Three Months Post-Launch: The Forgotten Corpse Lessons Learned
For every book before this one, my process was the same. I finished the edits, formatted the file, and hit publish within a week of getting the green light from my editors. It felt efficient. Looking back, I think it was mostly nerves wearing an efficient costume: I wanted the book out into the world before I had time to talk myself into changing something else about it.
The Forgotten Corpse broke that habit. Instead of a launch measured in days, I gave it a proper preorder run, built some noise around it on social media while readers still couldn't buy it, and lined up a group of advance readers so the book wouldn't land with zero reviews. Three months on, it's sold more copies in preorder than any previous release managed, and it's still selling now, which is the part that's made me stop and think about why.
The Preorder Wasn't Just a Delay
My old assumption was that a preorder period is dead time: a gap between finishing the book and readers being able to read it, best kept short so nobody loses interest. What I hadn't accounted for is that a preorder page is also a thing you can point people at. Every social post, every mention in an email, every "here's what I've been working on" had somewhere concrete to send people, and that link did work in the background that a bare announcement post can't do.
Where I need to correct myself is on what that link is actually doing behind the scenes on Amazon, because I got this slightly wrong in my own head for years. I'd assumed preorders quietly banked up and then landed as one number on release day, the way a slot machine pays out. They don't. Amazon counts each preorder toward sales rank on the day it's placed, not on release day, so a long preorder window gives you a slow drip of rank support spread across weeks rather than a single spike. The royalty side works differently again: those sales don't show up in the earnings reports until the book is delivered on release day, at which point they appear marked as preorders. Two separate systems, running on two separate clocks, and I'd been quietly conflating them.
That matters if your goal is a big rank spike on launch day itself, the kind that chases a bestseller badge. On Amazon, a long preorder doesn't build toward that spike the way it might on a retailer that does bank the count. What a long preorder is genuinely good for is everything around the spike: keeping the book visible in search and category listings for weeks rather than days, giving an ARC team time to read and post, and giving me something to point a slowly warming audience toward before there's anything else to sell them. If I wanted the rank spike specifically, the smarter move would be concentrating the push, the newsletter email, the ARC reminders, the social posts, into the final few days before release rather than spreading it evenly across the whole window.
Reviews Don't Arrive on Their Own
The other change was the advance reader team. In the past I'd published a book and then waited, slightly anxiously, for the first review to appear. This time there were reviews live from day one, because the readers who'd already finished the book had somewhere to put their thoughts as soon as it went on sale.
I hadn't fully appreciated how much of a threshold effect this is until I went looking at what other authors report. A new listing with no reviews reads, to a browsing stranger, as an unknown risk. Once a book clears even a modest number of honest reviews, it starts appearing differently in search and in the algorithm-driven "readers also bought" placements that quietly do a lot of the selling work. And the uncomfortable truth is that most readers who enjoy a book simply won't leave a review unless they've been asked at the right moment, which is exactly what an advance reader arrangement is designed to do.
Building Interest Before There's Anything to Buy
The social media side of this was less a strategy and more a slow accumulation of small posts, over weeks rather than the usual last-minute flurry: character notes, a line from the manuscript here and there, the odd behind-the-scenes photo of my desk in Spain looking more chaotic than I'd like to admit. None of it was dramatic. What it did, I think, was keep the book present in people's minds for long enough that the preorder link stopped being a cold ask and started being something people had already half decided to click.
There's a genuine debate in publishing circles about whether preorders themselves are worth the trouble, and now that I understand how Amazon processes them, I can see why. A long window spreads your rank support thin instead of concentrating it, so an author chasing a launch-day badge on Amazon specifically has a real argument for keeping the preorder short and saving the push for release week. But that argument is about rank mechanics, not about attention. Whichever side of that debate an author lands on, the part that seems to matter most is the sustained interest built beforehand, and a short preorder backed by months of quiet promotion will likely still outperform a long one with no promotion behind it at all.
What I can say with more confidence, three months in, is that The Forgotten Corpse hasn't behaved like my earlier books. Most releases I've had settle into a slow decline within a few weeks. This one is still ticking over, and I suspect that's less to do with anything I did on release day and everything to do with the weeks that came before it, and possibly with a launch-week push I could have timed even better than I did.
I'm applying the same approach to Fatal Turn of the Tide, with a sharper eye now on when the pushes land rather than just how long the preorder runs. I'll be curious to see whether the pattern holds for a series book with an existing readership rather than a standalone. If you preordered The Forgotten Corpse or left one of those early reviews, thank you. It turns out you did more work than either of us probably realised at the time.