Smashwords adds pre-orders as Spotify audiobooks hit 180 countries

Two platform announcements landed this week, and if you've been treating pre-orders as optional, the first one should change your mind.

Smashwords, via Draft2Digital, is now accepting pre-orders for the first time. You can list a book for pre-order up to twelve months before release. Payment isn't taken until release day — standard practice — but here's the detail that actually matters for your launch strategy: every pre-order sale gets credited to release day when the sales rank is calculated. That means if you've got pre-orders stacking up for months, they all land at once on the day that counts most for visibility.

Draft2Digital's own data, cited in the release, says books available for pre-order perform significantly better at launch. And yet only 20% of authors currently use the feature. That's not a niche tactic being underused — that's four out of five authors leaving a known advantage on the table.

Alongside pre-orders, Smashwords is also rolling out a Presales option. This requires the book to already be listed for pre-order, but it lets readers actually buy before the official release date. You can offer those early buyers a discount in exchange for joining your mailing list — a neat way to turn a pre-order into a list-building tool, not just a sales mechanic.

Then there's Spotify. The platform is expanding its audiobook offering from the current 22 countries to the full global market — 180 countries — with the rollout happening between now and the end of the year. Spotify's director of audiobook partnerships, Duncan Bruce, frames this explicitly as a benefit for indie authors, saying they'll be able to bring local-language versions of their titles into markets worldwide, and can use the company's partnership with ElevenLabs to generate local-language narration.

What we don't have yet is the fine print — how distribution actually works for indies, what the ElevenLabs narration option costs or requires, or exactly when in the rollout your titles become eligible. That's worth watching for as more detail comes out.

Here's what to actually do this week. If you've got a title releasing in the next year, set it up for pre-order on Smashwords now — twelve months is a long runway, and there's no reason to leave that rank-day boost unclaimed. If you're already distributing through Draft2Digital, check whether Presales is live for your titles and consider pairing the early-buy discount with a mailing list push. And if you have audiobooks on Spotify, keep an eye out over the next few months for details on how the 180-country rollout applies to your catalog — this is a reach expansion worth positioning for, even before all the mechanics are public.

My take: the pre-order number — 20% adoption against a performance boost Draft2Digital is willing to publicize — is the real story here. That's an easy fix sitting in your dashboard right now.