Can we stop asking authors to get people to preorder their books?

Or, why does publishing sometimes feel like a Tupperware party?

A month before my first book After World launched, I sent out an email to literally everyone I knew. Anyone who had ever emailed me personally in the past 15 years, as far as my Gmail stretches back—they got an email from me where I told them about my book and I asked them to preorder a copy.

I can’t do that for Portalmania, my story collection that’s coming out in 6 weeks. Or rather I’m not going to. There was something so humiliating about the process with After World—like I was back to being a fourth-grade girl scout going door to door asking people to please please please buy a box of Thin Mints from me so I can get a badge and my girl scout troop can receive enough money to survive the year. The business side and the creative side of writing are tangled up enough already. Authors are actively (and unfortunately) involved in promoting their books. But do we need to be directly involved in getting people to place orders as well?

This is what the Substack AI image generator came up with when I asked it to generate a photo of a tupperware party that is selling books instead of tupperware. It looks like my kind of party, actually, other than the assumed pressure to purchase things.

There’s a difference between promoting a book and convincing people to buy a book. Promotion, in my mind, is less transactional. It leads to readers, and there are so many ways to be a reader these days. The library, for one. Used book sales on Ebay, AbeBooks, Biblio, etc. Reading a friend’s copy of a book. Reading a book on Hoopla or through Libby. Picking up a treasure at the dozens of Little Free Libraries scattered around my neighborhood. The reason I’m a writer is, well, first to write, but secondly to have people read my work. My childhood self, the one who wanted so badly to be a writer, wasn’t dreaming of sales or preorders but of readers. So while it feels weird to pivot from being a short story writer to a book promoter, I find that easier to stomach than the pivot to being a salesperson.

I have nothing against publishers selling my book. I get that publishing is a business. I just don’t want to feel like I’m supposed to be drumming up sales myself.

Any author with a book can rattle off the reasons why preorders are supposed to be important to a book’s success:

• Preorders send a signal to the publisher and bookstores that people will actually buy your book.

• They can help create the elusive buzz that will attract media outlets, influencers, and, yes, readers.

• All of a title’s preorders are grouped together during the first week in sales, so some books might have a better chance at landing on a bestseller list if there is a high number of preorders.

But there’s also very little incentive for readers to preorder a book — even with bonuses like bookmarks or special chapters. As Kathleen Schmidt of Publishing Confidential argues in her great essay “Why Pre-order ‘Campaigns’ Rarely Work,” books don’t have expiration dates, and no retailer is going to run out of copies the first week. “Authors deserve better,” writes Schmidt, “and publishing needs to step up to help them. Yes, it is their [the author’s] job to help sell their book, but it is not their job to keep drumming up preorders when hardly anyone is biting.”¹ I had never thought of preordering a book, to be honest, until I was publishing my first novel.² And I had been a writer for 20 years at that point and a devoted and voracious reader for even longer. I still don’t preorder books unless I’m trying to help out a close friend. My reading tastes tend to be a few decades to a century ago, and my TBR list is more than a hundred books long. On the rare occasion I’m going to read a new release, I generally get it out from the library.

A friend of mine mentioned a good goal for a debut novel would be 50 to 200 preorders.³ There’s a way I can check in the Simon & Schuster author dashboard to see how many copies of Portalmania have sold so far. A few months ago I had two preorders. That’s what preorders can look like, I guess, when the author isn’t using their personal networks to sell their books. I debated for a while this morning about what would make a better end to this little essay: should I check how many preorders I have now, 6 weeks before Portalmania comes out? Or should I not check?⁴

1. Schmidt also argues that preorder numbers “don’t necessarily predict how a book will sell” anyway.

2. I hadn’t even heard of the term ‘preorder’ before After World went into production.

3. Presumably for second books that number should be higher. Though short story collections would generally, I imagine, be somewhat lower.

4. I decided not to check. I also decided not to include links to preorder Portalmania. That seemed a bit disingenuous. That said, I’m sure you can figure out how to preorder my book if you really want to.