Publishers I Am Begging You To Give Me Something For Pre-Ordering

If you've ever had a friend write a traditionally-published book, you will inevitably have gotten an email asking you to PLEASE preorder the book because 1) bookstores choose what to stock based on order numbers, 2) pre-orders count as first-week sales, so they're the book's best shot to get onto a bestseller list.

I try my best to contribute whenever this happens, because I want my friends to succeed, but I have to admit I feel pretty salty about it. One reason is that I don't actually want a hardback, and it costs $32, and 90% of that goes to the publisher/retailers/etc, so on the material side of the transaction I'm spending $32 to send my pal $3 for an object I don't actually want. I wish I could just give my friend $20 and then buy the e-book version for $12, but so it goes.

But even more than that, I feel salty because Publishers pester authors about how important pre-orders are, they make authors email all their friends and relations to do this "please pre-order my book" thing, and in return they are willing to give ABSOLUTELY LITERALLY NOTHING.

At the absolute bare minimum, pre-ordering a book should get me a 10% discount on list price. I know at this level it doesn't really matter economically but... you are asking me to tie up my money 6 months in advance, it is historically just a norm across most industries that if you ask someone to pre-pay you have to offer a cheaper price for it. But obviously it's not about the money, it's about the vibe: you are asking me to do a thing that helps you out and gives me 0 benefit, can you please just make a minimal good-will gesture so I can feel good about the interaction? This is 0% the author's faults, so I do it anyway, but it makes it way harder to be excited about helping.

And that gets at the real core of the problem: rather than making me feel Part Of Something, Publishers make me feel taken-advantage-of for trying to participate in supporting a book. It seems to me that Publishers could massively benefit themselves by treating pre-order customers with a bit more graciousness. Kickstarter is a very successful business model for many reasons, one of which is that if a person feels like a (small but real) part of the development of a project, they are way more invested in it and excited to help promote it.

There is no obvious reason why big publishers couldn't have a special pre-order platform where you pre-order books (at a small discount) and get made to feel like a Friend and Supporter, and then I'm pretty sure you'd be more likely to tell other people about the book and encourage them to buy it too. And this would not only help that specific book but allow publishers to build an email list of high-value Supporters, which would help them sell more books in the future.

One of the strangest parts of this is that it's not even clear to me that a discount Supporter Tier would need to cost Publishers any money! See, most Stuff Online is sold through Amazon [citation needed], but most sellers make higher margins when they sell directly. Amazon normally makes it approximately impossible to sell a good from your own online store for less than the Amazon price, and since Amazon has super-fast shipping and extremely easy checkout, it's hard to offer a workable incentive to customers for buying from your own store even when that greatly increases your profit margin. (I think Amazon's Most Favoured Nation Clause is one of the defining features of modern commerce, a huge chunk of dark matter warping everything else in online shopping – I will write more about this another day).

Anyway! To the best of my knowledge, pre-orders could just completely get around this problem because Amazon is matching a product's current price, not the ever-used price. So Publishers could do a one-month Supporter Pre-order window where people can buy from their own platform at a discount, ideally get some other warm fuzzy perk as well, and then once the window is over the book goes up for pre-order on Amazon etc at the normal price. They'd even get my email address in the process, which is valuable for future sales and which Amazon doesn't give them!

Publishers: please! I'm begging you, think about the psychology of this thing. Let me feel good about doing a thing I already want to do, and develop an actual relationship with me that you could profit from in the long run, rather than making me feel like a useless chump who's being cornered into giving an interest-free loan to a billion-dollar company in order to do my pal a favour.