Pre-sales of my company's book have been astonishing. Recall that we're planning to print 1,000 copies, and hope to do two things: get a lot of marketing bang for the buck, and cover our expenses. Make a profit (on the book, at least) isn't really a priority.

Nevertheless, we haven't sent it to the printer yet, but we've already sold over half the copies we plan to print.

How the heck did that happen?

Amazingly enough, one of our prospective customers (not even an actual customer) decided that they like the book so much, they want to hand it out at trade shows.

Yes, you read that correctly. One of our prospective customers is going to pay us to give away our marketing material. Whoa!

We sold them 500 copies (at a steep discount, naturally, but still above our cost of printing). Even better, 500 copies of our book (with our logo plastered all over the cover) will be in the hands of 500 industry decision makers, at no cost to us.

The next question is: do we increase the size of the print run from 1,000 copies to 1,500 or 2,000 based on the early demand? Or do we wait for it to sell out and do a second printing?

There's something very nice about saying our book is in its second printing....