Latest / If I'm Being Honest: Straight Talk About Book Publishing & Promotion / Are Pre-Order Campaigns a Waste of Time?

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Are Pre-Order Campaigns a Waste of Time? · If I'm Being Honest: Straight Talk About Book Publishing & Promotion

• 0:10
  Joel: Welcome to If I'm Being Honest, Straight Talk About Book Publishing and Promotion.
• 0:16
  Joel: My name is Joel Pitney.
• 0:18
  Sayde: And I'm Sayde Walker.
• 0:19
  Joel: And today we are going to be talking about a very popular topic in the book marketing world, and that's pre-orders.
• 0:26
  Sayde: And more specifically, whether or not you should be considering a pre-order as part of your book marketing strategy.
• 0:34
  Sayde: And we have some strong feelings about this.
• 0:36
  Joel: We certainly do.
• 0:37
  Joel: What's new?
• 0:38
  Joel: Joel and Sayde have strong feelings about an issue.
• 0:41
  Joel: Um so the way that the way that this came up for me is that I've talked, I I talk to people all the time.
• 0:48
  Joel: And you're probably, you know, most listeners, I'm sure can relate to this who come in saying, okay, what the checklist for a book launch is getting your pre-order campaign.
• 0:56
  Joel: You got to get people getting out there, buying, you know, ordering copies of your book prior to launch, right?
• 1:02
  Joel: Before it's actually live to ship.
• 1:06
  Joel: And you need to you need to get the buzz going, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:09
  Joel: If you go to ChatGPT and ask them, should I run a pre-order campaign for my book, ChatGPT will say yes.
• 1:15
  Joel: There are many thought leaders out there who will talk about pre-orders are critical to a big successful launch.
• 1:20
  Joel: Um, there are many successful authors who will talk about pre-order strategies, all kinds of things, right?
• 1:25
  Sayde: That's gotta be coming from somewhere, right?
• 1:27
  Sayde: There's a reason that that mindset exists, that that uh advice is out there on the internet.
• 1:32
  Sayde: So, you know, where is this coming from?
• 1:35
  Joel: And so we're gonna dive into that.
• 1:37
  Joel: Um, and like a lot of these issues, uh, we're gonna try to approach this with some nuance.
• 1:43
  Joel: We are not saying that pre-orders are a bad idea.
• 1:46
  Joel: We're just saying that you shouldn't emphasize them as much as a lot of people say you should.
• 1:53
  Joel: You shouldn't build your strategy around them in the ways that a lot of people do.
• 1:56
  Joel: And we're gonna explain why on this on this uh episode.
• 2:00
  Joel: Uh before we go any further, if if if you love our show, um, please like and subscribe on your different platforms.
• 2:06
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• 2:06
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• 2:09
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• 2:18
  Joel: All right, so how we want to do this episode, we're gonna start off by first talking about where did this, where does the pre-order myth come from?
• 2:28
  Joel: What is the value, like Sayde said?
• 2:31
  Joel: What what I'm it can't be just made up, right?
• 2:34
  Joel: So, what is the value in running a pre-order campaign and where does that come from and who is it relevant to?
• 2:39
  Joel: So we want to talk about that first.
• 2:40
  Joel: Then secondly, we want to talk about why we don't think uh for most authors that pre-orders should be a big priority.
• 2:48
  Joel: And then lastly, we want to talk about, well, what is the appropriate role of pre-orders in a campaign for every for anyone, you know, because I think that that there's an argument for most authors that you could do some kind of a pre-order campaign.
• 3:00
  Joel: It's just that we don't think it should be one of your priorities.
• 3:03
  Joel: Does that sound good, Sayde?
• 3:04
  Sayde: Yeah, let's dig in.
• 3:06
  Joel: Okay.
• 3:07
  Joel: So the first one, all right, what where does this where does this idea of running pre-order campaigns from come from?
• 3:12
  Joel: What are the benefits of running a pre-order campaign?
• 3:14
  Joel: So one of them is uh if you can bank a bunch of orders, right?
• 3:21
  Joel: In advance of the book coming out, you uh you you can start to hack Amazon's algorithms, right?
• 3:30
  Joel: Amazon will reward you for having lots of pre-orders because Amazon will see, oh, this book is selling, this book is getting buzz.
• 3:38
  Joel: That means that we want to start promoting it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
• 3:42
  Joel: So that's one of the reasons.
• 3:44
  Joel: And as we've talked a lot about in this podcast and other contexts, for most authors, Amazon algorithms are not really hackable, right?
• 3:55
  Joel: And I know that that I know that that sounds like a defeatist strategy.
• 3:58
  Joel: I'm not saying you shouldn't try to do Amazon best practices, but the thing is the numbers, the the amount of sales that you actually need and the amount of customer reviews that you actually need to start getting Amazon to promote your book is really, really high.
• 4:14
  Joel: And you are competing against deep pocketed publishers who are promoting all their titles.
• 4:21
  Joel: And so for most authors, hacking algorithm, hacking Amazon, while a smart idea to do at a small degree, is not really, shouldn't be a central part of your campaign.
• 4:32
  Joel: You shouldn't be expecting that if you just get all these pre-orders going, you get the right keywords, et cetera, your book is just gonna take off.
• 4:38
  Sayde: Right.
• 4:39
  Sayde: Yeah, it's not gonna move the needle in the way that you might think that it's going to.
• 4:44
  Joel: So that's that's rule number one.
• 4:45
  Joel: The second one is, and this this comes from traditional publishing, and I'll speak from personal experience because I've worked on marketing campaigns for quite a few traditional publishing campaigns, quite a few traditionally published books.
• 4:56
  Joel: In the traditional publishing industry, there is there is very concrete value for running a pre-order campaign.
• 5:01
  Joel: So if you're if you have a traditional book deal, uh getting pre-orders is a good idea, and there's two reasons why.
• 5:07
  Joel: So the first one is uh traditional publishers uh will, most of them will be trying to sell your book to institutional buyers like bookshops and libraries, right?
• 5:21
  Joel: And they have sales agents, we've talked a lot about bookstores and distribution on this podcast, um, but they have sales agents that are going to conferences, wining and dining, you know, the book buyers at Barnes and Noble and Books a Million in different places, and can trying to convince them, hey, you should make a large order of your book.
• 5:38
  Joel: I was just on the phone with a publisher yesterday who's publishing one of the a book that I ghostwrote.
• 5:44
  Joel: And he's about to, he's about to send his sales reps uh out to their annual pitching conference where they're gonna be trying to sell this book that I ghostwrote uh through to publishers.
• 5:56
  Joel: And what are those, what do those sales agents need?
• 5:59
  Joel: They need data.
• 6:00
  Joel: They need evidence, they need talking points, they need to be able to convince book buyers that this book is gonna be a winner.
• 6:07
  Joel: And that they, that booksellers all throughout the country, all throughout the world, should be stocking that book on their shelves and promoting it.
• 6:15
  Joel: And what's one of the best data points you can use to do that?
• 6:18
  Sayde: Arguably the best.
• 6:19
  Sayde: Pre-orders.
• 6:20
  Joel: Pre-orders.
• 6:21
  Sayde: High number of people who have already purchased this book.
• 6:24
  Sayde: That is gonna, that's gonna help sell more books in a situation like that.
• 6:28
  Sayde: Absolutely.
• 6:29
  Joel: And it's and to so to a book, a books, a bookseller, they're gonna say, oh wow, that's impressive.
• 6:34
  Joel: I can see those numbers.
• 6:36
  Joel: That's really impressive.
• 6:37
  Joel: It tells me this author's invested in marketing the book for themselves, right?
• 6:41
  Joel: Which gives me confidence that if if we list this in our bookstore, people are gonna come into our store knowing about the book because they're already doing it.
• 6:49
  Joel: And it's also saying that this is a this is a winning product.
• 6:52
  Joel: But, and there's a big butt here, most authors are not working with traditional publishers.
• 6:58
  Joel: And there's a categorical difference, even if you're working with a hybrid, right?
• 7:03
  Joel: Most hybrids, the vast majority of hybrids will not be pitching your title to bookstores.
• 7:08
  Joel: And if you're self-published, you're not pitching your book, you're you are not out there pitching your title to bookstores either.
• 7:14
  Sayde: And they're not just gonna you don't have a sales team supporting you.
• 7:16
  Joel: So you are and they're not just gonna, yeah, and they're not gonna magically see your pre-order numbers out there in the ether and say, ooh, this is a book I want to bring into my store.
• 7:25
  Joel: Okay.
• 7:26
  Joel: So that's reason number one if you have a traditional pup traditionally published book.
• 7:30
  Joel: Reason number two, and this is even more obscure.
• 7:32
  Joel: So, right, we're we're shrinking the the audience for whom this is relevant, right?
• 7:36
  Joel: If you are running a bestseller campaign, and by bestseller campaign, I'm talking about a national bestseller campaign, not an Amazon bestseller campaign, but a national bestseller campaign, which is would be the New York Times or USA Today, LA Times, Publishers Weekly.
• 7:52
  Joel: These are these are bestseller campaigns where you are trying to accumulate a uh you're you're trying to be in the top seller in your genre for a week.
• 8:02
  Joel: They're calculated on a weekly basis.
• 8:05
  Joel: And uh in they calculate those numbers not based on the date of sale, but on the date of shipping.
• 8:13
  Joel: And so if you are one of the rare authors who have a who has a traditionally published book and is trying to run a national bestseller campaign, which means you're gonna need to sell at least 10,000 copies in a week, you can bank pre-orders in the in the months leading up to your launch.
• 8:30
  Joel: You could bank 500, 1,000, 2,000 of your sales over time.
• 8:34
  Joel: And those sales will count towards your bestseller campaign in the week that they are shipped, which is the first week of launch.
• 8:41
  Joel: They will not count in the time they were actually purchased, you know, months beforehand.
• 8:46
  Joel: So it's a tactic and a trick that a very, very small percentage of authors who have the capacity to sell 10,000 plus copies in a week with a traditional publisher.
• 8:58
  Joel: Okay.
• 9:00
  Joel: So those are the reasons, right?
• 9:03
  Joel: So we're talking about hacking Amazon's algorithms, and then if you're traditionally published, convincing uh giving convincing, giving good data for your sales agents to pitch your book to bookstores and or running a bestseller campaign.
• 9:17
  Joel: That, as far as I can tell, is where this idea of pre-orders being important comes from.
• 9:23
  Sayde: Yeah.
• 9:23
  Sayde: And it doesn't translate over well into the indie author scenario, which, you know, is who we work with.
• 9:31
  Sayde: Uh, I mean, we certainly we work with traditionally published authors as well, but who we really try to speak to on this podcast are, you know, those authors who are going at it by themselves.
• 9:41
  Sayde: And so those those scenarios don't translate over well to to a self-published author.
• 9:48
  Joel: Now, you know, there's and there's probably some secondary benefits, right?
• 9:51
  Joel: So if you run a if you run a pre-order campaign, it kind of forces you to get organized, right?
• 9:56
  Joel: And it it means that you're planning ahead and and you can build some excitement and buzz to your audience about this book coming out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
• 10:03
  Joel: So there's some secondary benefits.
• 10:05
  Joel: Um, and again, we're not saying you shouldn't run a pre-order campaign.
• 10:08
  Joel: We're just saying that you shouldn't expect it to do as much as you want.
• 10:12
  Joel: So now we're gonna get into our criticisms of it.
• 10:14
  Joel: Okay.
• 10:15
  Joel: So again, pre-order campaign not bad, but uh it just needs to be in the right priority.
• 10:21
  Joel: And so why are we suspicious?
• 10:23
  Joel: Why do we think pre-orders can can sometimes be a waste of time?
• 10:27
  Joel: When someone shows up on your Amazon page, ready to buy your book, right?
• 10:31
  Joel: They're usually gonna be there because you've you've spent some time and probably money and a lot of energy to get them there, right?
• 10:39
  Joel: Most people, most books are not gonna have just this audience of people just showing up randomly to see their book, right?
• 10:45
  Joel: You're gonna push them there.
• 10:46
  Joel: That's how for most books, especially first-time authors are just getting started.
• 10:51
  Joel: Um, or and especially if you're indie publishing, you're gonna be pushing people to your point of purchase, right?
• 10:57
  Joel: They're not gonna just naturally find it.
• 10:59
  Joel: That's a that's very important to know.
• 11:01
  Joel: Once they show up to buy, and you you're gonna have spent some money on that, or some time, or some energy, or some social capital trying to get those people there.
• 11:08
  Joel: You might have run some ads or you might have got on a podcast and started promoting your book, or maybe you you reached out to a fellow, uh, an influencer that you made contact with and said, Hey, could you promote your book to promote my book to your audience, right?
• 11:21
  Joel: So you've done something, you've had to do something to get someone there.
• 11:24
  Joel: By the time they get to that Amazon page and they're excited about your book, if they see that that book is available for pre-order only, which means they won't get their copy for in-sale months and months and months and months and months, they are much less likely to buy it, right?
• 11:38
  Joel: It's hard to get someone to the doorstep.
• 11:40
  Joel: And when they get to the doorstep, you want them to be able to just walk in the door.
• 11:42
  Joel: You don't want to have a sign that says, now that you're at the doorstep, I'd love to invite you in, but you're not gonna be here for three months, you can't come in for three months.
• 11:49
  Sayde: Right.
• 11:49
  Joel: Most people are probably just gonna say, Oh, okay, we'll come back and do it later.
• 11:53
  Joel: Right.
• 11:53
  Joel: And there's plenty of data on this.
• 11:55
  Joel: Your conversion rates are gonna be far lower for a pre-order campaign.
• 11:59
  Joel: Compounding the situation is that many most people who set up pre-order campaigns are only able to do that for their ebook if you're independently publishing.
• 12:08
  Joel: You can't even make your print book available for pre-order.
• 12:11
  Joel: Although there are some ways to kind of get around that, but still.
• 12:15
  Sayde: Right.
• 12:15
  Sayde: The systems of when we talk about when we talk about the technical systems of independently publishing a book, you know, through Amazon KDP, they only let you set up a pre-order for your ebook.
• 12:27
  Sayde: And and so that you have to take that into consideration.
• 12:30
  Sayde: If you're gonna be spending all of this time, money, effort driving people to your Amazon page to pre-order your ebook.
• 12:37
  Sayde: Is that really where you want to be prioritizing your focus?
• 12:42
  Sayde: You know?
• 12:43
  Joel: Yeah.
• 12:43
  Joel: You want to be efficient with your spend, right?
• 12:46
  Joel: So if you're gonna spend time, if you're gonna spend energy, if you're gonna spend money, if you're gonna spend social capital to try and get someone interested in your book, we highly recommend that that book is available to buy and get right away, not for pre-order, because otherwise your your RO ROI is gonna be greatly reduced.
• 13:05
  Joel: By how much?
• 13:06
  Joel: It's hard to say.
• 13:07
  Joel: My guess is it's at least a 50% reduction in your conversion rates when the book is available only for pre-order.
• 13:15
  Joel: And because, again, you know, part of the reason is what are the benefits of the pre-orders?
• 13:21
  Joel: We spoke about that in the beginning.
• 13:23
  Joel: You're not really gonna get any of those things, right?
• 13:26
  Joel: Most independently published authors are not gonna are not trying to sell through to bookstores or not gonna be able to.
• 13:31
  Joel: So um, there's no reason to get the pre-order.
• 13:34
  Joel: You're not gonna get that benefit.
• 13:35
  Joel: Most people are not gonna be running a national bestseller campaign, right?
• 13:39
  Joel: And so there's no reason to get that those pre-orders.
• 13:42
  Sayde: Right.
• 13:43
  Sayde: And if you're if you're thinking, well, the benefit is to hack the Amazon algorithm and to preload a bunch of sales that are gonna land on a specific day, and then I'm gonna get a number one new release banner, or even, you know, maybe even a number one bestseller banner that day, depending on what categories you have selected.
• 14:03
  Sayde: Um, yes, that is a that is certainly a possibility.
• 14:06
  Sayde: And you can also do all of that while your book is just available for sale.
• 14:10
  Sayde: Doesn't mean it would be a good thing.
• 14:11
  Sayde: What is going to hack the Amazon algorithm is sales and a continuation of sales and sales from from lots of different areas of the country and the world.
• 14:22
  Sayde: And so you you can you were you as an independent author are going to need to focus your time, attention, energy, money on getting book sales, regardless of whether it's in pre-order or not.
• 14:34
  Sayde: And so it anyway, those are those are some of the things that are always on my mind when I'm thinking about our pre-orders a waste of time and folks are out there reading about these, you know, Amazon hacks, like yes and no, because you could also just do that when you have the book for sale, you have multiple versions of your book for sale, so that when people do land on your page and they're going, Great, I like to read hardcover or I'm a paperback reader all the way.
• 15:04
  Sayde: I don't usually order traditionally published pre-order books because they only put the hardcover up.
• 15:10
  Sayde: And I'm gonna wait for the paperback because I prefer to read paperbacks.
• 15:13
  Sayde: And so that, you know, that's why I don't, that's why I don't pre-order.
• 15:17
  Sayde: And, you know, the other thing is you can't leave customer reviews on a pre-order page.
• 15:21
  Sayde: And that's a, you know, if we're talking about Amazon hacks, I'll put that in quotations.
• 15:27
  Sayde: Having customer reviews is such a fabulous way to encourage other readers to buy your book because that is unsolicited real people's opinions about whether or not they enjoyed this book.
• 15:42
  Sayde: And if I were an independently published author and I'm driving people to my Amazon page, my ask is not only buy the book, but also leave me a review because that's how other newer readers are going to vet this product.
• 15:56
  Sayde: And so again, if you're spending a lot of effort sending someone to a pre-order page and they're like, well, I don't really like ebooks, so that's not for me.
• 16:04
  Sayde: They can't leave you a review.
• 16:06
  Sayde: You know, it's it's not that it's a complete waste of time.
• 16:08
  Sayde: It's just we want you to think about this really holistically.
• 16:12
  Sayde: Does this approach work for you?
• 16:14
  Sayde: And and we just tend to believe that in most situations, it's it doesn't work that well.
• 16:20
  Joel: Yeah.
• 16:20
  Joel: When you look at, when you when you really look at, well, what are the pros, right?
• 16:24
  Joel: Which we talked about up front, most of those pros don't relate to most authors.
• 16:28
  Joel: And uh they're not worth, and in the eve for any of the pros you might get from running a pre-order campaign, they're not worth the cons, which is this dramatically reduced conversion rate on any person that you spent time, energy, money, or social capital getting to your page.
• 16:43
  Sayde: Yeah.
• 16:43
  Joel: So what is the same framework for pre-orders?
• 16:46
  Joel: Right?
• 16:47
  Joel: That's kind of the third piece here.
• 16:48
  Joel: And so again, we're saying there's plenty of opportunities to run pre-order campaigns, and there's no reason not to run one.
• 16:54
  Joel: So, what's our framework?
• 16:56
  Joel: So the first framework I would suggest, Sayde to alluded to this, would be why not run a pre-order campaign once the book is live?
• 17:05
  Joel: It's kind of a trick of the mind.
• 17:07
  Joel: But you can do all the things that you would do for a pre-order campaign, promoting it, building buzz, but just make the book live and available for sale.
• 17:15
  Joel: Because you're gonna get a higher conversion rate anyway, and there's no real benefit to saying that it's coming out before it's released.
• 17:22
  Sayde: Right.
• 17:23
  unknown: Right?
• 17:23
  Sayde: You can I'm gonna segue just a little teeny tiny bit, so please forgive me.
• 17:27
  Sayde: Uh, even if you are thinking, oh, I'm still gonna do a pre-order, you know, I would I would highly encourage you in the setup process of that to make sure that you have all of your files ready and in the system.
• 17:41
  Sayde: And uh, you know, because you do have the option, you can set up a pre-order and say, oh, I'll upload my files later.
• 17:47
  Sayde: Um, we've had authors do that for a variety of reasons.
• 17:50
  Sayde: We've helped them with that, and then we've, you know, gone to upload the files and they've gotten rejected or the you know, the system, there was a hiccup in the system and and they didn't get distributed to the people who had pre-ordered the book, which is absolutely devastating.
• 18:04
  Sayde: And so if you're gonna set up a pre-order, make sure you have all of your ducks in a row, all of your files are ready and they're in the system.
• 18:13
  Sayde: And if they're gonna be in the system anyway, why not just turn them on and make them live?
• 18:18
  Sayde: Yep.
• 18:19
  Sayde: And run your pre-order, like Joel said, with actual live books for purchase.
• 18:24
  Joel: And yeah, we're saying pre-order campaigning quotes.
• 18:27
  Sayde: Yes.
• 18:28
  Joel: So that's framework number one.
• 18:29
  Joel: But then there's a second framework that um is also interesting.
• 18:33
  Joel: And in this case, this would be for someone who actually said is like, you know what?
• 18:36
  Joel: I still want to run a pre-order.
• 18:38
  Joel: I want to do a traditional pre-order.
• 18:39
  Joel: I want that book turned on.
• 18:40
  Joel: I've been sold by, you know, Chat GPT and and, you know, uh so-and-so pre-order book expert author who said I should do this on their YouTube channel or whatever, right?
• 18:53
  Joel: And um again, those people are not necessarily wrong, just partial.
• 18:56
  Joel: So let's say you want to go that way.
• 18:58
  Joel: It's important to think about what type of audience and promotion you want to do for that pre-order campaign.
• 19:07
  Joel: So uh some people may uh may know about the the paid, earned, and owned paradigm of marketing.
• 19:15
  Joel: So when you think about audiences, there's paid audiences, which are audiences that you literally pay to get access to.
• 19:20
  Joel: That'd be like paying written word media or book bub to send a to do to do an ad about your book or a Google ad, right?
• 19:27
  Joel: You are paying to get that audience that's paid.
• 19:29
  Joel: Uh earned would be PR, right?
• 19:32
  Joel: You're probably paying, you could be paying a PR firm, but you're or doing it yourself, but you are earning an audience because you're going out there and compelling people to want to interview you or bring them on their platform or or uh talking to an influencer contact that you have and earning their uh promotion of your book, right?
• 19:52
  Joel: That's earned.
• 19:53
  Joel: You have owned, you have earned, sorry, you have paid, then you have earned, and then you have owned.
• 19:57
  Joel: So owned is your implicit audience.
• 19:59
  Joel: That's your email list, that's your LinkedIn network, that's anybody that you can talk to multiple times.
• 20:05
  Joel: And that's why I like that's very important.
• 20:08
  Joel: Owned, right?
• 20:09
  Joel: Paid, earned, and owned.
• 20:11
  Joel: And that owned, you have control over that.
• 20:14
  Joel: You're not gonna get just one shot.
• 20:16
  Joel: In paid and earned, you're gonna get one shot with an audience.
• 20:19
  Joel: In owned, you can talk to them multiple times.
• 20:23
  Joel: And so um if you do really want to run a pre-order campaign and you want to make that book available pre-order, we highly recommend that you only run that pre-order campaign within your owned audience.
• 20:36
  Joel: We don't think that you should pay or earn any audience for that pre-order campaign because there you really care about ROI.
• 20:44
  Joel: You're only gonna talk to them once.
• 20:46
  Joel: So you want to make sure that if you're paying to get someone or you're working hard to earn exposure, that at that point everybody will want to buy your book and there won't be anybody who says, oh, I'll wait till later.
• 20:58
  Joel: You want that conversion rate to be a hundred percent owned audience, it's fine.
• 21:02
  Joel: Let's say you have a really big TikTok following or you have a really large LinkedIn network.
• 21:05
  Joel: You can say, hey, I've got this book.
• 21:07
  Joel: It's coming out in February.
• 21:08
  Joel: I'm running a pre-order campaign for it right now.
• 21:11
  Joel: Go check it out.
• 21:12
  Joel: Go ahead.
• 21:13
  Joel: That's awesome.
• 21:14
  Joel: Get some pre-order numbers, generate some buzz.
• 21:16
  Joel: That's super cool.
• 21:17
  Joel: Guess what?
• 21:18
  Joel: You're gonna be able to talk to them again in January and then in February, and then in April.
• 21:22
  Joel: You're gonna be able to come back to that owned audience.
• 21:24
  Joel: Okay.
• 21:25
  Joel: Now, Sayde, do you have anything you want to add about that?
• 21:29
  Sayde: No, I think that's I think that really drives it home.
• 21:31
  Sayde: You know, that's such a that's such a fabulous way to look at your audiences and how to prioritize your efforts.
• 21:39
  Sayde: And if you do want to include a pre-order, that's great.
• 21:43
  Sayde: And here's, you know, here's how to do it.
• 21:45
  Sayde: I think that's fabulous.
• 21:46
  Joel: And I'll just I want to tell one little story to underscore this this framework.
• 21:50
  Joel: And it was with uh, I was recently uh another one of my ghostwritten books uh was published by a traditional publisher, and we were running a national bestseller campaign.
• 22:02
  Joel: Okay.
• 22:03
  Joel: So the traditional publisher had a vested interest in getting pre-orders to be able to increase sales to booksellers.
• 22:10
  Joel: And then we, as sort of like the team, were running, we were investing a lot of money and energy in running a national bestseller campaign.
• 22:18
  Joel: Okay.
• 22:19
  Joel: So those are the two criteria where pre-orders matter.
• 22:22
  Joel: And so I remember one of our strategic calls, we we had the publisher on board, we had the publicist on board, we had the author on board, we had a marketing team on board, we were all talking, how are we gonna do this?
• 22:31
  Joel: How are we gonna do this?
• 22:33
  Joel: And there was consensus among every stakeholder on that call that we should, even though there was a true value in getting pre-orders, we should only be using owned audience for it.
• 22:45
  Joel: The publicist was saying, nope, we shouldn't do any PR until the book is live.
• 22:50
  Joel: And the publisher was saying, nope, we're not gonna, we don't want to spend any money on advertisements or or buying access to lists or anything like that until the book is live.
• 22:59
  Joel: Use your own audience.
• 23:01
  Joel: And this individual did have a large owned audience, so that was that was good.
• 23:05
  Joel: But they they said for pre-orders, they're important, but they're not so important that you should pay for or earn any audience.
• 23:12
  Joel: Just use your own audience.
• 23:13
  Sayde: When you're gonna get a lower ROI on that.
• 23:15
  Sayde: And that that's that's the key.
• 23:17
  Sayde: Like that's the I think the main point that we want to drive home.
• 23:20
  Joel: Yep.
• 23:21
  Joel: So um we'd love to hear any counterpoints to this.
• 23:24
  Joel: Um any questions.
• 23:26
  Joel: I would love to hear people who found exceptions to our little framework here because we always love to update our priors, as they say.
• 23:33
  Joel: So please leave us comments, shoot us an email, Joel at launch my book, or Sayde at launch my book.
• 23:38
  Joel: We're here.
• 23:39
  Joel: Thanks for tuning in.