Preorders are an extremely vital and important part of the process to getting a book out into the world. It’s vital to all creative processes, beyond just for books, comics, and graphic novels, but we’re going to focus on the publishing world for the purpose of this post.

I’m going to go into depth on the why behind everything but feel free to scroll down to the TL;DR summary, if you want the short version.

If you follow any creators on their social media, you may have seen them hyping up their projects available for preorder. On top of creators just being downright excited for something to be almost out in the world, it serves an important function: to tell bookstores and publishers that a title is worth stocking or that the creators are worth acquiring more stories from.

You might not think anything of it when you know there’s something you’re excited about on the horizon—you can just pick it up in stores on the day of or whenever you’re next out, right? But what if you go to pick it up, and it’s not stocked? It could be that they sold out, sure, but it could also be that without preorders to let a book buyer know about a title, it got lost in the shuffle and didn’t even wind up in the store in the first place. There is a lot of competition for not a lot of shelf space, so a book needs to standout to get a spot.

You’ve probably seen bestseller lists before like the New York Times or USA Today or within Canada, the Globe & Mail. All of these lists track the sales data for books to see what is doing well. They can be localized, regional, national, or international, but all of them compile sales from a variety of sources to give folks an idea of what people are excited about. When a new release hits that list, it’s very often also because of preorders. Preorders get added to the data for the first week of sales, and they’re vital to helping put creators on the bestsellers map, so to speak.

Authors and creators that hit bestseller lists are far more likely to get bigger marketing budgets for their current and future books since “Bestselling Author” can be an enticing title for consumers when looking to check out new books. But even without the bestseller lists in the mix, preorders help to determine the marketing budgets for a book ahead of time—AKA how much time and energy a publisher is willing to put into promoting a title. If there aren’t a lot of preorders for something, a creator will likely be given a pretty small budget with minimal marketing and therefor might not reach as big of an audience as it could.

On a similar note, if you’ve ever wanted to meet your favourite creators and have a copy of your book signed or get to chat with them, etc., guess what? Preorders also factor into book tours, festival circuits, conventions, signing events, and more. More preorders again means that a marketing budget could potentially include travel to places where the preorders are prevalant or where there’s lots of hype! It helps gets more eyes on the creators and their works.

It’s all an ecosystem that has many moving parts that all feed into each other.

Consumers have a lot of say about which creators get marketing, and get out into the world. The books that you choose to support tell publishers that there is interest in those stories and the people who tell them.

So when creators ask for you to preorder their books, it’s more than just being excited for their stories to be out in the world, it’s part of them trying to continue to do what they do and make even more stories for you to read and enjoy.

TL;DR Summary:

Are you a reader who wants to support your favourite creators and books? Great! One of the absolute best things you can do is preorder your books. Preorders help determine a number of different things including:

• Publisher marketing budgets to promote a book
• Bookstores interest in ordering books (and the quantities they order)
• Interest for book tours/festival and convention appearances

And one of the biggest ones:

• Whether or not a publisher wants to acquire MORE books from creators Consumers have sway over the market for the creators they enjoy.

You can tell publishers how much you support them by preordering and encouraging others to do the same.

Speaking of which, if you want to help me out and support the work I do, please take a moment to visit RaccPack.com to preorder Racc Pack: Prince and the Pawper, which is out on January 28, 2025.

<3 <3