Trying a New Thing At Amazon

Amazon has a pre-order thing on Kindle, and I’m going to try it with the next volume, The Roof of the World. We’ll see how it goes.

The idea is that someone reads The Deeping Well and The Lost City, and thinks, “gosh, that was fabulous, I can’t wait for more!” They go to Amazon, and find that there is a third volume — but it’s not available yet. So they click "Pre-Order,” and as soon as the volume becomes available, their credit card is charged and the book downloads to their Kindle.

In theory, this is supposed to be more exciting and positive, as an experience, than going to Amazon and finding only the two current live volumes.

Now since I’m pretty far ahead in the series, and in fact include a few teaser chapters at the end of each volume as well as an approximate release date, there’s no reason not to do a pre-order.

The only thing is, having gone through and clicked all the little buttons and uploaded things and so forth, Amazon lists the book as in “Pre-Order Draft,” which it’s not supposed to do. That’s supposed to happen only if the book is set up but I haven’t clicked the final approval button… which I did. So it’s a little nerve-racking.

Fortunately, I’ve set it up for 90 days in advance (last Sunday of June, if you’re counting), so there’s a lot of time to get this sorted.

And it certainly would be very nice not to have to think about these things for some time, and even generate some buzz. We’ll see.