The other advantage of a pre-order is you know roughly how many copies to print. If you're publishing your own book you may not be able to predict that, and if you estimate wrong you're out a bunch of your own money.
Large publishers have some expertise in guessing that, and probably still plan to eat some costs for the times when they get it wrong. But on a smaller scale, "Oops I have piles of extra copies of every single book I printed" would be a big problem for someone self publishing a couple of books.
If your fans trust you to follow through on a kickstarter, there's not really a downside.
Large publishers have some expertise in guessing that, and probably still plan to eat some costs for the times when they get it wrong. But on a smaller scale, "Oops I have piles of extra copies of every single book I printed" would be a big problem for someone self publishing a couple of books.
If your fans trust you to follow through on a kickstarter, there's not really a downside.