As you might guess from the title of this post, Ignotus (Fringe Worlds #3) has been released. Hooray! As usual, Amazon got the page count wrong – it’s 467 pages in length as opposed to 363. (I still don’t understand why they can never get that right.)
Anyway, the publication journey for this one has been a little different. I actually finished the book a while back and put it up for pre-order in January. In retrospect, that was a mistake. A three-month pre-order period is just way too long. (Maybe for the Stephen Kings and James Pattersons of the world it works out better, but for an author like me that’s just too much time before the actual release date.)
Basically, a pre-order operates just as suggested: it allows readers to pay for the book in advance, and upon release they automatically receive it. For category rank purposes, a pre-order is treated like an actual sale and your book moves up or down in rank based on when pre-orders are received. However, you don’t get credit for the actual sale until release day. The result is that a decent number of pre-orders may show up as sales on release day, but they will not affect your book’s ranking.
Setting aside ranking and such, I think a better pre-order period would be something like one month or less. That strikes as great from the standpoint of giving readers a date certain when the book will be available, but keeps the time period short enough so that excitement about the release remains high.
As to the book itself, I really like the direction that the story goes in; it was a lot fo fun to write and ultimately, I think, opens a lot more doors in terms of what’s next for Lt. Maker and his crew of misfit marines.