Which month your pre-orders land in, and why the five stores answer that differently

You ran a pre-order. Launch day arrives, you open your reports, and the numbers are in the wrong place. Then the deposit does not match either.

Nothing has gone wrong. The stores book a pre-order at different moments, and they do not agree with each other. On one store the sale can appear a month early. On another the same sale shows up in one report and not in the other, on purpose.

Here is what each of the five actually publishes about it.

Amazon hides the sale until release day, and it can land in the month before

While a pre-order is still a pre-order, Amazon keeps it in a report of its own. Its help page says “Your pre-order report is updated as orders are placed” and that the report “includes pre-ordered units, pre-order cancellations, and net pre-order units”. The report’s own help page breaks those out as three columns: Pre-order Units, Pre-order Cancellations, and Pre-order Units Net of Cancellations.

That is not your royalty report, and Amazon is blunt about the split:

“Your pre-order sales data will not appear in other reports until after your eBook is delivered to customers on its release date.”

Once readers get the book, the units move across:

“After that, you’ll see pre-order units listed in the Prior Months’ Royalties report, under the ‘Pre-order’ transaction type.”

Now the part that catches people. Delivery happens on your release date, release dates are struck in GMT, and your readers are not in GMT. Amazon gives the worked example itself:

“For example, if your release date is June 1 (GMT), US pre-orders may process on May 31 and appear in your May sales report rather than June.”

So a June launch can book most of its money in May. Amazon clearly fields this question a lot, because the same page carries the fix as a troubleshooting line:

“If pre-orders appear to be missing from your current month’s royalties report, check the previous month’s report.”

If you take one thing from this post, take that one. A launch month that looks empty on Amazon is usually a launch month that happened in the previous report.

Google dates the same pre-order two different ways, in two different reports

Google is the only one of the five that states the rule outright, and its answer is the most useful thing on this page.

The sales side uses the day the reader clicked. The money side uses the day the book was delivered. Google says so on its earnings reports page:

“Google generates a monthly Earnings Report for each payment profile in your account. This is the only report that matches the payment amount you receive each month. Transaction Reports and Summary Reports are based on the user’s initial click date rather than the fulfilled order date.”

And on its pre-orders page:

“Because customers aren’t charged for pre-orders until the release date, these purchases only appear in your earnings reports once the books have been digitally delivered to the customers.”

Read that twice. Google is telling you in writing that during a pre-order period its sales reports and its payment will not agree, and that this is by design rather than a fault. If you reconcile Google against the transaction report, you will see a pre-order in a month Google never paid you for.

Google also tags where each transaction sits in the pre-order lifecycle. The Preorder column reads “Authorized” when the buyer has ordered and the book has not been delivered yet, “Fulfilled” once it has, “Canceled” if the pre-order was called off before delivery, and “None” when no pre-order was involved. That column is the cleanest signal of its kind on any of the five, because it lets you separate ordered from delivered without guessing.

One limit worth naming. Google never gives a worked example chaining a release date to an earnings month to a payment date, so do not treat any such chain as Google’s words.

Apple records the fulfilment, and says so in a field definition

Apple has an answer, but it is one line, and it is not in a help article. It sits in Appendix A of the Payments and Financial Reports Guide, as the definition of a column called Pre-order Flag, whose values are “P” or null:

“Only used if the transaction is part of a pre-order fulfillment. Otherwise this field is empty. This is only used for fulfillment, not the customer’s original pre-order.”

That is genuinely informative. The financial report is the one that matches your payment, and what it records is the fulfilment, not the moment the reader ordered. So Apple’s money side behaves like Amazon’s rather than like Google’s transaction report.

Be careful how much weight you put on it though. It is a field definition, not a policy statement. Apple never restates it in plain language, never names a month, and gives no example. We are quoting it as what it is.

A fetch note, because it wasted an hour here and might waste yours. The plain guide address returns a JavaScript shell with no readable text, and that shell is byte for byte identical across different Apple guides. Sweep it for keywords and you get zero hits for every term, including words from the guide’s own title. That zero means the page did not load, not that Apple is silent.

Kobo explains how, and never when

Kobo has a guide to pre-orders and it is a decent one. It covers setting a future release date, uploading your final file at least three business days ahead, the reminder emails, and the fact that books still missing content 14 days after release are delisted automatically. It tells you readers can buy before release and that “The book will then automatically be added to their reading library on the release date.”

What it never says is which month that sale is reported in, or when you are paid for it.

We checked that properly rather than reading one page. Kobo’s help centre is 106 articles. Across all of them there is not one sentence connecting a pre-order to a royalty, a sales report month, or a payment. The only place the two ideas appear near each other is a list of dashboard filter labels, which answers nothing. For calibration, the same sweep finds 47 sentences mentioning royalties elsewhere in that corpus, so the tooling works and the silence is real.

The closest Kobo comes is one word in a dashboard field called Total Pre-Orders, which “reflects all unpaid pre-orders”. Unpaid hints that pre-orders are not earnings yet. A hint is not an answer, and we are not going to dress it up as one.

Draft2Digital is silent too, and has a bigger surprise

D2D never says which month a pre-order is reported in either. Its terms of service mention pre-orders zero times against 55 mentions of royalties, and its most detailed reporting write-up mentions them zero times against 24. The nearest general rule it publishes does not settle the question: sales reports cover the month the sale happened, royalty statements cover the month D2D got paid, and those can sit two or three months apart. Put a pre-order inside that lag and you have two uncertainties stacked rather than one.

The surprise is on the Amazon partner page, and if you distribute to Amazon through D2D you need to know it:

“Due to conflicts in the requirements of various eBook distributors, Draft2Digital is currently unable to offer preorders for Amazon Kindle. You may still make your book available for preorder through Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, Tolino, and Overdrive, using the ‘Release Date’ from your book’s Details page.”

And then:

“At this time, we will submit any preorder to Amazon on the release date.”

So a pre-order campaign routed through D2D simply does not run on Amazon. The book arrives there on release day. If you planned a wide pre-order and assumed Amazon was included, that is worth checking before you announce dates.

Put them side by side

Say you take 400 pre-orders in May for a June 1 release.

On Amazon your May royalty report may show the lot, because US pre-orders processed on May 31. June looks quiet.

On Google your transaction report shows the orders as they came in during May, while the earnings report shows nothing until the book is delivered. Two Google reports, two different months, same sale.

On Apple the payment side records the fulfilment, so it behaves more like Amazon.

On Kobo and D2D you are reconciling without a published rule, which means the safe assumption is that you do not know and should check the actual numbers rather than predict them.

Same campaign, same dates, and no two stores telling the same story about which month you had a launch in. None of them is wrong. They are answering different questions, and none of them asks which one you meant.

A short month end checklist

1. If a launch month looks empty on Amazon, open the previous month’s report before anything else. Amazon says to do exactly this.
2. On Amazon, look for the “Pre-order” transaction type in the Prior Months’ Royalties report. That is where units go after delivery.
3. On Google, never reconcile a pre-order period against the transaction or summary report. Use the earnings report, which Google calls the only one that matches your payment.
4. On Google, read the Preorder column. Authorized is not money yet.
5. Treat a release date as a time zone problem, not a calendar date. A GMT release date means some readers bought on what was, for Amazon’s reporting, the day before.
6. On Kobo and D2D, do not predict which month a pre-order will appear in. There is no published rule to predict from.
7. If you are running a wide pre-order, confirm whether Amazon is actually in it. Through D2D it is not.

Pre-orders are one of several reasons a deposit disagrees with a report. Payment timing, returns landing in a later month, currency conversion, tax withholding and thresholds all do it too, and we wrote up the schedules and the traps store by store in when each store actually pays you.

We are building a local first desktop tool that does this monthly reconciliation for you, using the stores’ own numbers, with nothing leaving your computer. You can see what it does and where it is up to on the Royalty Desk page.

Every quote in this post was taken from the store’s own pages on 24 September 2026 and is linked above. Stores change these pages without notice, so check the source before you make a decision on it.