My latest novel ‘Rampike’ is just about finished- but it should have been finished a few weeks ago! It looks like coming in at 10k words over what I targeted and it should be finished either today 8th May, or tomorrow night.
Unfortunately, that means there are only 21 days to publication on Amazon through the pre-order option they provide. I should be able to get it edited in that time but if anything goes wrong or gets delayed at all, I may have to push back the release date by a couple of weeks. This would mean that I would become ineligible for preorders with Amazon for a whole year!
That sounds worse than it is, however. As much as I’d love to be churning out books every few weeks, I don’t have the time for this. I plan to have another book out in late 2018 and another in early 2019 but those will be the final two books in ‘The Alderman James Series’ so I’m not all that bothered about not being able to make those available for preorder. The people who read these two books will in most cases have already read the first two books in the series and will by now probably be on my mailing list as a result.
I’m on the fence about preorders anyway. My preorder sales have increased each time I’ve used the function but I think (I’m not sure about this) that it dilutes the effect on your sales rank as the sales are recorded as they happen and not on release day which would show a nice spike in the rankings. Let me know if you have any experience good or bad with preorders. I might just need some education on the matter!
E. P. Douglas 