I have never offered a pre-order discount and I've had a similar experience to VanessaC. The higher prices for later books didn't put people off of pre-ordering. My series goes from $3.99 > $3.99 > $4.99 > $5.99 > $5.99 > $6.99 and each book had more pre-orders than the last.

Personally, I've never pre-ordered a book but I have pre-ordered lots of video games. The ones I do are ones I'm raring to play right away and want to support the developers with as much money as possible. I figure books are the same way. If readers want it bad enough, they'll pay the full price and be happy to do so. There have been times where I've held off on buying books on sale because I want to pay more to support the author, but that's only if I'm a huge fan. Given the biggest fans are likely to be those to pre-order, I'd have to think pre-order discounts only cut into an author's profits without providing much benefit.

The rankings are terrible. I signed up too, and I'll check the rankings from the newsletters, but it doesn't look promising.

In terms of price, perhaps they have deal with trad publishers and then it's not as expensive. Maybe the idea is to compete with Bookbub but discouraging indies? 

That said, maybe it's not true that they have 800k subs. I mean, they should have advertised to get those subs, right? How come we've never seen anything? We're also readers and could have been targeted by their ads if such ads existed.

I've run ads with them on the general list as well as some genre-specific ones. I had to pay by check at the time so hopefully they've gotten past that. No issue getting accepted. Didn't see results I'd want to pay for again at the price they charge.

Would you mind more details? Was this a long time ago? A few months? How many subs...etc.

I run pre-orders on my books, and as I'm still starting out and write in series the pricing is 0.99 for book 1, then 2.99 for the rest in series, and I set my pre-orders up with those prices.

I found that as I worked through the first series, the number of pre-orders increased as the series went on - don't get me wrong, we're still talking very small numbers - but the "high" price didn't put people off pre-ordering.

I think if people enjoy your books, and you're reasonably priced, then they will pre-order to make sure they get your book.

Just my tuppence worth.

Joke:

Did you know that a group of crows is called a murder?

Well, technically it's only a murder if there's probable caws.