Pre-Orders in the New Year

It took a few extra days, but I was finally able to make Ignotus (Fringe Worlds #3) available for pre-order (which - as the name implies - allows readers to order a book before it's actually released). 

I previously talked about the notion of doing pre-orders on my blog. I personally haven't embraced them to a large extent because they actually delay the release of a book. In short, your book has to be finalized for release at least several days in advance of the actual release date.  By way of example, for the April 15 release of Ignotus, Amazon says everything has to be done by April 11.  Needless to say, in a perfect world, if I had everything finalized by say, April 11, then that's the day I'd release - not a day, week, or month later.

That said, pre-orders do seem to be a way to help build early buzz for books, and many of the promotional channels now support them.  For instance, BookBub (which is the 800-pound gorilla of book promotions), will let authors send a Preorder Alert if they have at least 1000 followers on the site. (BookBub also has New Release Alerts and the Featured New Release promo to help in getting the word out.) Other marketing platforms have followed suit.  

For me, I've slowly come around to the idea of using pre-orders because I'm starting to like the idea of giving readers a firm release date.  Thus, I'll probably use it for the next few books and see how it works out.  

And speaking of the next few books, I should get back to work on the next item in the queue, which is Kid Sensation #8.  (Just between us chickens, the plan is to publish at least three Kid Sensation novels this year, so keep your fingers crossed.) I really do like the Kid Sensation universe, and I've got a number of other books set there which I've started (and have high hopes of completing soon):

• Smoked - a Kid Sensation companion novel featuring Smokescreen
• A Vixen story which will probably be the second Alpha League Supers book (working title, Siren's Call)
• An untitled Alpha Prime novel (which will probably feature Megaton as well)

So yeah, looks of stuff in the works - and that's not even counting books in other series. Anyway, keep your fingers crossed that my writing mojo stays strong, and I wish you much success in the new year.