A Friday Chat About the Frugal and the Beast Preorder

NICOLE: The Frugal and the Beast preorder is live now!

NICOLE: And Amazon gave us permission to have both a personal and a business KDP account!

NICOLE: Yay!

NICOLE: Almost. The ebook is currently available for preorder, but the paperback is currently available for… sale? Like, if you bought it today you’d have it in your mailbox on Monday?

NICOLE: PLEASE DON’T BUY THE PAPERBACK TODAY. WE HAVEN’T RECEIVED THE PRINT PROOF YET.

NICOLE: Luckily for us, the ebook and paperback listings aren’t connected. If you click on that ebook link, you won’t be able to buy the paperback. You’d have to search “frugal and the beast” on Amazon to find the paperback link.

NICOLE: Which we are deliberately not sharing with you, because we haven’t received the print proof yet.

NICOLE: I wonder if Amazon doesn’t let you do a paperback preorder.

NICOLE: That’s what it looks like. When you search the internet.

NICOLE: That’s weird.

NICOLE: I know.

NICOLE: They should have told us. There should have been a big red button that said something like “WARNING: YOUR PAPERBACK WILL GO ON SALE RIGHT NOW.”

NICOLE: I KNOW!

NICOLE: So what should we do?

NICOLE: Well, first we have to get the print proof.

NICOLE: Which we’ll get on Tuesday.

NICOLE: Why can’t we get it on Monday?

NICOLE: I don’t know. KDP said it would take one business day to ship and we’d get it Tuesday.

NICOLE: We should have bought a copy through Amazon Prime instead and gotten it one day sooner.

NICOLE: I wonder if that would have worked.

NICOLE: Once we get the book, we have to proof it.

NICOLE: Which will also be Tuesday? Probably? Maybe Wednesday?

NICOLE: Then we have to make any adjustments to the file and re-upload it to Amazon and wait 72 hours for the changes to take effect, so let’s just say that, best-case-scenario, the paperback could be ready for public consumption on Friday, November 16.

NICOLE: But let’s actually plan for Monday, November 19 because Friday afternoon is a terrible time to release something.

NICOLE: Unless it’s political news, amirite?

NICOLE: That’s not funny. Anyway, maybe on the 19th we have a nice paperback ready to sell, and then what do we do? We don’t want people to be able to buy the paperback now but have to wait a month to get their ebook.

NICOLE: Everyone should get the book at the same time!

NICOLE: Which means we’ll have to release the ebook on the same day the print book is ready.

NICOLE: If Amazon lets us update our preorder.

NICOLE: Internet says… that is possible!

NICOLE: So that’s what we gotta do then, right? And then instead of emailing all of our marketing contacts to let them know The Billfold has a book available for preorder, we’ll just have to tell them that it’s… released?

NICOLE: Yup.

NICOLE: And then when we do the bigger Billfold anthology in 2019, we’ll have to figure out how to do all of this so we can have a preorder period and release the paperback and the ebook at the same time?

NICOLE: Probably? We can think about that next year, though.

NICOLE: Okay. So, to recap: the Kindle ebook is available to anyone who wants to preorder it, the paperback is technically for sale but we don’t want people to buy it yet, we got a great blurb from Lillian Karabaic of Oh My Dollar! that you can see if you visit the ebook preorder page and expand the book description, and — anything else?

NICOLE: The ebook is $5.99 and the paperback is $10.99 and The Billfold makes the same amount of money on both the ebook and the paperback, so people should order whichever one they want!

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