Should You Run an Amazon Pre-Order?
For an ebook, the short answer is usually yes, and the reason is all about timing. A pre-order lets people buy your book before it's out, and every one of those sales gets held and counted on release day instead of the day it was bought. So instead of your first-week sales trickling in across seven days, they land in a single spike.
Why the spike matters
Amazon's system watches for velocity, a cluster of sales in a tight window, and reads it as a sign your book is worth showing to more people on its own. A pre-order manufactures exactly that spike. All the buying you gathered over two or four weeks hits at once on launch day, your rank jumps, and that jump is what trips the momentum signals that get you free visibility. Point your launch team and your newsletter at the pre-order, and you're loading the spring before you let it go.
The trap to avoid
One thing to know: pre-orders and Kindle Unlimited don't mix. KU subscribers are waiting to borrow your book for free, not buy it, so they won't touch a pre-order. If a big chunk of your audience reads through Kindle Unlimited, don't count on them for launch-day sales, and aim your pre-order push at the readers who actually buy. (Whether KU even makes sense for you is its own genre question.)
A couple of practical notes
Amazon lets you set an ebook pre-order up to ninety days out. Longer isn't automatically better. A pre-order window that drags on for months can go quiet and stall, so a few weeks is usually plenty to gather momentum without losing it. And print doesn't work the same way as ebook here, so if you're running both, treat the ebook pre-order as your launch-day rank play.
The short version
For an ebook, open a pre-order. It stacks your early sales into one launch-day spike that lifts your rank and triggers Amazon's promotion. Point your buyers at it, keep the window to a few weeks, and don't expect your Kindle Unlimited readers to buy.
The pre-order is the last piece of the launch. If you want all of it in one place, from categories and keywords to reviews and pricing, the free launch playbook walks through the whole thing, genre by genre.