Kindle indies getting pre-orders

Kindle indies getting pre-orders

When Amazon wanted to put pressure on the publisher Hachette during some recent negotiations, one thing they did was take away pre-orders from some books.

Pre-orders are important. One of the big things they do is drive a book up the bestseller list, even before it is released (it’s not uncommon that some of the bestsellers are on pre-release).

Broadly speaking, traditionally published authors have tended to side with Hachette during what I call the “Hachazon War”, and indies (independent authors) have tended to side with Amazon. That’s just a rule of thumb, though…your authors may vary. 😉

One ironic thing that some indies mentioned, though, is that they couldn’t do pre-orders for Kindle books when using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Amazon punished Hachette by taking away something it hadn’t given to any of the KDP indies.

Well, I’m happy to let you know that’s changing!

Indies can now also do pre-orders, as outlined in this

public KDP help page

It’s pretty simple: you say that a new book will be published at a future date, and allow pre-orders (it can happen in any of the KDP markets except India, which doesn’t do pre-orders for some reason).

Pre-orders push a book up the bestseller list.

The publisher (which may be just the author) doesn’t get paid until the customer is charged (on release day), but does get reports about pre-orders before that.

This certainly helps level the playing field.

One concern I have: what happens if somebody announces a pre-order…and then doesn’t have the book ready?

Do they just get to announce a new date, or are the orders canceled and then they have to be placed again?

Part of the idea of this is that you could announce a book while you were writing it or while it was in the production phase following the writing.

They only let you have up to ten at a time, but I predict right now that you’ll see people doing those ten, and doing them into the future. If somebody produced a series, and you could pre-order them now with a book coming out every year (or six months or month), that might make many people more likely to buy it.

Hey, here’s an idea: somebody could do one where a chapter or short story came out every day for ten days. You could pre-order them all on the same day, and then it would be sort of like a serialized novel.

I’m not big on pre-orders myself, but many of you may use this.

Oh, I should mention: you can’t pre-order Kindle Unlimited “borrows”. I’ve mentioned that before, but I’m sure some people are getting caught by that. They intend to borrow the book, and pre-order it…and then get charged for it.

I should also mention that Amazon announced much bigger “pool pay” for publishers in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited. That’s the money that people split for each borrow, and it made sense that they would raise it, since one has to assume that Kindle Unlimited has added a lot of borrows to the pool.

I wonder if Amazon was thinking that they needed to something good for authors right now, during the Hachazon War. I don’t think that would have been the sole impetus, but it might have accelerated a development schedule.

Amazon is, I believe, needing tradpubs (traditional publishers) less and less…and to do that, they need authors. Making publishing through Amazon more attractive helps get that content (and often exclusive content) that they need to thrive without the Big Five.

What do you think? Do you care about pre-orders? Do you deliberately check what is coming up in the future? Have you ever pre-ordered a book and not gotten it when promised? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

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This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy  Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

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