ebook editions of your book.

Once your book is available for pre-order, we recommend that you:

• Add your retailer links to your website 
• Incorporate your retailer links into your social posts, driving people to varying points of purchase
• Update your social profile links to promote the pre-order call-to-action 

The value of pre-orders for most hybrid or self-published authors is access to retailer links so you can finalize your website and other marketing materials. Once you’ve added your book links to your website and social channels, you’ve established that your book is credible. 

After those assets are set up, you should turn your attention to preparing for launch week. It’s important to clarify that, for a print-on-demand title, I recommend a greater focus on first-week book sale promotion, especially if your goal is gaining bestseller status on Amazon. Launch week is when you should highly engage your network to purchase.

It’s better to have high first-week book sales than high pre-orders. If you spend a lot of energy on getting people to pre-order the book, you may not have enough first-week sales to give you the momentum you need to get the bestseller banner in your category on Amazon. There’s no advantage to you as a self-published, print-on-demand author to get those early orders. 

You can read more about the steps to follow to work toward bestseller status on Amazon here. 

Setting up your self-published or hybrid book for pre-order offers value in building credibility and momentum; however, your emphasis should be on the first-week sales in order to achieve bestseller status on Amazon and further improve sales.