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Latest / If I'm Being Honest: Straight Talk About Book Publishing & Promotion

Are Pre-Order Campaigns a Waste of Time?

Pre-orders sound like the responsible thing to do for a book launch, but they can quietly sabotage the moment you need most: when an interested reader is finally ready to buy. Joel Pitney and Sayde Walker dig into the pre-order myth with nuance, not hot takes, and we explain why the “everyone must do a pre-order campaign” advice often comes from contexts most self-published authors are not actually in.

We walk through the real sources of pre-order hype: the promise of triggering Amazon algorithm visibility, the very real value of pre-orders in traditional publishing when a sales team is…

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