u/DoopleWrites

Hi there! I'm working on a long fiction project and I was super curious about what other people would think!

If a juvenile Gigantoraptor was suddenly dropped into a world full of Griffins and magic and dragons etc, how well do you think it'd fare? Would that change if it was a fully grown adult and in what way? What creature do you think would be it's equivalent in strength?

Today my book finally launched, after having it up on pre-order for two months. I assumed that having it available for pre-order would bring more eyes on it and help me promote the book, since I thought adding a link to all of my promo would help convince people to take a look at it.

Today, it finally launched. After months of editing, promoting and a failed ARC campaign, it's finally out in the world. And I am very proud to say that I have made a total of:

1 sale.

So that now begs the question: Was it worth it? Did setting my book up for pre-orders get any more eyes on it than if I just pushed "publish" and let it go out in the world by itself? What did I do wrong?

The "What" is pretty easy to understand in hindsight, honestly. I was launching this book on a shoestring budget (if the shoe was laceless), so I didn't run a single ad. By what I can surmise post-mortem, setting your book up for pre-order only actually helps if you plan to set up ads to run on Kindle - driving interest and getting the name out there.

On top of that, it's book 1 of a series. Setting up book 2 or 3 etc for pre-order is probably a good idea to do in order to drive sales and hype towards that book, since the readers can gorge themselves on the first before hungrily staring at the second in their reading list. But since this is the first of a series (largely) nobody has ever heard of, it did nothing.

Was it worth it?

In my case, no. I do think that the book would've benefitted from a new cover that I had commissioned three weeks ago that is still not available, but would've definitely been better than what I have now. I was just afraid of pushing back the release date in case anyone actually DID want to buy the book and got put off by the delay, but hindsight is 20/20 and if I knew that only one person would buy it, I would've pushed it back.

Did setting it up for pre-order get any more eyes on it?

No, it most certainly did not. Honestly, my marketing was just as effective as if I just posted it that same day and marketed the hell out of it afterwards. Again, if I was running ads at the time, maybe it would've been more effective. But unfortunately, I was not, so it was not.

So if you were wondering if you should put your book up for pre-order before release, just keep in mind:

• If it's book 1 of a series, there's really no point.
• UNLESS you run ads at the same time, which should (if you get your tags right) get some eyes on it - but not more than if you just posted ads after-release.
• If you have a series ready, set book 2 (and 3, if you can) to pre-order and release book 1 and market it, if you really want to go the pre-order route.

That's all I really have today. I hope my experience helped!