Hello reader friends! Welcome to another episode of Amateur Hour with Piper Bee.
Okay, all jokes aside, I want to apologize for pretending even a tiny smidge that I knew what I was talking about when it came to pre-orders and self-publishing. I do not. (But to be fair, I did warn you.)
Now for some GOOD NEWS!
My amatuer mishap means YOU can order the paperback of JSLP early!! WOOHOO!! It’s already #1 in Amazon YA Clean Romance New Releases!
Why I Released My Paperback Early
The main tea: I got mixed up about the dates on IngramSpark. Essentially, the “publication” date and the “on sale” date are both the release date. So, if you change one, the other follows automatically. I don’t know why they are both there, but they are.
I decided that I would take advantage of my misunderstanding of the dates and release my book on the date that I set in IngramSpark.
Should I have looked into it more? Perhaps. But IngramSpark’s “help” topic on the matter is extremely confusing (basically it states that the “on sale date” is the date the book can be sold by retailers… is pre-order not that?? Apparently not). I will go into detail in another post about this and other self-publishing issues I’ve had to resolve, but the basic answer is this:
“Enable Distribution” to “on” or “yes” means your pre-orders will begin even if your book isn’t released yet. The book will release on the “on sale/publication” date.
For further insight on the topic, check out my friend Renee Dugan’s blog on the matter.
The other teas:
- I had to answer a question: Should I change the dates on IngramSpark to reflect my original release? It looks like this is possible. If you change the dates, the title goes into “review” before the changes are made. It occurred to me that my “pre-orders” could turn into actual sales during that period, and then once changed, go back to pre-orders. There was potential that some of my readers would get the book and others would still have to wait… and I thought that was super unfair. IngramSpark is very slow right now. Printing is slow, customer service is slow… I had no reason to believe that this issue wouldn’t be slow to fix. It was better to roll with the change.
- Many people already consider late May to be summer. I was nervous about a May release date because I couldn’t be sure that every part of the process would be completed by then. But, it turned out that everything was ready. I even got quite a few early reviews before May 20th! It was a major bonus that people would have access to my summer book for a longer period of summer.
- I had already considered starting my paperback release before the ebook release. This is a release strategy that I happened upon a while ago. Having different “release days” for different versions gives the book a little more exposure. It also allows for the other version to have reviews populated on Amazon before the official release of the other version.
- Releasing early is a fun surprise 😀
So there you have it folks! Until next time!
Piper Bee 
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