Why Preorders Are Gold

You may have noticed that authors really, really like it when you preorder. I’m no exception: If you offered me either a preorder or a taco, I’d have to apologize to the taco, tell it that it did nothing wrong because it’s perfect, and still take the preorder. Why are they so spiffy? An attempt to explain, perhaps not exhaustive but hopefully not exhausting:

Preorders are the ultimate indicator of buzz, because if folks are willing to put money down in advance, well, that talks much louder than someone saying in a social media post that they’re looking forward to reading it (though that’s great too). And if bookstores and the publisher see buzz surrounding a certain title, then things start happening that might not have happened otherwise. What things? Well…

•An indie bookstore with limited shelf space might decide to stock copies of a book they weren’t going to stock before. Let’s say our fictional bookstore, Taco Bout Books, can bring in ten new titles on a release week—they probably have to get rid of ten titles too—but dang, there are probably seventy, eighty, even five hundred new titles to choose from. Which ones are they going to pick? Well, if they have preorders for your book, it’s more likely they’ll pick yours. They might even make a stack on a front table and face it out so people can find it easily. And if they have copies available in store, then the chances of people discovering your book increase dramatically. Because they can’t discover you if the store isn’t stocking your book. So preorders can ultimately increase visibility and distribution, which can lead to more sales.

•A preorder is a guaranteed first-week sale, which is the most important week in a book’s life cycle. It’s the week you’re most likely to hit a list, for one thing, and hitting those lists help authors write more books later. But even if they don’t hit a list, that first week’s sales get a hard look by publishers when it’s time to decide on future contracts. So every first-week sale is important downstream. To be clear, I’m grateful and happy whenever folks buy a book! But first-week sales are the most helpful career-wise, so writers understandably dig preorders for that reason.

•Sometimes a publisher might look at preorder numbers, see they’re kinda strong, and throw some extra marketing resources at a title to see if they can juice it up a bit more. Those resources can manifest in different ways, but the key is that this extra juice happens solely because of preorders. Authors love extra juice. Sometimes they like it in a box or pouch with a straw, sometimes mixed with gin, and sometimes in marketing dollars.

•Digital platforms have to decide which books to put on their front page, and front-page visibility helps a lot, as you might imagine. And they’re going to pick the buzzy books. Strong preorders mean buzz. Even if a digital retailer is being paid by a publisher for front-page visibility, what’s the publisher pushing? Buzzy books. This is true in ebook and audio too. So your preorders in those formats help as well!

All of which is to say, preorders are the One Weird Trick to make sure you get to write more books. That’s why you hear writers talk about them a lot, offer special deals for swag, and so on. For example, if you preorder A Curse of Krakens from any store in any format and upload your confirmation or receipt to the form at this link, you’ll get a free short story in the Seven Kennings universe called “A Whisper of Snakes.” I’ve done fun little pins in the past, bookmarks, doohickeys, cursed garden gnomes—you have to try stuff. People are digging the story, though—it features Abhi, Murr, and Eep.

If you’d like to preorder a signed copy, please order from any of the following indie stores and specify you want it signed either in special instructions online or by saying so over the phone. I’ll sign it the day I visit the store and they’ll ship to you wherever you are.

Old Firehouse Books, Ft Collins, CO (970) 484-7898
Tattered Cover, CO Springs (719) 602-5300
The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, AZ (480) 947-2974
Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, CA (619) 539-7137
Schuler Books, Okemos, MI (517) 349-8840
Bakka Phoenix, Toronto, ON (416) 963-9993
Perfect Books, Ottawa, ON (613) 231 6468

And of course I hope you’ll come see me on tour if you can! Thanks for reading whenever you read. You deserve a taco.

Update on the updated update

Hey buds,

A whole honkin’ buttload of you helped us out with the medical costs of our friend, Ayesha, who had chronic leukemia and needed treatment in Denver. The bone marrow transplant was successful—hooray!—and holy cow, you helped save her life. Thank you. Can’t thank you enough, really (and those doctors in Denver who know what they’re doing).

However, Ayesha still has three to four appointments a week for various therapies, tests, and treatments, and needs to stay in the Denver area another year. I’ve been taking care of Ayesha’s housing this year but cannot afford to continue that. Downtown Denver’s rent, as they say, is nucking futs, so we are looking to move her someplace more affordable now that she doesn’t need to be so close to the hospital. So: If you wish to help out by donating to Ayesha’s gofundme, we would of course be turbo grateful, but we would also hook you up with a signed book or two. What we’ve done thus far is get you a book for every $50. After you donate to Ayesha, screenshot the confirmation and email my assistant/amazing spouse, Kimberly, and let her know two things: 1) what you’d like from the list below (while supplies last) and 2) your complete shipping address. The email to use is treats [at thingie] kevinhearne dot com. (I spelled it out in an attempt to foil internet scrapers, but what the heck, let’s be real, they are probably watching me type this right now.)

Here’s the list:
Iron Druid Trade Paperbacks, the revised and expanded 10th Anniversary Edition with bonus goodies:
Hounded: 0 (sorry)
Hexed: 4
Hammered: 7
Tricked: 6
Trapped: 5
Hunted: 5
Shattered: 23
Staked: 22
Besieged: 19
Scourged: 23

Subterranean Press signed special edition hardcovers:
Hounded: 0
Hexed: 0
Hammered: 10
Tricked: 12
Trapped: 16
Hunted: 22
Shattered: 22

Thank you again. I appreciate you all so much and am grateful to you for reading. I hope to see you on my tour for A Curse of Krakens in November if you’re able to make any of these dates. Super excited to see you!

Tour math

Piggybacking here on an excellent post by Chuck Wendig about why we gotta have bookstore events. It’s a great dive into the whys and wherefores and you should definitely give it a read—I nodded and said “Yep, yep, yep” though the whole thing.

Chuck’s main argument is that publishers might not be supporting bookstore events because they’re not mega profitable in the immediate spreadsheet sense, but they are actually profitable in many ways that aren’t obvious to a bean counter looking at one night’s event sales.

To be fair to the bean counters—they are correct in that events are often not immediately profitable. You have to sell a fairly large buttload to make events profitable on one night’s balance sheet. So let’s MATH a bit, then circle back to why we have to look beyond that.

A Curse of Krakens, when it comes out November 7, will be going for $32 in hardcover. It’s a big chonker of a book with a spiffy map on the endsheet. Retailers like your local indie plus bigass megacorporations buy the books from the publishers at a discount, of course, and then they sell them for cover price and have to make their payroll and such and hope there’s profit when that’s all done. This can vary a bit depending on the retailer—discounts from the publisher start at 40% but can go higher depending on volume and other stuff. But let’s imagine a new indie store that hasn’t really earned big discounts yet called Taco Bout Books. If Taco Bout Books wants to stock A Curse of Krakens, a 40% discount means it’s paying $19.20 to the publisher. So if it sells a copy to you at cover price, Taco Bout Books makes $12.80 per copy. A large amount of that is going to pay for labor and insurance and rent and utilities and shipping and such and then, if there’s any profit left over, maybe they have taco money. If you are getting any discount from the store, that’s all on them—they’re reducing their profit margin.

(Let me say right now I’m not discussing ebooks or audiobooks—they’re not usually part of bookstore event math because while some indie stores offer both, it’s not, to my knowledge, a huge slice of any pie. We’re dealing with paper copies here.)

Margins are of course slimmer on mass market and trade paperbacks because the price point is smaller to begin with. An $8.99 mass market paperback costs the store $5.39 to stock. They therefore make $3.60 per copy sold, and after you pay for overhead, there’s not even taco money left unless you are selling a huge buttload of them. There’s one indie store I know of that’s very transparent about their costs: They have to sell 3200 books a month to break even. And they often don’t make it for most of the year; they wind up depending on the holiday season to have a ridiculous couple of months that make up for all the shortfalls. Most indie stores are in this boat. Months of panic and fervent prayers that the holiday season will allow them to stay open.

But one thing—a huge thing—that helps smooth out those troughs and meet payroll is store events. Because a good event brings in a bunch of readers who might not normally walk in, and they often buy more than just one book while they’re there. That part is like, TURBO CRUCIAL. Virtual events, from all I’ve heard, don’t cut the mustard; people might buy the book that’s being promoted but they don’t buy a lot of other stuff. At in-person events, folks might buy other goodies with higher profit margins than books, too—which is why you see so many weird tchotchkes in bookstores. And then those new customers might come back again for more events and become regulars. Events are, in many ways, key to an indie bookstore’s survival. Which is why bookstores are really worried that authors aren’t having as many events, that publishers aren’t sending them, and some events are sparsely attended—events are not only what make a bookstore profitable, but financially possible. And COVID wrecked a lot of that.

More math, but from my side: Publishers pay authors a 10% royalty on the cover price for hardcovers. (Yes, there are variations in this rate, but I’m using a very common one.) So, if you buy a hardcover copy of A Curse of Krakens while I’m on tour, I’ll get $3.20 regardless of any discount you get when you buy it (because the discount is coming from the retailer’s profit margin, not my royalty.) You will, in effect, have bought me a street taco. Thank you. (Usually—again, there are variations—authors get 8% for mass market and 12% for trade paperbacks, which doesn’t quite equal a taco, but if you buy a couple of those then we will unlock the achievement: Taco.)

So here’s what’s happening: Travel is ridiculously expensive and daaaang does that eat into everyone’s taco money. You have to plane, train, or automobile to the city the event is in. You have to rent a room to sleep in. You have to eat a food or three, and it all adds up. So let’s look at what it’s gonna take to get me to my first event in Ft Collins, CO, on Nov. 7:
Flight from Montreal to Denver: $390
Rental car to get my butt to Ft Collins: ~$100
Hotel: ~$130
Three Foods for the day, keeping it cheap at an average $20 each, so call it $60
Total: $680

Who’s paying for all of that? The publisher, the author, or some combo of the two? Let’s say it’s all me (it isn’t) just to do the math on my side because I can’t even begin to do the math on the publisher’s side (I have no idea what their overhead is. Out of the $19.20 they get for a copy of A Curse of Krakens, they pay me $3.20, so they are really working with $16 to pay for their overhead, which is in New York and involves numerous editors and an art department and accounting and shipping and warehousing and printing and marketing and so on). If I am paying all costs for the trip and make $3.20 per copy, I’d have to sell 213 books in Ft. Collins to break even on my travel costs. I would be delighted, of course, if that happened, but it’s unlikely, y’all. I’m simply not that big a deal. But that math right there is why bean counters are looking at events and going, you know what? Events aren’t profitable. You have to be a pretty big deal to move 200+ books at an event. (Bookstores on the other hand are delighted with an extra 50-100 books sold on any given day.)

Lowering travel costs obviously helps—I’m keeping the rental car to get to my subsequent dates and avoiding the expense of airfare until I leave San Diego—but still. I’m not going to be swimming in tacos at any point. I’m giving away my tacos by touring. So why do it?
1. Because of all the stuff Chuck said in his blog, and it was a lot
2. Because I like people who read and want to meet them. They’re the best people
3. I love bookstores. The way they look and smell, the sheer monument to human achievement and creativity they represent, and some of them have shop dogs and I get to pet them. (Shoutout to Fern in Capital Books on K in Sacramento, CA! She is a very good dog and has her own account on Instagram, @bookstorefern)
4. I’m still amazed that people want to read my books and have me sign them. It gives me warm fuzzy feelings that counterbalance the months of existential dread and self-doubt one feels while working alone. Plus it’s good to get out of the house. Events are necessary for my well being.

I’ve been touring since 2011. Last year I did four tours—three in the US and one in Europe—and not a single one of the tours was profitable to me personally or my publisher if you look at just the event sales in isolation. Travel costs always eat up the sales. But every tour was worth it to me and definitely to the bookstores—and therefore to the publishers, if they’d like to continue to have bookstores in which to sell their products. (Every indie shop that shuts its doors is one step closer to a giant anti-union megacorp running everything.) Hopefully these tours were a good experience for readers, too—happy readers keep reading and buying books on other days than the event days, and they spread the word and more sales are generated down the road because of the events, but just because that’s impossible to track, we shouldn’t conclude that it’s not happening or that events aren’t worth it.

All of which is to say: I hope you’ll go to events. Because they’re fun, and bookstores are rad, and money isn’t the only thing we should be considering here. COVID still exists, so wear a good mask for safety. And if you can’t go to events, you can support the stores (and the authors) by preordering signed copies to be shipped to you. That helps everyone because you get a signed book without moving from your reading chair and the stores who host authors can keep the lights on and maybe buy a taco.

My tour schedule is below, and I’m super excited to see everyone. I’ll point out one event in particular—Nov. 10 in Scottsdale. A couple doors down from The Poisoned Pen is a pub called Cornish Pasty with a large outdoor seating space. I’ll be there at 5 pm before the event and there might be Irish wolfhounds there too. So please drop on by and say hi, let’s have a drink and a pasty and chat if you feel like it before we go get bookish at 7.

And go see Chuck on tour if you can! And any other authors coming to your local indie or your local B&N. Stores often have event calendars and email newsletters telling you who’s coming in the next month. Become a member of the literati illuminati! It’s fun for the whole family.

Regardless: Thank you for reading (or listening if you dig audiobooks). People who read are the bestest peeps.