Between the
publication of my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, last April and the publication of the third, Not Death, But Love, last month, Amazon
introduced a new promotional tool for authors — the preorder. Although I’m not
normally a cutting-edge sort of guy, I decided to give it a try.
Preorder
allows an author to put the book out there on Amazon as a coming attraction up
to three months before actual publication. Interested readers can reserve a
copy, which is downloaded to them on publication day. For the purpose of
counting sales for book rankings on Amazon, the preorders are counted the day
they’re recorded. For the purpose of paying the author, they’re counted on
publication day.
A book can
be placed on preorder if it’s not quite done, but if the final copy isn’t
submitted to Amazon a week and a half before publication, there are penalties.
Like losing all the preorder sales. I knew I could make the deadline, so
figured I had nothing to lose.
Not What I Expected
My initial
expectation was that the book up for preorder would sell about as well as the
two books already up on Amazon, but that turned out not to be the case. The
first month that Not Death, But Love
was up on Amazon, the only buyers were myself, my wife, Linda, and two friends.
I concluded that unless you’re a big-name author, you won’t sell many books in
March to people who won’t be receiving them until the end of May.
The next
month picked up a bit, and when it got to be about two weeks before book
publication date, the pace quickened. Ten days before publication, I sent a
blast email to a large group of people I know and saw an immediate surge in
sales.
Not until
the book went live did I get a breakdown of where the sales had come from. Most
were from the U.S. (I’m guessing half to two thirds were people who knew me),
but I also got preorders in the U.K. and Australia, where I don’t know anybody.
A Good Marketing Tool
From the
sales standpoint, I’d have to say the preorders were a bit disappointing, but
they still helped somewhat. The unexpected bonus of trying this out was that it
enabled me to do some test-marketing about how to present the book.
When I
first put the book up for preorder, the tag line on the book description was,
“She was writing a family history, and her murder became the final chapter.” I
tried tweeting that with an image of the book cover and a link, but I also
tried out several other taglines. One of the alternatives came in head and
shoulders above the others in terms of being re-tweeted and favorited.
The winning
tag line was “A Paean to Books, A Reflection on Love, and a Police Procedural
With No Police.” That’s currently the leader to the book description on Amazon,
and in spite of or because of it, the book is selling well compared to my previous
efforts. In any event, I decided that the people had spoken and went with their
decision. Well, the people who use Twitter, anyway.
