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I've read that all preorders for a book count towards first week's sales. So for example, if you open preorder for 3 months and sell 9,000 copies during that time, you could hit the NYT Bestseller list.

But is there a limit to this period? Could you host pre-orders for 1 year and just work really hard to drive up sales?

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    @what One of the aims of Stack Exchange is to create canonical answers to questions that will, with time, end up being high up in search engine results. Telling a user to google their question rather than ask here is unhelpful.
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    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 20:16
  • @NeilFein I'm not telling Eric to google his question, but that the Google search results contain links to some brilliant articles that answer his questions in more depth than any answer here ever will. For example, that article in the Huffington Post is rich in helpful information.
    – user5645
    Commented Mar 8, 2017 at 21:10

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Don't know from experience, but a year out is pretty long... for pretty much anything whether it is games, movies, or books. The only time I have seen that much time during a preorder would be for crowd fund perks. Part of it is because you want the hype to maintain. If you do it a year in advance, people may even completely forget about the book until they get an email saying it is ready.

I also found this article that seems to share similar views about the length but they even go further to suggest that preorders may not even be as good as you may think. I don't know how reputable the link would be but I think they do provide an interesting point of view too about publishing (though this is mostly in regards to people who self publish through Amazon).

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