I’m sure most authors hope to make a lot of money selling their books, but apparently there are some ways to really shoot yourself in the foot and make the process as difficult as possible. I’m happy to take the bumps and bruises so you don’t have to!

This week’s learning has to do with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). When you get your manuscript ready for publishing and you decide to hit “submit” for pre-orders of your newly written Kindle Book (you can’t pre-order print books through KDP for some reason), don’t do what I did.

I set the release date as far into the future as possible (90 days) and then started telling people right away that they should pre-order my book. And they did! Sounds great, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. There are some important tradeoffs to consider, and I think that having a shorter pre-launch (at least on Amazon) might have been a better bet.

Here’s the downside of a long pre-order: Your pre-order sales are counted as a sale immediately. If you sell five books today through pre-order, your book ranking goes up based on those sales today. But if you don’t get a lot of new sales between today and your book launch 90 days from now, your ranking is going to drop back down to earth and won’t go up again until you have another large batch of sales. Every early pre-order takes away from the large number of sales you’re likely to get when you actually launch, reducing your chance of hitting a high ranking. 

Why is this important? Well, a high rank tells Amazon that other people are probably going to buy your book, and since they’re in the business of selling your book, they’ll list your book in recommendations paired with other books that people are looking at. That helps with sales as well.

BUT, it’s not all bad. Having early buyers still feeds the algorithm, so I suspect that the whole “buyers who buy THAT book will probably like THIS OTHER book” function will operate quite well with enough early pre-order buyers. Hopefully!