Your publication date is the day your book is available for purchase by readers. On some sites like Amazon—or even your direct-to-reader sales page—your book might be listed as available for pre-order, but this is different from your publication date. This just means that once your publication date arrives, all books that’ve been pre-ordered
If you’re using print-on-demand to print your books, they will be! With POD, your books are printed as they’re ordered, so they’re always listed as “in-stock.” With Expanded Distribution, after your books are printed, they need to be transported (distributed) to the distribution warehouse, where they’ll be checked in and stocked. After that, the
It’s not. We distribute ebooks directly to Amazon.com, Apple’s iBookstore, BN.com, and 120+ other retailers and wholesalers.
Expanded Distribution has a different publishing timetable than POD distribution and involves more involvement from our distributor. For more information, see our publishing timetable.
While you can technically switch distribution models, practically speaking, it’s much cheaper and better for your book’s publishing continuity to stay with one distribution model from the beginning of the process.