benlehman

Also -- but take this with a grain of salt, because I'm me, with the ties to things you know I have -- you could consider, now that you've hit your personal sphere of communication, running some part of the preorder through IPR (see the Finis preorder on there right now as an example).

Basically it would work like this:

- You give me the data to list the preorder on IPR.

- We'd list it under whatever pricepoint and terms you wanted.

- You could at any time pull out a list of the preorders using the publisher order extraction tool I recently set up and mentioned over on the IPR chat group.

- I'd also be building a list of the preorders every time I pull out the order information for sending to our warehouse (I'm doing this with Finis) in a spreadsheet format. I can provide the spreadsheet to you at any time, or at the conclusion of the preorder period.

- You can still do all the shipping based on the above information files; if there are any shipping revenues generated from the preorders, Brennan can cut you a check for that when you're ready to do the mail-out. This would let you precisely control your shipping methods. Or, you could instead have IPR do all of that once you deliver the products to our warehouse (though I figure, for alacrity reasons, you may want to stick with the ship-it-yourself gig).

Granted, this all means IPR would still take its 15% cut, and "free shipping anywhere" isn't possible with our setup, since we don't have any way to offer free shipping conditionally to international addresses -- though you'd already hit free shipping domestically with the $36 pricepoint. But it's possible that that 15% cut (a bit over $5) would be something you'd be willing to afford for the increased exposure of front-page billing on the site.

We *can* do it in such a way that retailers do or do not get access to the preorder, if you wanted to stick to direct sales. If instead you did want to go with allowing retailer preorders, it'd be at their usual 42% off followed by the 15% IPR cut (meaning revenues of about 50% of cover, or $18-ish).

Drop me an email if this sounds like something that would help sustain the level of preorders that you're looking for. But don't feel like I'm pressuring you to take us up on this! I just want you aware that it's an option. Doing the SOTC preorder with IPR worked out pretty well for me, and the Finis preorder seems to be doing pretty well for Ryan Macklin.