Episode 057 - The Pros and Cons of Pre-orders with Joe Lallo
December 15, 2020
Joe Lallo discusses THE PROS AND CONS OF PRE-ORDERS, including the specific considerations of pre-orders on Amazon versus other platforms, whether or not pre-orders make sense for an author’s first book or for standalone novels, and things to keep in mind to avoid annoying your most faithful fans. We also talk about pricing strategies, including how to price box sets.
Joseph Lallo was educated at NJIT, where he earned a master’s degree in Computer Engineering. In September 2014 he was given the opportunity to take a promotion that would eliminate his writing time or become a full-time author. He chose the books. Since then he has written dozens of novels and novellas in genres across the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, including the international bestselling Book of Deacon series and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series.
In addition to writing, Joe Lallo helps run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Past ventures have included the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing podcast and BrainLazy.com. In his spare time he builds pointless doodads in his ridiculously over-equipped basement workshop.
"There's typically not a downside to having a longer pre-order elsewhere, but longer pre-orders on Amazon flatten out your spike, which might not be what you're after." --Joe Lallo
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast today. My guest is Joe Lallo. Hey, Joe, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Joe: I'm pretty good. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:12] Joseph Lallo was educated at NJIT, where he earned a master’s degree in Computer Engineering. In September 2014 he was given the opportunity to take a promotion that would eliminate his writing time or become a full-time author. He chose the books. Since then he has written dozens of novels and novellas in genres across the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, including the international bestselling Book of Deacon series and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series.
In addition to writing, he helps run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Past ventures have included the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing podcast and BrainLazy.com. In his spare time he builds pointless doodads in his ridiculously over-equipped basement workshop.
[00:00:55] And we're going to be talking today about a topic that I heard Joe and his SIX FIGURE AUTHOR co-hosts talking about a couple of months ago that I was really intrigued by, and that's the pros and cons of pre-orders. So before we dive into the details of that, Joe, can you just give us a little more background about your fiction work so listeners understand the context of your own use of pre-orders.
[00:01:18] Joe: Sure. I've been doing science fiction, fantasy and steam punk, primarily, since about 2010. I started with fantasy and then I just expanded into the other genres. In 2010, it was pretty early on for the indy boom, so it wasn't even called KDP back then, it was Digital Text Platform, so I've been around long enough to try an awful lot of things. I've been around long enough that pre-orders weren't always an option. If you listen to the SIX FIGURE AUTHOR PODCAST, I'm usually the guy who's telling you the thing I did that was a mistake so that you don't make the same mistake, but you learn from mistakes.
[00:01:52] So I started off with an accidental rapid release because my first book was actually a gigantic book that I split into three, so my first book was three books finished at the beginning and I've been releasing between five and zero books a year since then. On average, I release at least three books, so I've been reasonably prolific at this point. That means I've got almost 40 books out, I think. And pre-orders have been a pretty crucial part of my tactic for almost every release since they were an option.
[00:02:24] Matty: So you'll be able to speak from direct experience of rapid release and long series, but hopefully we'll be able to touch throughout on people who might be in a slightly different scenario than you are.
[00:02:37] So can you just give a high-level description of what pre-orders are and what the requirements are for pre-orders on the major retail platforms? ...
[00:00:06] Joe: I'm pretty good. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:12] Joseph Lallo was educated at NJIT, where he earned a master’s degree in Computer Engineering. In September 2014 he was given the opportunity to take a promotion that would eliminate his writing time or become a full-time author. He chose the books. Since then he has written dozens of novels and novellas in genres across the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, including the international bestselling Book of Deacon series and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series.
In addition to writing, he helps run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Past ventures have included the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing podcast and BrainLazy.com. In his spare time he builds pointless doodads in his ridiculously over-equipped basement workshop.
[00:00:55] And we're going to be talking today about a topic that I heard Joe and his SIX FIGURE AUTHOR co-hosts talking about a couple of months ago that I was really intrigued by, and that's the pros and cons of pre-orders. So before we dive into the details of that, Joe, can you just give us a little more background about your fiction work so listeners understand the context of your own use of pre-orders.
[00:01:18] Joe: Sure. I've been doing science fiction, fantasy and steam punk, primarily, since about 2010. I started with fantasy and then I just expanded into the other genres. In 2010, it was pretty early on for the indy boom, so it wasn't even called KDP back then, it was Digital Text Platform, so I've been around long enough to try an awful lot of things. I've been around long enough that pre-orders weren't always an option. If you listen to the SIX FIGURE AUTHOR PODCAST, I'm usually the guy who's telling you the thing I did that was a mistake so that you don't make the same mistake, but you learn from mistakes.
[00:01:52] So I started off with an accidental rapid release because my first book was actually a gigantic book that I split into three, so my first book was three books finished at the beginning and I've been releasing between five and zero books a year since then. On average, I release at least three books, so I've been reasonably prolific at this point. That means I've got almost 40 books out, I think. And pre-orders have been a pretty crucial part of my tactic for almost every release since they were an option.
[00:02:24] Matty: So you'll be able to speak from direct experience of rapid release and long series, but hopefully we'll be able to touch throughout on people who might be in a slightly different scenario than you are.
[00:02:37] So can you just give a high-level description of what pre-orders are and what the requirements are for pre-orders on the major retail platforms? ...
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[00:02:46] Joe: All right. A pre-order, as the name would suggest, is when you make a book available for order before its actual release date. So usually this is ideally at least a week, but most of the platforms now let you do multiple months. I don't know the maximum time -- I know Smashwords lets you do them up to a year and I think you can do at least six months on, KDP. And for a long time, a finished manuscript was a necessity, but I think Smashwords -- I, by the way, publish on Smashwords and Kindle -- Smashwords lets you do assetless pre-orders, which basically means you don't even need a cover. You just need a title and ideally a description. You don't need a finished manuscript for anything, although until recently it was pretty well recommended for KDP because there were some situations where, if you weren't very timely on putting your finished manuscript up, they would put whatever was there originally up. They've gotten better about that.
[00:03:45] So generally speaking to have a pre-order ready, you should have a title, the description, and the cover. You don't need the cover, but you should have the cover. It makes it more effective overall. And then anywhere between three days and a week before the actually release date, make sure you've got the finished manuscript in there, and then you're good to go.
[00:04:04] Matty: What are some of the considerations that people should be factoring in if you're talking about one of these platforms that allows a longer pre-order period, what would determine whether you decide to put it up a week or a year in advance?
[00:04:18] Joe: There's different value for preorders on different platforms. We'll look at iTunes or Barnes and Noble, iTunes in particular, when you make a pre-order sale on iTunes or Barnes and Noble or almost anything but Amazon, you don't get a rank boost on that. You get a rank boost on the day that you release. So every single pre-order counts as a day one sale.
[00:04:42] So a very long pre-order is really useful in that situation, because you can get a gigantic day one bump. Amazon, that's not how it works. Amazon gives you your rank boost when the pre-order happens. So technically every pre-order is stealing a day one sale. So you're going to have a lower first day spike. You'll have a better sales history, which has got its own value. But if your goal is to try to make a list or -- make a list is not necessarily what your aim is -- but if your goal is to rank very highly on release day, you're going to want a shorter pre-order on Amazon. There's typically not a downside to having a longer pre-order elsewhere, but longer pre-orders on Amazon flatten out your spike, which might not be what you're after.
[00:05:24] Matty: Do you ever have to weigh the benefits that you're looking for from a sales point of view to new readers against the reaction of existing readers? Because an existing fan versus someone who's looking for something to read might react differently to seeing something up that's going to be available in a month. The fan might say, Great, I'm definitely going to get that in my queue. And the new reader might just pass it by because they're looking for something to read now. How do you weigh those considerations?
[00:05:52] Joe: I think the main thing that you should do is, and I've heard a lot of people talk about when we talk about rapid release, they'll be like, If I have, three books that are already finished, should I put all three pre-orders up --you know, release the first one and put the second two pre-orders out. And I think the best way to balance the expectations of new readers with the expectations of old readers is to not have any more than one pre-order up at a time. If your Amazon page has got six pre-orders on it, people are going to be like, This is not the catalog that I expect it to be. If I really enjoy this, I'm not going to be able to binge it.
[00:06:22] If you've only got one pre-order up, it sends a message -- first off, it accurately represents the books that you've got available, but it also lets people know that you've got more stuff coming. So at most one pre-order just lets people know that your page is growing, but more than one pre-order can really start to get on the nerves of people who expect to have a complete reading experience when they go to your author page.
[00:06:45] Matty: If people are fairly new in their career, at what point does it make sense to consider a pre-order, like if they're preparing to publish their first book, does a pre-order make sense in that scenario?
[00:06:58] Joe: I think a pre-order still make sense even with your first book. I think you can argue that it makes more sense with your first book, because if you don't have any books available, a pre-order becomes your only product, so you can push it for a lot longer. Perhaps not so much on Amazon, but even on Amazon, maybe a longer preorder around the first one is not a bad idea because you can talk it up on social media and you can start flexing your muscles in terms of learning how to advertise it. Generally speaking, advertising a pre-order isn't the best idea because a pre-order is a tougher sell because people like instant gratification, but again, if you don't have any other options and you've never practiced advertising before, having a long-term product up that you can slowly accumulate and measure the success of your different advertising, I think that it's not a bad idea to pre-order your first book.
[00:07:48] Matty: If someone is equally new and they're building up their platform on social media, so they have few followers, they're promoting it on their site, through social media, but maybe they don't have a large pool of people to promote it to, what other options do they have for getting word out about it?
[00:08:05] Joe: There's a couple of things that you can do just in general. It's hard to book a promo for a pre-order because typically the places that do promos like there to be some sort of a history of quality, so they're usually looking for reviews and you can't get reviews on a pre-order. But if you're super new, you can try newsletter swaps. They're not as successful now as they were, but basically you reach out to someone -- and this assumes you have a newsletter, which again, if you're new, you might not.
[00:08:32] But you can also, basically when you are new and you don't have a network yet, one of the ways that you can get a network and start pushing this sort of thing is to do the legwork on a promo. So if you offer to do, say, a curated bundle, just reach out and say, Hey, listen, we're going to all put together and do a group promo, or a coordinated price drop, really anything that is annoying to organize, but somebody likes to be a part of it if somebody else does the work. You basically trade sweat equity for reputation and reach out to people who are in your same genre who were maybe on the same trajectory as you -- they're early on, or maybe if you're particularly energetic or confident, you can reach out to somebody who's very well-established and just talk about, Hey, can I help you run a promo? And by the way, in exchange, just mention me to your newsletter or mention me to your social media. Yeah, that's about it. You talk to people who are better established than you and offer to do some work for them.
[00:09:36] For a long time, doing guest blog, blogs aren't as big as they once were. But again, just offering your services to somebody who's got a bigger platform in exchange for a mention is often pretty useful. But don't be annoying. Take no for an answer and don't pester, because that will immediately put you on the naughty list.
[00:09:55] Matty: That's great advice. How about standalone versus series? If people are writing a series of standalone books, can they similarly benefit from a pre-order?
[00:10:07] Joe: Pre-orders are more useful -- in general marketing is more easy -- for series. Like if you were to put the link to your pre-order in the back matter of the previous book in a series, that's an excellent way. And generally speaking, that's a good timing for pre-order announcement is when the previous book comes out. Standalones are harder. They're still useful, but it becomes trickier to lead people into it. I would definitely use the same pre-order tactic. I would definitely put it up longer on wide and shorter on Amazon and talk it up.
[00:10:38] But in this case, with a standalone, you're basically going to have to be leaning on your reputation as an author, as opposed to the reputation of your series. So you're going to be working harder for your pre-orders on standalones.
[00:10:52] Matty: And finally, in this series of questions, what are the differences if an author is wide versus if they're exclusive on Amazon for considering a pre-order.
[00:11:03] Joe: Because Amazon does not give you a day one boost for all of your preorders, if you're exclusive to Amazon, you're going to want to be a shorter pre-order, but you should still have a pre-order.
[00:11:15] There's a couple of other aspects, even when you're not interested in accumulating sales or having an extra thing to push. Books don't show up exactly when you expect them to when you launch them just by hitting the go live button, it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Usually it's a few hours these days, but I can remember times when it took up to three days for a book to release.
[00:11:35] So if you're planning a big launch of anything and you've got promos lined up and you're going to do a Facebook live and you're going to do a social media push. You want your book to be available at the moment that you want it to be available, and you can guarantee that with a pre-order. If you've got a pre-order up at least a week early, or even a few days early, the book is guaranteed actually to show up when you said it would. So even when you're Amazon exclusive and the pre-order doesn't have a lot of punch rank-wise, even could leech away your initial rank, having at least a few days just for a solid initial release is a good idea.
[00:12:06] When you're wide, a long pre-order elsewhere is almost without con -- it's all pro. It could confuse people if you have two different length pre-orders. If you mentioned your pre-order announcement and it's not available on Amazon, which is where most of your readers are going to be, that could be confusing, but just communicate well.
[00:12:25] The other thing is when you're exclusive, one of the big things about it is that you have KU and there's almost no value to pre-orders when your primary readers are KU because they're not going to order it. They're going to wait until it comes out and then get it on Kindle Unlimited. If you are getting most of your money off of KU, you should still do a short pre-order, but a very short pre-order because otherwise there's just not a lot of value to having it up. The announcement that it will be coming out is exactly identical to a pre-order when somebody is waiting until they can just read it on KU.
[00:12:58] Matty: If someone likes the idea of having that control of knowing exactly when it's going to go up to avoid those delays that you mentioned, and so they're putting up a pre-order just for those logistical considerations, but not doing any promotion around it, is there any downside to that?
[00:13:15] Joe: Not really. There's a couple of things. If your goal is to do what they call a soft release or a stealth release, where you're just getting something up so that it's established on the thing, but you have a big launch strategy that you want to, say, start small and slowly build up your launch stuff, Amazon will do an announcement of your books. Sometimes you have no control over whether they do and they don't, and that announcement starts with pre-order. So if your goal is to quietly have the book up and make sure that it's out, or maybe you pull the stunt where you release the paper book early, the paperback early so that you can actually get reviews on a book that's still in pre-order, Amazon might announce the pre-order and give you a big number of sales during the pre-order period, which you were hoping to save for the release period.
[00:13:59] So that's really the only downside I would say to the short pre-order. And if your pre-order is only three to seven days, there's not going to be much risk of stealing. And even if it does, it's going to be within that sort of launch window. So I would say doing a preorder just to logistically have the release date nailed down to precisely when you want, it's a pretty safe bet as long as you don't have a very fragile release process that requires no mention of the book before it actually releases.
[00:14:29] Matty: Do you feel that there's any benefit now, if we're just looking at committed fans, do you find that fans who are going to buy the book anyway react differently to a pre-order than just seeing it go live and purchasable on the day of the launch?
[00:14:45] Joe: There's a little bit, basically when you've got your thousand super fans, or your three super fans, they are excited to hear from you and are excited to have a thing they can act on. So generally speaking, when you announced the pre-order, they're going to be excited and they're going to jump on it because they want to have the pre-order and it's standard announcement and standard promotion for a book launch, you're usually talking about it at least a little bit early. Oh, I just got the cover -- here's the cover. So if you are able to put up a pre-order at the first moment that you announced the books availability aside from, Hey, I'm working on blah, it lets people act on it immediately. And fans are going to want to.
[00:15:29] So that's one of the other things about a pre-order is if you have the ability to capture a sale every time you talk about your book, then you're going to get more sales overall. So yeah, you could talk about the production of your book and, Oh, it's going to be releasing in three weeks ... it's going to be releasing in two weeks. If there's a link for them to, Oh, let me just grab it now, you're going to get more people.
[00:15:52] If you just announced and talk about the books release and then eventually have a link that they can click, the people who saw those first three or four emails but maybe didn't see the actual release email might not click on it. But if they have the opportunity to, then they will do and fans more so than anyone. So even if you hadn't been shooting for any sort of promotional value to the pre-order, just it being another thing for you to announce keeps the fans a little bit more engaged ... we often talk about how newsletters tend to have more punch if they come out consistently. And if you're struggling for a thing to release a newsletter on, your one-week release, if that's what you do -- I'm not very consistent with my newsletters -- but if you're looking for a thing to talk about, the newsletter is one of the things you can talk about. And if it's the first thing you talk about, then each subsequent mention is going to hopefully get at least a few more clicks. So yeah, I think that you will get a lot of use out of preorders with your fans.
[00:16:48] Matty: Is there a different pricing strategy that people should keep in mind or pricing considerations if they decide to use a pre-order?
[00:16:56] Joe: A lot of people like to release their books a little bit cheaper, and then raise the price afterwards just to reward early buyers. Because more purchases early on gets you a higher release rate, release rank. So there are people who like to knock a dollar off or, heck, even release at 99 cents. I usually release at full price, but I've seen a tremendous amount of success with people doing this.
[00:17:21] But the big consideration you need to have and one that can really bite you if you do it wrong -- the people who order the pre-order will be charged whatever the book costs when it releases. So if you have the book set to 99 cents during the pre-order period, and you want the book to eventually cost $3.99, if you change the price and the price updates before the pre-order goes live, people who clicked on a book that cost 99 cents are going to be charged $3.99 for it. And that is an incredibly bad thing. You're going to upset people. So if you want to try the lower price initially thing, I would not recommend raising the price until, say, a full day after the book releases.
[00:18:00] But other than that, pre-orders, people are accustomed to them costing what a regular book costs. So you're not going to hurt anybody's feelings if you price full price for the entire time the book is available until an eventual price drop for another promo. But there's also the strategy of pricing cheap early on so that people will be encouraged to buy during the pre-order, and you'll have a nice boost. Works very well wide where the day one boost is huge with pre-orders.
[00:18:27] Matty: It's really surprising to me that the retail platforms would allow that scenario where someone pays more than what they thought they were going to pay.
[00:18:35] Joe: Yeah. I know that Amazon for other products will inform you that the price of basically a preorder is essentially sitting in your shopping cart. And I know a lot of time, if the price changes on something that's in your shopping cart, Amazon will send an email saying the price has gone up or the price has gone down. I would like to think they would do that with pre-orders, but I've not heard that they do.
[00:18:57] Matty: Yeah. It's surprising. Just to give some context for the pricing, how do you price the books in your series both on an ongoing basis and when you launch them, you said you normally pre-launch at the full price. What is the full price for you?
[00:19:12] Joe: My books are usually around a hundred thousand words. 150,000 for the epic fantasy and 75,000 for some of the shorter stuff. So my price range is typically $3.99 to $4.99. That's my standard full novel price. I have some novellas and stuff and I'll price those closer to 99 cents. But yeah, that's what I do with that. If a book's been out for over a year and I'm putting out the box set, occasionally I will drop the price early on.
[00:19:42] I also, by the way, am a big fan of free series starters. It was a fantastically effective method early on. It's lost almost all of its punch, but it's still probably my most valuable promotional tool. So my series starter dropped to nothing almost as soon as the second book is out.
[00:19:59] But also when I do promos, I almost never discount mid series books. The first one's free and then it goes to full price and stays full price. But I had three active series that I tried to close down this year, so I released a sixth book in my three main series this year. And with each release of book six, I did a staircase price promo where the first one was still free. The second one was 99 cents and the third one was $2. I went up by a dollar until I got to book six, which was $5. Basically the thing you want to keep in mind when you're pricing anything is on Amazon: you get 70% royalties on anything between $2.99 and $9.99. So you can take it down to $2.99 and not get too much of a hit. But if you're going to price anything below that, you need to make sure you've got a strategy because you're giving up half of your earnings when you do it.
[00:20:48] Matty: Do you pre-launch box sets?
[00:20:52] Joe: I have never pre-ordered a box set, interestingly enough. On one hand, I have not released a new box set in a long time because I've only done books one through three of box sets. I'm probably going to change that now that I've got six books. I might do a second box set for the three volumes where I might do a complete series box that. I haven't decided. So I haven't really messed with pre-orders too much on box sets. I don't know that it's necessarily going to be as useful as when you're releasing individual books because your fans probably aren't buying your box set because your fans have probably bought the individual books as they went along.
[00:21:25] Unless you've got something particularly enticing in your box set, like a bonus, your fans probably aren't going to, so the people who are more likely to hear about the box that pre-order probably aren't going to buy it. So I would still pre-order it for all the reasons we've said before: getting short releases when we want to and making sure, maybe extending the amount of time that people ...
[00:21:46] I got to actually temper what I just said. If you were writing the box set in a different genre, or if you have an established fan base for potentially other series, you might pick up some fans out of the box set then. So there's probably still some value to it. But I think overall box sets are more useful for promotional purposes -- You make a lot of money off of them too -- but you usually wouldn't stack an additional pre-order type thing and promotional tools like that onto a box because the box sets utility is, number one, it's a big price that you can use for a price drop later. And number two, catching people up on a series that has been out for a long time. So I don't think that the value for pre-order is as much for a box set.
[00:22:30] Matty: If you were doing a pre-order for a box set, would you have any different advice about the pricing strategy you apply there?
[00:22:37] Joe: I think that I would almost certainly not do a low-price pre-order period on a box set. Number one, your box set is already a bargain item. The old concept of box set is generally to sell it at a lower price than the combined cost of the individual books. So it's already a price drop. You probably aren't going to hit any lists with a box set unless it was eagerly anticipated. So doing the lower price, long pre-order period to try to hit a list or something, or to just rank super high isn't typically your aim. It's more of a tool for later purposes and just another release to fill a stop gap. So I would probably release my box set at full price without any consideration for the low-price pre-order period.
[00:23:25] Matty: Here's a question that is not related to pre-orders, just related to box set pricing. So I have two series of three books and I have a box up for one, and I'm about to put out a box set for the other, and I've calculated the price based on the theory that somebody buys the first book -- and the first books in my series are less expensive, they're always $2.99 unless they're on a BookBub promotion or something like that -- and so I've priced the box set of those three books at what the remaining two books would cost at full price minus a dollar. And obviously that calculation doesn't work if you have a series of six, because then the price would be too high. But what have you found is a good pricing approach for, let's say, a box set of three?
[00:24:11] Joe: That's a good approach. Because my three box sets are each for three books, except for one of them, I'll do that last, but, yeah, I have two box sets that contain three full novels. One of them has got an extra short story thrown onto it as an extra, one of them is just three novels. Again, I have a free series starter, so I effectively have the same process where you subtract the cost of the first book, which in my case was already zero, and then, knock a dollar off so that there's a financial incentive to purchasing that instead of purchasing the books individually. If you have a very long series, if you have a six-book set and you want to price it like that, just basically use the same formula until it gets to $9.99 and don't go any higher than $9.99.
[00:24:56] You're going to be undercutting the cost of this full series pretty deeply if you're putting like nine or 10 books into a thing and only charging $9.99, but it's almost always going to be worth losing the higher price. It would have to cost 20 bucks an order to make it worth charging more than $9.99, basically.
[00:25:17] That does not go, however, for wide. There's a lot of wide stores -- I've heard that Kobo in particular, Kobo does not have a penalty for charging over $9.99. So if you're wide or even only wide -- it's weird to do a book that's only wide, but people do it -- you can price higher and still make money off of it. Non-fiction does this too. Non-fiction tends to price very high in terms of length. So, yeah, price structure is don't give it away, but knock a dollar or two off the combined price.
[00:25:51] I like the idea of subtracting the price of the first book because most people aren't going to necessarily cold buy a half a million-word box set from an author they don't know. So, yeah, might subtract the first book price and an extra dollar is a good rule of thumb.
[00:26:08] Now I said I was going to go over the first box that I released. THE BOOK OF DEACON was enormous. It was the first three books in the main series, plus one just gigantic 200,000-word prequel novel that I'd written, plus I think six short stories and novellas. So that was the combined cost of all of the books in the series without the price drop. So it was a combined cost of books, one, two, and three, and the prequel. And then essentially the novellas and short stories were the bonus -- like you get probably another 90,000 words of story and you're not paying for that. That's your bonus for buying the box set. So you can put together a box sets that are titanic, but again, just make sure that you're not going over the $9.99.
[00:26:53] Matty: And that's because Amazon penalizes you by dropping the royalties back to 30%, right?
[00:26:58] Joe: Yeah.
[00:26:59] Matty: It does seem intriguing to do the gigantic box set on the other retailers that don't penalize you.
[00:27:07] Joe: Yeah. There's BookFunnel -- if you don't use BookFunnel, you should use BookFunnel, it's fantastic. It's a great way to give away books and to sell books. And you keep everything -- with payment processing fees, we're talking over 90% of your income. So there are people who will sell their box set, their book one through three box set, all the places, and then they'll have the full series box set as a direct sale that they talk about on their newsletter and social media. And then they could charge whatever -- $23 for 18 books or whatever you want to do -- and you keep 90% of that because you sold it directly. So if you're going to start putting things together that have a value significantly more than $10, keeping them wide or keeping them exclusive to you are probably the two best ways.
[00:27:54] Matty: Yeah, I'm doing that with PayHip. I haven't been doing that too long, so I don't have much data on it, but it is nice to think about cutting out the middleman.
[00:28:03] So we've been talking a lot about the sales benefits, the direct sales benefits, of doing a pre-order. Are there any benefits in terms of using that as a test period for, let's say, ads that you're planning on really hitting hard after the launch? Can you test various things -- even the cover -- I suppose you could use pre-orders to test a cover. Have you done that at all? Or have any insight into that?
[00:28:30] Joe: I haven't done a huge amount of that, but we have a pretty good insight into it. We've talked to people on the show who do this sort of thing. Pre-orders are harder to promote with ads because people don't want to see an ad for something that they can't buy right away. But all things considered, the performance of an ad during a pre-order is going to be proportional to the performance of an ad after the pre-order. So the book cover, just the graphic that you use, the ad copy, all of that is going still get an idea of how well it will perform on an eventual release if you're testing it during the pre-order period. And if you've never advertised anything before, don't put a ton of money into it because you're going to have a hard time getting a return on investment on a pre-order, particularly a pre-order of your first book, with no other series to funnel through.
[00:29:19] So keep your ad spend low, but you can definitely AB test with a pre-order. And also you can, if you're advertising on Facebook in particular, Facebook likes engagement on their stuff. So if you put together, say, a book post talking about the pre-order and you boost that post, then you can start to get replies and comments and likes and all that stuff. And you can build that up over a pretty long period of time. And then when the time comes to actually launch it, or even to just announce that it's about to release, now you can boost a thing that's got tons of engagement and tons of comments and stuff like that.
[00:29:58] And if you put your ad copy together correctly, so it still reads as a forthcoming release or a release that's going to be moments from now without misleading during the longer, the broader period, then you can have a really successful boosted post / ad, because you can just turn a post into an ad, more so than if you had just tried to do an ad on launch day. So, yeah, you can get a lot of good practice, especially if you don't have any prior material, and you can also just use it to build up momentum on the stuff that will be the launch promo.
[00:30:32] Matty: Is it possible to actually completely swap out a book cover in the pre-launch period? So if you're putting up a book, maybe it's a book in a new series and you're not getting the same reaction to it that you've gotten for previous pre-orders and you think it might be the cover, is it possible to just put a completely new cover on it and see if that entices any more interest?
[00:30:53] Joe: You can. You can update pre-orders like that. You will be subject to the whims of the various platforms, however long it takes to do an update. But you can do that. If you do that, I would recommend that you be very clear in subsequent announcements that this is not a different book than what you've seen before. Obviously, people seeing it for the first time aren't going to care or even know. But for people who actually are your fans and have been interested and they suddenly see a thing with a new cover, you don't want to confuse them into thinking, Oh, there's another book coming out. It's also on pre-order. So be clear with your messaging, but yeah, this is a period where you can AB test and the performance is going to be proportional to an eventual release. So even if the change in interest and the change and in actual click-through is a small, that will be amplified when the eventual release happens. So be very sensitive.
[00:31:46] Here's the problem. You have to be very sensitive to small changes because the changes will likely be small, but small changes are also more likely to be noise. So don't bet the farm, if it seems like, Oh wow, three more people click them it when only one person clicked on it last time, this was going to sell three times as much -- temper your expectations. But, yeah, during the pre-order period, you can swap that sort of thing out. I haven't done it but there's no reason why it wouldn't have the same value as swapping out a cover six months after the book came out after bad performance or during a relaunch of the book.
[00:32:21] Matty: You had mentioned earlier the idea of a pre-order gives you a more precise way of calibrating the launch date. And I guess another benefit, although I don't think precision really comes in here, is that if you have a pre-order up, then you can start an ACX audio book. Is that correct?
[00:32:41] Joe: Yes, you can. In order to do ACX you need to have a title available on Amazon just to say listed on Amazon. So, yeah, you can start your ACX audio book process as soon as the pre-order populates on their site. And I think Lindsay <Buroker> has done that, where she wanted to get a head start on trying to do a simultaneous audio and Ebook release, which really helps the audio book sales. So if you are highly dependent on or trying to build your audio book sales, then pulling the lengthy pre-order in order to try to do a simultaneous release, that's a valid method.
[00:33:16] Matty: Let's say you put up a very long pre-order for an ebook, and then you start the audio book, and the audio book production is complete well in advance of when the announced launch date is, can you specify a launch date for the audio book, or do you just have to pretty much go with whenever ACX is quality assurance group is done with it?
[00:33:38] Joe: I think you're at the mercy of ACX's quality assurance. That's one of the big frustrations of audio books is the very great difficulty in nailing down when the actual release date is. I would say trying to have audio book and ebook go live at exactly the same time, if you really genuinely want that to happen, you're probably going to achieve it by moving the pre-order date, I think. I know that you can shift the pre-order date around. You can just basically hit a release now button on a lot of the places. I think you can do it on all places, but a surprise early release date is almost always a bad idea because a good promotion is almost always about planning.
[00:34:22] If you're like, okay, it's coming out on June 3rd ... June 3rd ... it's coming out in May, it's not going to work out. So I would say the best-case scenario is having the audio book finished and ready and able to purchase before the actual launch date, because people will be looking for your book on the launch date and they'll see that the audio book is available.
[00:34:44] There's not a lot of people who sit and wait for an audio book to come out. That's not entirely true. There's not a lot of people who plan their purchase on the release date of the audio book. Whereas the release day of the actual book is something that is already being promoted. So you can just pretend like the book release date is the audio book release date if it's available when the book releases.
[00:35:06] Matty: Yeah, that makes sense because people probably aren't just happening upon it unless you have a large following. You're going to need to point people to it. Are there promotional opportunities that are available to pre-orders specifically?
[00:35:20] Joe: So you can do a pre-order email with BookBub and it's not curated. You don't have to qualify for it. If you were on BookBub early on, you had to have a certain number of followers and that might still be the case. Even if it isn't still the case, it only goes to your followers. So you won't get a lot of punch out of it unless you have a lot of followers on BookBub. But, yeah, BookBub has specifically a thing that you can purchase that will send that email out to everybody who follows you that announces the presence of a pre-order.
[00:35:52] I have done it a few times. I've not found it to be hugely effective, but I have not actively built my followers on BookBub. So if you have 30,000, 40,000, a hundred thousand followers on BookBub, it'll probably pay for itself handily. The price also scales with the number of followers you have, so there's an argument to be made if you have a very small number of followers, it will be cheap. And then even if only a handful of people actually purchase it because of it, then it'll pay for itself. But I would say this is a tactic for people with huge following on BookBub. I don't know of any other pre-order-specific promo opportunities.
[00:36:26] But if you have had the pre-order up and you pull one of the stunts that allows you to get early reviews, like when the paperback comes out early, you can use the presence of your pre-order in some circumstances to get a day one promo on your book from places that normally wouldn't promote a new release if it meets all the criteria that they have. Except promo sites often require a price drop. And if you're going to do a price drop, this is another big thing about pricing or promo: don't do a price drop after release. If you're going to sell it cheaper earlier on, don't raise your price until after release. But if you want to do a day one price drop, don't do a pre-order because now you're punishing your biggest fans who bought the pre-order -- suddenly they paid $4.99 for a thing they could have got for 99 cents on day one.
[00:37:15] So that's another pricing consideration. But, yeah, actually, there's very few directly targeted pre-order promo opportunities, but the BookBub one is one of them. Also, anything that does a new release alert may do the new release alert during the pre-order period, Amazon in particular.
[00:37:31] Matty: It seems as if most of the things we've talked about are leading toward, as long as your expectations are set appropriately and you're willing to be careful about the planning and the logistics of it, that pre-orders are generally favorable. What are the big cautions, if someone's thinking about doing a pre-order but they're on the fence, what would you say are the big cautions for them to consider about making that decision?
[00:37:56] Joe: So as previously mentioned, you're essentially decreasing your sales rank day one on Amazon. So if Amazon is your primary platform and your promotional tactics require you to have a really good launch, you're going to have a smoother launch, less spiky, if you do a pre-order and that could be a problem for you. Likewise a pre-order might cause a release mentioned earlier than you expected. That's usually not too much of a problem, particularly if you had plans for the pre-order to begin with, but that's a concern too.
[00:38:30] Some concerns that were very big in the past that are less big now. So what I'm going to describe to you probably does not go currently, but it has been a problem in the past. If you did an assetless pre-order or a placeholder pre-order where you didn't have the final book in place, there were instances in the past of the unfinished manuscript being the one that was launched. I have not heard this happening at all recently, but there are some nightmares of it occurring in the past. So a lot of people only did pre-orders with finished manuscripts, which pushes the production pipeline way longer, because now you have to have a finished manuscript complete before you even start the pre-order.
[00:39:09] I wouldn't worry about that now, but there is still the concern of whether or not you're going to hit the pre-order date. Amazon used to punish you for not having a successful pre-order. If you didn't have your final book file uploaded three days before, like they wanted you to, they would punish you by taking away your permission to pre-order in the future. I think that they've loosened the rules on that.
[00:39:31] But you are still setting a hard deadline for yourself. And if you can't meet that deadline nowadays, you can move pre-orders and there's not a huge logistical punishment for doing it, but you are failing to meet expectations with your fans. So if you're going to do a pre-order, make sure that you're very realistic about it.
[00:39:52] I have traditionally not started a pre-order period until the book has at least gone to the editor. I want any major problem that might come up to have already come up before I decide on the launch date. But Lindsay and a lot of other people I know have got pre-orders out before the book is finished being written. And you need to be really certain that you're going to be able to pull this off and that your editor is reliable, you're not going to have any big problems. So a pre-order is an opportunity to miss a deadline and that can be stressful.
[00:40:22] It's also the stress thing -- like maybe you are not really in danger of missing a deadline, but the moment that you have one looming out there, it starts to weigh upon you. I know a lot of people who just would prefer to lose the long pre-order benefits just so that they can be comfortable knowing they're not going to fail to meet expectations. So there's always a psychological impact that a lot of people don't keep it in their equations. Always have your brain in your equation.
[00:40:50] Matty: I think my pre-order for my last book was a month and I was done done. I may have gone and made a couple of tiny tweaks, but it was edited, it was done, it was proofread, the cover was all there. And I actually liked it because then it gave me that month. In the past I've released a novel a year and I'm trying to speed that up a little now that I've gone full time, so my timeframes are different than someone who's rapid releasing, but it was nice to have that month where I wasn't worried about the logistics of getting everything loaded. I was just thinking through putting the final touches on my launch event and thinking through promos. It was nice to have that little bit of a down period. And I suppose if I were really doing right, it wouldn't have been a down period, but I wasn't trying to stack so many activities on top of each other during that period.
[00:41:42] Joe: Yeah, I have really found -- and the phrase I use for it is a little bit weird -- but my favorite period in a book launch is the period at which I can get hit in the head and go into a coma and the book will still come out. And that is when you put the final manuscript into your preorder. It is for me a huge relief once a pre-order is live, because that is something that's going to take care of itself. I guess that's one of the unspoken psychological pros of having a pre-order is that suddenly it's like you have a virtual assistant, even if you don't have one, because someone out there, some machine is going to make your book available when you want it to be available. You can relax and not have to worry about doing that yourself.
[00:42:20] So, yeah, I find it really soothing to have a pre-order go. Load it up. Date's ready. Good. You can even, if you're really good, and I'm not good enough to say that I do this, have your entire launch email and all of your social media pushes, you can schedule all of those to go along with it. And suddenly you've got this release on automatic, which you can then double up your efforts. And again, I do typically take a little bit of time off once they hit the pre-order. But if you are a real go getter, then now you're working in parallel. All of the stuff you would have been doing for release is going to take care of itself and now you can start stacking additional stuff underneath it.
[00:42:59] Matty: Yeah. Great. Joe, thank you so much for running through all this information about pre-orders. I think you've answered a lot of the questions I've heard among my author friends about pre-orders. So please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you, your podcast, and your fiction work online.
[00:43:17] Joe: All right. So if you want to learn about me on social media, I'm almost always jrlallo. That's me on Twitter and a couple of other places. My website is a bookofdeacon.com. And the name of the podcast is SIX FIGURE AUTHORS. The website is 6figureauthors.com and we release new episodes every Thursday.
[00:43:37] Matty: Great. Thank you so much, Joe.
[00:43:39] Joe: You're very welcome.
[00:03:45] So generally speaking to have a pre-order ready, you should have a title, the description, and the cover. You don't need the cover, but you should have the cover. It makes it more effective overall. And then anywhere between three days and a week before the actually release date, make sure you've got the finished manuscript in there, and then you're good to go.
[00:04:04] Matty: What are some of the considerations that people should be factoring in if you're talking about one of these platforms that allows a longer pre-order period, what would determine whether you decide to put it up a week or a year in advance?
[00:04:18] Joe: There's different value for preorders on different platforms. We'll look at iTunes or Barnes and Noble, iTunes in particular, when you make a pre-order sale on iTunes or Barnes and Noble or almost anything but Amazon, you don't get a rank boost on that. You get a rank boost on the day that you release. So every single pre-order counts as a day one sale.
[00:04:42] So a very long pre-order is really useful in that situation, because you can get a gigantic day one bump. Amazon, that's not how it works. Amazon gives you your rank boost when the pre-order happens. So technically every pre-order is stealing a day one sale. So you're going to have a lower first day spike. You'll have a better sales history, which has got its own value. But if your goal is to try to make a list or -- make a list is not necessarily what your aim is -- but if your goal is to rank very highly on release day, you're going to want a shorter pre-order on Amazon. There's typically not a downside to having a longer pre-order elsewhere, but longer pre-orders on Amazon flatten out your spike, which might not be what you're after.
[00:05:24] Matty: Do you ever have to weigh the benefits that you're looking for from a sales point of view to new readers against the reaction of existing readers? Because an existing fan versus someone who's looking for something to read might react differently to seeing something up that's going to be available in a month. The fan might say, Great, I'm definitely going to get that in my queue. And the new reader might just pass it by because they're looking for something to read now. How do you weigh those considerations?
[00:05:52] Joe: I think the main thing that you should do is, and I've heard a lot of people talk about when we talk about rapid release, they'll be like, If I have, three books that are already finished, should I put all three pre-orders up --you know, release the first one and put the second two pre-orders out. And I think the best way to balance the expectations of new readers with the expectations of old readers is to not have any more than one pre-order up at a time. If your Amazon page has got six pre-orders on it, people are going to be like, This is not the catalog that I expect it to be. If I really enjoy this, I'm not going to be able to binge it.
[00:06:22] If you've only got one pre-order up, it sends a message -- first off, it accurately represents the books that you've got available, but it also lets people know that you've got more stuff coming. So at most one pre-order just lets people know that your page is growing, but more than one pre-order can really start to get on the nerves of people who expect to have a complete reading experience when they go to your author page.
[00:06:45] Matty: If people are fairly new in their career, at what point does it make sense to consider a pre-order, like if they're preparing to publish their first book, does a pre-order make sense in that scenario?
[00:06:58] Joe: I think a pre-order still make sense even with your first book. I think you can argue that it makes more sense with your first book, because if you don't have any books available, a pre-order becomes your only product, so you can push it for a lot longer. Perhaps not so much on Amazon, but even on Amazon, maybe a longer preorder around the first one is not a bad idea because you can talk it up on social media and you can start flexing your muscles in terms of learning how to advertise it. Generally speaking, advertising a pre-order isn't the best idea because a pre-order is a tougher sell because people like instant gratification, but again, if you don't have any other options and you've never practiced advertising before, having a long-term product up that you can slowly accumulate and measure the success of your different advertising, I think that it's not a bad idea to pre-order your first book.
[00:07:48] Matty: If someone is equally new and they're building up their platform on social media, so they have few followers, they're promoting it on their site, through social media, but maybe they don't have a large pool of people to promote it to, what other options do they have for getting word out about it?
[00:08:05] Joe: There's a couple of things that you can do just in general. It's hard to book a promo for a pre-order because typically the places that do promos like there to be some sort of a history of quality, so they're usually looking for reviews and you can't get reviews on a pre-order. But if you're super new, you can try newsletter swaps. They're not as successful now as they were, but basically you reach out to someone -- and this assumes you have a newsletter, which again, if you're new, you might not.
[00:08:32] But you can also, basically when you are new and you don't have a network yet, one of the ways that you can get a network and start pushing this sort of thing is to do the legwork on a promo. So if you offer to do, say, a curated bundle, just reach out and say, Hey, listen, we're going to all put together and do a group promo, or a coordinated price drop, really anything that is annoying to organize, but somebody likes to be a part of it if somebody else does the work. You basically trade sweat equity for reputation and reach out to people who are in your same genre who were maybe on the same trajectory as you -- they're early on, or maybe if you're particularly energetic or confident, you can reach out to somebody who's very well-established and just talk about, Hey, can I help you run a promo? And by the way, in exchange, just mention me to your newsletter or mention me to your social media. Yeah, that's about it. You talk to people who are better established than you and offer to do some work for them.
[00:09:36] For a long time, doing guest blog, blogs aren't as big as they once were. But again, just offering your services to somebody who's got a bigger platform in exchange for a mention is often pretty useful. But don't be annoying. Take no for an answer and don't pester, because that will immediately put you on the naughty list.
[00:09:55] Matty: That's great advice. How about standalone versus series? If people are writing a series of standalone books, can they similarly benefit from a pre-order?
[00:10:07] Joe: Pre-orders are more useful -- in general marketing is more easy -- for series. Like if you were to put the link to your pre-order in the back matter of the previous book in a series, that's an excellent way. And generally speaking, that's a good timing for pre-order announcement is when the previous book comes out. Standalones are harder. They're still useful, but it becomes trickier to lead people into it. I would definitely use the same pre-order tactic. I would definitely put it up longer on wide and shorter on Amazon and talk it up.
[00:10:38] But in this case, with a standalone, you're basically going to have to be leaning on your reputation as an author, as opposed to the reputation of your series. So you're going to be working harder for your pre-orders on standalones.
[00:10:52] Matty: And finally, in this series of questions, what are the differences if an author is wide versus if they're exclusive on Amazon for considering a pre-order.
[00:11:03] Joe: Because Amazon does not give you a day one boost for all of your preorders, if you're exclusive to Amazon, you're going to want to be a shorter pre-order, but you should still have a pre-order.
[00:11:15] There's a couple of other aspects, even when you're not interested in accumulating sales or having an extra thing to push. Books don't show up exactly when you expect them to when you launch them just by hitting the go live button, it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Usually it's a few hours these days, but I can remember times when it took up to three days for a book to release.
[00:11:35] So if you're planning a big launch of anything and you've got promos lined up and you're going to do a Facebook live and you're going to do a social media push. You want your book to be available at the moment that you want it to be available, and you can guarantee that with a pre-order. If you've got a pre-order up at least a week early, or even a few days early, the book is guaranteed actually to show up when you said it would. So even when you're Amazon exclusive and the pre-order doesn't have a lot of punch rank-wise, even could leech away your initial rank, having at least a few days just for a solid initial release is a good idea.
[00:12:06] When you're wide, a long pre-order elsewhere is almost without con -- it's all pro. It could confuse people if you have two different length pre-orders. If you mentioned your pre-order announcement and it's not available on Amazon, which is where most of your readers are going to be, that could be confusing, but just communicate well.
[00:12:25] The other thing is when you're exclusive, one of the big things about it is that you have KU and there's almost no value to pre-orders when your primary readers are KU because they're not going to order it. They're going to wait until it comes out and then get it on Kindle Unlimited. If you are getting most of your money off of KU, you should still do a short pre-order, but a very short pre-order because otherwise there's just not a lot of value to having it up. The announcement that it will be coming out is exactly identical to a pre-order when somebody is waiting until they can just read it on KU.
[00:12:58] Matty: If someone likes the idea of having that control of knowing exactly when it's going to go up to avoid those delays that you mentioned, and so they're putting up a pre-order just for those logistical considerations, but not doing any promotion around it, is there any downside to that?
[00:13:15] Joe: Not really. There's a couple of things. If your goal is to do what they call a soft release or a stealth release, where you're just getting something up so that it's established on the thing, but you have a big launch strategy that you want to, say, start small and slowly build up your launch stuff, Amazon will do an announcement of your books. Sometimes you have no control over whether they do and they don't, and that announcement starts with pre-order. So if your goal is to quietly have the book up and make sure that it's out, or maybe you pull the stunt where you release the paper book early, the paperback early so that you can actually get reviews on a book that's still in pre-order, Amazon might announce the pre-order and give you a big number of sales during the pre-order period, which you were hoping to save for the release period.
[00:13:59] So that's really the only downside I would say to the short pre-order. And if your pre-order is only three to seven days, there's not going to be much risk of stealing. And even if it does, it's going to be within that sort of launch window. So I would say doing a preorder just to logistically have the release date nailed down to precisely when you want, it's a pretty safe bet as long as you don't have a very fragile release process that requires no mention of the book before it actually releases.
[00:14:29] Matty: Do you feel that there's any benefit now, if we're just looking at committed fans, do you find that fans who are going to buy the book anyway react differently to a pre-order than just seeing it go live and purchasable on the day of the launch?
[00:14:45] Joe: There's a little bit, basically when you've got your thousand super fans, or your three super fans, they are excited to hear from you and are excited to have a thing they can act on. So generally speaking, when you announced the pre-order, they're going to be excited and they're going to jump on it because they want to have the pre-order and it's standard announcement and standard promotion for a book launch, you're usually talking about it at least a little bit early. Oh, I just got the cover -- here's the cover. So if you are able to put up a pre-order at the first moment that you announced the books availability aside from, Hey, I'm working on blah, it lets people act on it immediately. And fans are going to want to.
[00:15:29] So that's one of the other things about a pre-order is if you have the ability to capture a sale every time you talk about your book, then you're going to get more sales overall. So yeah, you could talk about the production of your book and, Oh, it's going to be releasing in three weeks ... it's going to be releasing in two weeks. If there's a link for them to, Oh, let me just grab it now, you're going to get more people.
[00:15:52] If you just announced and talk about the books release and then eventually have a link that they can click, the people who saw those first three or four emails but maybe didn't see the actual release email might not click on it. But if they have the opportunity to, then they will do and fans more so than anyone. So even if you hadn't been shooting for any sort of promotional value to the pre-order, just it being another thing for you to announce keeps the fans a little bit more engaged ... we often talk about how newsletters tend to have more punch if they come out consistently. And if you're struggling for a thing to release a newsletter on, your one-week release, if that's what you do -- I'm not very consistent with my newsletters -- but if you're looking for a thing to talk about, the newsletter is one of the things you can talk about. And if it's the first thing you talk about, then each subsequent mention is going to hopefully get at least a few more clicks. So yeah, I think that you will get a lot of use out of preorders with your fans.
[00:16:48] Matty: Is there a different pricing strategy that people should keep in mind or pricing considerations if they decide to use a pre-order?
[00:16:56] Joe: A lot of people like to release their books a little bit cheaper, and then raise the price afterwards just to reward early buyers. Because more purchases early on gets you a higher release rate, release rank. So there are people who like to knock a dollar off or, heck, even release at 99 cents. I usually release at full price, but I've seen a tremendous amount of success with people doing this.
[00:17:21] But the big consideration you need to have and one that can really bite you if you do it wrong -- the people who order the pre-order will be charged whatever the book costs when it releases. So if you have the book set to 99 cents during the pre-order period, and you want the book to eventually cost $3.99, if you change the price and the price updates before the pre-order goes live, people who clicked on a book that cost 99 cents are going to be charged $3.99 for it. And that is an incredibly bad thing. You're going to upset people. So if you want to try the lower price initially thing, I would not recommend raising the price until, say, a full day after the book releases.
[00:18:00] But other than that, pre-orders, people are accustomed to them costing what a regular book costs. So you're not going to hurt anybody's feelings if you price full price for the entire time the book is available until an eventual price drop for another promo. But there's also the strategy of pricing cheap early on so that people will be encouraged to buy during the pre-order, and you'll have a nice boost. Works very well wide where the day one boost is huge with pre-orders.
[00:18:27] Matty: It's really surprising to me that the retail platforms would allow that scenario where someone pays more than what they thought they were going to pay.
[00:18:35] Joe: Yeah. I know that Amazon for other products will inform you that the price of basically a preorder is essentially sitting in your shopping cart. And I know a lot of time, if the price changes on something that's in your shopping cart, Amazon will send an email saying the price has gone up or the price has gone down. I would like to think they would do that with pre-orders, but I've not heard that they do.
[00:18:57] Matty: Yeah. It's surprising. Just to give some context for the pricing, how do you price the books in your series both on an ongoing basis and when you launch them, you said you normally pre-launch at the full price. What is the full price for you?
[00:19:12] Joe: My books are usually around a hundred thousand words. 150,000 for the epic fantasy and 75,000 for some of the shorter stuff. So my price range is typically $3.99 to $4.99. That's my standard full novel price. I have some novellas and stuff and I'll price those closer to 99 cents. But yeah, that's what I do with that. If a book's been out for over a year and I'm putting out the box set, occasionally I will drop the price early on.
[00:19:42] I also, by the way, am a big fan of free series starters. It was a fantastically effective method early on. It's lost almost all of its punch, but it's still probably my most valuable promotional tool. So my series starter dropped to nothing almost as soon as the second book is out.
[00:19:59] But also when I do promos, I almost never discount mid series books. The first one's free and then it goes to full price and stays full price. But I had three active series that I tried to close down this year, so I released a sixth book in my three main series this year. And with each release of book six, I did a staircase price promo where the first one was still free. The second one was 99 cents and the third one was $2. I went up by a dollar until I got to book six, which was $5. Basically the thing you want to keep in mind when you're pricing anything is on Amazon: you get 70% royalties on anything between $2.99 and $9.99. So you can take it down to $2.99 and not get too much of a hit. But if you're going to price anything below that, you need to make sure you've got a strategy because you're giving up half of your earnings when you do it.
[00:20:48] Matty: Do you pre-launch box sets?
[00:20:52] Joe: I have never pre-ordered a box set, interestingly enough. On one hand, I have not released a new box set in a long time because I've only done books one through three of box sets. I'm probably going to change that now that I've got six books. I might do a second box set for the three volumes where I might do a complete series box that. I haven't decided. So I haven't really messed with pre-orders too much on box sets. I don't know that it's necessarily going to be as useful as when you're releasing individual books because your fans probably aren't buying your box set because your fans have probably bought the individual books as they went along.
[00:21:25] Unless you've got something particularly enticing in your box set, like a bonus, your fans probably aren't going to, so the people who are more likely to hear about the box that pre-order probably aren't going to buy it. So I would still pre-order it for all the reasons we've said before: getting short releases when we want to and making sure, maybe extending the amount of time that people ...
[00:21:46] I got to actually temper what I just said. If you were writing the box set in a different genre, or if you have an established fan base for potentially other series, you might pick up some fans out of the box set then. So there's probably still some value to it. But I think overall box sets are more useful for promotional purposes -- You make a lot of money off of them too -- but you usually wouldn't stack an additional pre-order type thing and promotional tools like that onto a box because the box sets utility is, number one, it's a big price that you can use for a price drop later. And number two, catching people up on a series that has been out for a long time. So I don't think that the value for pre-order is as much for a box set.
[00:22:30] Matty: If you were doing a pre-order for a box set, would you have any different advice about the pricing strategy you apply there?
[00:22:37] Joe: I think that I would almost certainly not do a low-price pre-order period on a box set. Number one, your box set is already a bargain item. The old concept of box set is generally to sell it at a lower price than the combined cost of the individual books. So it's already a price drop. You probably aren't going to hit any lists with a box set unless it was eagerly anticipated. So doing the lower price, long pre-order period to try to hit a list or something, or to just rank super high isn't typically your aim. It's more of a tool for later purposes and just another release to fill a stop gap. So I would probably release my box set at full price without any consideration for the low-price pre-order period.
[00:23:25] Matty: Here's a question that is not related to pre-orders, just related to box set pricing. So I have two series of three books and I have a box up for one, and I'm about to put out a box set for the other, and I've calculated the price based on the theory that somebody buys the first book -- and the first books in my series are less expensive, they're always $2.99 unless they're on a BookBub promotion or something like that -- and so I've priced the box set of those three books at what the remaining two books would cost at full price minus a dollar. And obviously that calculation doesn't work if you have a series of six, because then the price would be too high. But what have you found is a good pricing approach for, let's say, a box set of three?
[00:24:11] Joe: That's a good approach. Because my three box sets are each for three books, except for one of them, I'll do that last, but, yeah, I have two box sets that contain three full novels. One of them has got an extra short story thrown onto it as an extra, one of them is just three novels. Again, I have a free series starter, so I effectively have the same process where you subtract the cost of the first book, which in my case was already zero, and then, knock a dollar off so that there's a financial incentive to purchasing that instead of purchasing the books individually. If you have a very long series, if you have a six-book set and you want to price it like that, just basically use the same formula until it gets to $9.99 and don't go any higher than $9.99.
[00:24:56] You're going to be undercutting the cost of this full series pretty deeply if you're putting like nine or 10 books into a thing and only charging $9.99, but it's almost always going to be worth losing the higher price. It would have to cost 20 bucks an order to make it worth charging more than $9.99, basically.
[00:25:17] That does not go, however, for wide. There's a lot of wide stores -- I've heard that Kobo in particular, Kobo does not have a penalty for charging over $9.99. So if you're wide or even only wide -- it's weird to do a book that's only wide, but people do it -- you can price higher and still make money off of it. Non-fiction does this too. Non-fiction tends to price very high in terms of length. So, yeah, price structure is don't give it away, but knock a dollar or two off the combined price.
[00:25:51] I like the idea of subtracting the price of the first book because most people aren't going to necessarily cold buy a half a million-word box set from an author they don't know. So, yeah, might subtract the first book price and an extra dollar is a good rule of thumb.
[00:26:08] Now I said I was going to go over the first box that I released. THE BOOK OF DEACON was enormous. It was the first three books in the main series, plus one just gigantic 200,000-word prequel novel that I'd written, plus I think six short stories and novellas. So that was the combined cost of all of the books in the series without the price drop. So it was a combined cost of books, one, two, and three, and the prequel. And then essentially the novellas and short stories were the bonus -- like you get probably another 90,000 words of story and you're not paying for that. That's your bonus for buying the box set. So you can put together a box sets that are titanic, but again, just make sure that you're not going over the $9.99.
[00:26:53] Matty: And that's because Amazon penalizes you by dropping the royalties back to 30%, right?
[00:26:58] Joe: Yeah.
[00:26:59] Matty: It does seem intriguing to do the gigantic box set on the other retailers that don't penalize you.
[00:27:07] Joe: Yeah. There's BookFunnel -- if you don't use BookFunnel, you should use BookFunnel, it's fantastic. It's a great way to give away books and to sell books. And you keep everything -- with payment processing fees, we're talking over 90% of your income. So there are people who will sell their box set, their book one through three box set, all the places, and then they'll have the full series box set as a direct sale that they talk about on their newsletter and social media. And then they could charge whatever -- $23 for 18 books or whatever you want to do -- and you keep 90% of that because you sold it directly. So if you're going to start putting things together that have a value significantly more than $10, keeping them wide or keeping them exclusive to you are probably the two best ways.
[00:27:54] Matty: Yeah, I'm doing that with PayHip. I haven't been doing that too long, so I don't have much data on it, but it is nice to think about cutting out the middleman.
[00:28:03] So we've been talking a lot about the sales benefits, the direct sales benefits, of doing a pre-order. Are there any benefits in terms of using that as a test period for, let's say, ads that you're planning on really hitting hard after the launch? Can you test various things -- even the cover -- I suppose you could use pre-orders to test a cover. Have you done that at all? Or have any insight into that?
[00:28:30] Joe: I haven't done a huge amount of that, but we have a pretty good insight into it. We've talked to people on the show who do this sort of thing. Pre-orders are harder to promote with ads because people don't want to see an ad for something that they can't buy right away. But all things considered, the performance of an ad during a pre-order is going to be proportional to the performance of an ad after the pre-order. So the book cover, just the graphic that you use, the ad copy, all of that is going still get an idea of how well it will perform on an eventual release if you're testing it during the pre-order period. And if you've never advertised anything before, don't put a ton of money into it because you're going to have a hard time getting a return on investment on a pre-order, particularly a pre-order of your first book, with no other series to funnel through.
[00:29:19] So keep your ad spend low, but you can definitely AB test with a pre-order. And also you can, if you're advertising on Facebook in particular, Facebook likes engagement on their stuff. So if you put together, say, a book post talking about the pre-order and you boost that post, then you can start to get replies and comments and likes and all that stuff. And you can build that up over a pretty long period of time. And then when the time comes to actually launch it, or even to just announce that it's about to release, now you can boost a thing that's got tons of engagement and tons of comments and stuff like that.
[00:29:58] And if you put your ad copy together correctly, so it still reads as a forthcoming release or a release that's going to be moments from now without misleading during the longer, the broader period, then you can have a really successful boosted post / ad, because you can just turn a post into an ad, more so than if you had just tried to do an ad on launch day. So, yeah, you can get a lot of good practice, especially if you don't have any prior material, and you can also just use it to build up momentum on the stuff that will be the launch promo.
[00:30:32] Matty: Is it possible to actually completely swap out a book cover in the pre-launch period? So if you're putting up a book, maybe it's a book in a new series and you're not getting the same reaction to it that you've gotten for previous pre-orders and you think it might be the cover, is it possible to just put a completely new cover on it and see if that entices any more interest?
[00:30:53] Joe: You can. You can update pre-orders like that. You will be subject to the whims of the various platforms, however long it takes to do an update. But you can do that. If you do that, I would recommend that you be very clear in subsequent announcements that this is not a different book than what you've seen before. Obviously, people seeing it for the first time aren't going to care or even know. But for people who actually are your fans and have been interested and they suddenly see a thing with a new cover, you don't want to confuse them into thinking, Oh, there's another book coming out. It's also on pre-order. So be clear with your messaging, but yeah, this is a period where you can AB test and the performance is going to be proportional to an eventual release. So even if the change in interest and the change and in actual click-through is a small, that will be amplified when the eventual release happens. So be very sensitive.
[00:31:46] Here's the problem. You have to be very sensitive to small changes because the changes will likely be small, but small changes are also more likely to be noise. So don't bet the farm, if it seems like, Oh wow, three more people click them it when only one person clicked on it last time, this was going to sell three times as much -- temper your expectations. But, yeah, during the pre-order period, you can swap that sort of thing out. I haven't done it but there's no reason why it wouldn't have the same value as swapping out a cover six months after the book came out after bad performance or during a relaunch of the book.
[00:32:21] Matty: You had mentioned earlier the idea of a pre-order gives you a more precise way of calibrating the launch date. And I guess another benefit, although I don't think precision really comes in here, is that if you have a pre-order up, then you can start an ACX audio book. Is that correct?
[00:32:41] Joe: Yes, you can. In order to do ACX you need to have a title available on Amazon just to say listed on Amazon. So, yeah, you can start your ACX audio book process as soon as the pre-order populates on their site. And I think Lindsay <Buroker> has done that, where she wanted to get a head start on trying to do a simultaneous audio and Ebook release, which really helps the audio book sales. So if you are highly dependent on or trying to build your audio book sales, then pulling the lengthy pre-order in order to try to do a simultaneous release, that's a valid method.
[00:33:16] Matty: Let's say you put up a very long pre-order for an ebook, and then you start the audio book, and the audio book production is complete well in advance of when the announced launch date is, can you specify a launch date for the audio book, or do you just have to pretty much go with whenever ACX is quality assurance group is done with it?
[00:33:38] Joe: I think you're at the mercy of ACX's quality assurance. That's one of the big frustrations of audio books is the very great difficulty in nailing down when the actual release date is. I would say trying to have audio book and ebook go live at exactly the same time, if you really genuinely want that to happen, you're probably going to achieve it by moving the pre-order date, I think. I know that you can shift the pre-order date around. You can just basically hit a release now button on a lot of the places. I think you can do it on all places, but a surprise early release date is almost always a bad idea because a good promotion is almost always about planning.
[00:34:22] If you're like, okay, it's coming out on June 3rd ... June 3rd ... it's coming out in May, it's not going to work out. So I would say the best-case scenario is having the audio book finished and ready and able to purchase before the actual launch date, because people will be looking for your book on the launch date and they'll see that the audio book is available.
[00:34:44] There's not a lot of people who sit and wait for an audio book to come out. That's not entirely true. There's not a lot of people who plan their purchase on the release date of the audio book. Whereas the release day of the actual book is something that is already being promoted. So you can just pretend like the book release date is the audio book release date if it's available when the book releases.
[00:35:06] Matty: Yeah, that makes sense because people probably aren't just happening upon it unless you have a large following. You're going to need to point people to it. Are there promotional opportunities that are available to pre-orders specifically?
[00:35:20] Joe: So you can do a pre-order email with BookBub and it's not curated. You don't have to qualify for it. If you were on BookBub early on, you had to have a certain number of followers and that might still be the case. Even if it isn't still the case, it only goes to your followers. So you won't get a lot of punch out of it unless you have a lot of followers on BookBub. But, yeah, BookBub has specifically a thing that you can purchase that will send that email out to everybody who follows you that announces the presence of a pre-order.
[00:35:52] I have done it a few times. I've not found it to be hugely effective, but I have not actively built my followers on BookBub. So if you have 30,000, 40,000, a hundred thousand followers on BookBub, it'll probably pay for itself handily. The price also scales with the number of followers you have, so there's an argument to be made if you have a very small number of followers, it will be cheap. And then even if only a handful of people actually purchase it because of it, then it'll pay for itself. But I would say this is a tactic for people with huge following on BookBub. I don't know of any other pre-order-specific promo opportunities.
[00:36:26] But if you have had the pre-order up and you pull one of the stunts that allows you to get early reviews, like when the paperback comes out early, you can use the presence of your pre-order in some circumstances to get a day one promo on your book from places that normally wouldn't promote a new release if it meets all the criteria that they have. Except promo sites often require a price drop. And if you're going to do a price drop, this is another big thing about pricing or promo: don't do a price drop after release. If you're going to sell it cheaper earlier on, don't raise your price until after release. But if you want to do a day one price drop, don't do a pre-order because now you're punishing your biggest fans who bought the pre-order -- suddenly they paid $4.99 for a thing they could have got for 99 cents on day one.
[00:37:15] So that's another pricing consideration. But, yeah, actually, there's very few directly targeted pre-order promo opportunities, but the BookBub one is one of them. Also, anything that does a new release alert may do the new release alert during the pre-order period, Amazon in particular.
[00:37:31] Matty: It seems as if most of the things we've talked about are leading toward, as long as your expectations are set appropriately and you're willing to be careful about the planning and the logistics of it, that pre-orders are generally favorable. What are the big cautions, if someone's thinking about doing a pre-order but they're on the fence, what would you say are the big cautions for them to consider about making that decision?
[00:37:56] Joe: So as previously mentioned, you're essentially decreasing your sales rank day one on Amazon. So if Amazon is your primary platform and your promotional tactics require you to have a really good launch, you're going to have a smoother launch, less spiky, if you do a pre-order and that could be a problem for you. Likewise a pre-order might cause a release mentioned earlier than you expected. That's usually not too much of a problem, particularly if you had plans for the pre-order to begin with, but that's a concern too.
[00:38:30] Some concerns that were very big in the past that are less big now. So what I'm going to describe to you probably does not go currently, but it has been a problem in the past. If you did an assetless pre-order or a placeholder pre-order where you didn't have the final book in place, there were instances in the past of the unfinished manuscript being the one that was launched. I have not heard this happening at all recently, but there are some nightmares of it occurring in the past. So a lot of people only did pre-orders with finished manuscripts, which pushes the production pipeline way longer, because now you have to have a finished manuscript complete before you even start the pre-order.
[00:39:09] I wouldn't worry about that now, but there is still the concern of whether or not you're going to hit the pre-order date. Amazon used to punish you for not having a successful pre-order. If you didn't have your final book file uploaded three days before, like they wanted you to, they would punish you by taking away your permission to pre-order in the future. I think that they've loosened the rules on that.
[00:39:31] But you are still setting a hard deadline for yourself. And if you can't meet that deadline nowadays, you can move pre-orders and there's not a huge logistical punishment for doing it, but you are failing to meet expectations with your fans. So if you're going to do a pre-order, make sure that you're very realistic about it.
[00:39:52] I have traditionally not started a pre-order period until the book has at least gone to the editor. I want any major problem that might come up to have already come up before I decide on the launch date. But Lindsay and a lot of other people I know have got pre-orders out before the book is finished being written. And you need to be really certain that you're going to be able to pull this off and that your editor is reliable, you're not going to have any big problems. So a pre-order is an opportunity to miss a deadline and that can be stressful.
[00:40:22] It's also the stress thing -- like maybe you are not really in danger of missing a deadline, but the moment that you have one looming out there, it starts to weigh upon you. I know a lot of people who just would prefer to lose the long pre-order benefits just so that they can be comfortable knowing they're not going to fail to meet expectations. So there's always a psychological impact that a lot of people don't keep it in their equations. Always have your brain in your equation.
[00:40:50] Matty: I think my pre-order for my last book was a month and I was done done. I may have gone and made a couple of tiny tweaks, but it was edited, it was done, it was proofread, the cover was all there. And I actually liked it because then it gave me that month. In the past I've released a novel a year and I'm trying to speed that up a little now that I've gone full time, so my timeframes are different than someone who's rapid releasing, but it was nice to have that month where I wasn't worried about the logistics of getting everything loaded. I was just thinking through putting the final touches on my launch event and thinking through promos. It was nice to have that little bit of a down period. And I suppose if I were really doing right, it wouldn't have been a down period, but I wasn't trying to stack so many activities on top of each other during that period.
[00:41:42] Joe: Yeah, I have really found -- and the phrase I use for it is a little bit weird -- but my favorite period in a book launch is the period at which I can get hit in the head and go into a coma and the book will still come out. And that is when you put the final manuscript into your preorder. It is for me a huge relief once a pre-order is live, because that is something that's going to take care of itself. I guess that's one of the unspoken psychological pros of having a pre-order is that suddenly it's like you have a virtual assistant, even if you don't have one, because someone out there, some machine is going to make your book available when you want it to be available. You can relax and not have to worry about doing that yourself.
[00:42:20] So, yeah, I find it really soothing to have a pre-order go. Load it up. Date's ready. Good. You can even, if you're really good, and I'm not good enough to say that I do this, have your entire launch email and all of your social media pushes, you can schedule all of those to go along with it. And suddenly you've got this release on automatic, which you can then double up your efforts. And again, I do typically take a little bit of time off once they hit the pre-order. But if you are a real go getter, then now you're working in parallel. All of the stuff you would have been doing for release is going to take care of itself and now you can start stacking additional stuff underneath it.
[00:42:59] Matty: Yeah. Great. Joe, thank you so much for running through all this information about pre-orders. I think you've answered a lot of the questions I've heard among my author friends about pre-orders. So please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you, your podcast, and your fiction work online.
[00:43:17] Joe: All right. So if you want to learn about me on social media, I'm almost always jrlallo. That's me on Twitter and a couple of other places. My website is a bookofdeacon.com. And the name of the podcast is SIX FIGURE AUTHORS. The website is 6figureauthors.com and we release new episodes every Thursday.
[00:43:37] Matty: Great. Thank you so much, Joe.
[00:43:39] Joe: You're very welcome.
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