The Shadow of Arcadia Amazon Print Pre-Orders

Some disappointing news about the status of print pre-orders for The Shadow of Arcadia on Amazon, and a cautionary tale for fellow authors.

Fresh from a live chat conversation with KDP support about the status of print pre-orders on Amazon for The Shadow of Arcadia, I thought I should update you on the situation. I know many of you were probably waiting for the print version to be available to pre-order through Amazon before ordering, but it is with great regret and profound disappointment that I announce this will no longer be possible.

What!? Is There Any Good News?

Thankfully, yes. Because IngramSpark uses the Ingram distribution network, print pre-orders for The Shadow of Arcadia are available pretty much everywhere else! Here’s a few:

Why No Amazon Print Pre-orders?

Here cometh the tale of woe.

First of all it’s important to understand that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which is Amazon’s self publishing platform, does not have an option for authors to set up pre-orders for print books—only ebooks. In order to get pre-orders listed for print books, self publishing authors must use a third party distribution platform which does have the option. This is where IngramSpark comes in. IngramSpark is another self-publishing platform which uses the same printers as KDP, but has access to the Ingram worldwide distribution network. This distribution network allows self-published books to show up for sale on many other retailer websites (and in brick-and-mortar bookstores if you take the massive risk of allowing returns, but that’s a tragic conversation for another post).

Amazon also makes use of the Ingram catalogue.

So if you set up a book with IngramSpark and give it a release date that is in the future, after 30 days of it being enabled for distribution, it will be listed on Amazon as available for pre-order. This is how I set up print pre-orders for From the Grave of the Gods and The Flight of the Aurora, and they worked perfectly fine. And this is what I’ve also done for The Shadow of Arcadia.

But since the release of The Flight of the Aurora, KDP added a new option to its setup process: scheduled releases. If you pick the option, you can specify your release date, and schedule your release ahead of time so you don’t need to press that “publish” button and potentially wait 72 hours afterwards for the book to go live. It sounds incredibly convenient, and so, for The Shadow of Arcadia, I scheduled the release for the 15th July.

30 days following the book being enabled for distribution on IngramSpark, I had expected the pre-order listing for The Shadow of Arcadia to show up on Amazon. But it never did. A fellow author in the Indie Book Spotlight Discord chat suggested that the hold-up could be because of the KDP scheduling - the scheduled release overrides the IngramSpark listing. So I got onto KDP support to ask about it.

The problem comes in how scheduled releases actually work on KDP, which is not at all made clear. It turns out that when you “schedule” your release, it doesn’t simply and conveniently give you an automated way to publish your book on time. No, it actually publishes the book, but doesn’t show it to customers on Amazon until the release date. That’s an important detail and that’s the reason why the IngramSpark listing doesn’t show up: You can’t pre-order a book on a platform where it’s already published.

I was told that the only way to allow the IngramSpark pre-order to go live on Amazon is if I cancel the scheduled release on KDP. But that means unpublishing the book (because it’s already published), and that means the ISBN number can no longer be used. This is a problem because the IngramSpark version of the book is the same edition and uses the same ISBN.

So, there is nothing that can be done which won’t mess things up royally elsewhere and waste one of my expensive and limited ISBNs. I am deeply sorry to those of you who may also be disappointed by this news. Not gonna lie, I’m absolutely fuming. If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have pressed that damned button.

Fellow authors beware: If you’re using both IngramSpark and KDP for your print pre-orders on Amazon, for the love of god do not schedule your release on KDP.