Okay, I know I was going to talk "content" in my next blog post, but something REALLY frustrating came up while uploading my book to Amazon. I've been planning my release with the understanding that I could upload everything ahead of time, make it available as a "pre-order", and then start encouraging people to pre-order it ahead of time -- extra marketing time, right?
So, I uploaded my ebook to Amazon fine. Set it to pre-order. Woot. Excited. No issues. Then I go to upload my paperback and hardcover. Do the same thing. Woot. Excited. No issues.............................. Oh. But wait. What's this email in my Inbox that tells me my paperback and hardcover are freaking LIVE!!!
LIVE! As in, published. As in, available for purchase. OMG, I can see the page preview! EVERYONE CAN SEE MOST OF MY FIRST CHAPTER! This is NOT good because I wanted a final read-through in paper form before publishing (and, sure enough, on the very first page, one of my key words is 'too long' and my formatting software hyphenated it instead of keeping it together and it looks FREAKING TERRIBLE)
*ME FREAKING OUT*
I quickly unpublished the books. Then I went hunting for answers. It's official -- Amazon does NOT allow you to set paperbacks/hardcovers to pre-order. All or nothing folks. Apparently Ingramspark does allow it, so I may look into that. I'm super-disappointed, since I had a bunch of family members lined up to pre-order. And all my marketing was planned around having a pre-order period to ramp up sales. Grrrr...
In conclusion, I have no idea how badly I screwed myself over by early-publishing my books. I was under the impression that Amazon boosts the algorithms for newly published works, which I wouldn't be able to benefit from now apparently.--if that's true at all.
Lessons learned!
The End of the World is set to launch Feb 5th, so a little ways to go (thus my blog full of 'here's what I learned/am learning' haha)
Thanks, very good info. Gimme some titles of your books. I'd like to take a look. ;-)