Yeah... preorders and having the comic down on your standing orders at comic shops are the most vital part of keeping a book alive. Basically, the more standing orders a shop has for a book (as in, how many customers have the book ordered in specifically for them and held aside for them when it comes in as opposed to having copies on the shelf for any random to pick up), the more the shop has to order IN ADDITION to what they might stock for their shelves. A shop might order six for the shelves, but that might sell out, and if you don't have a standing order, then you miss out. So because a shop is ordering MORE specifically for people with standing orders, that tells Diamond (the distributor) that it's selling, and they tell Dark Horse, so the sales figures go up. The better the sales figures, the longer a book lasts. Single issues are the lifeblood of any comic. Trade waiting is fundamentally flawed in that without the single issues, you don't have trades. The sales of single issues usually help cover the ongoing fees for the writers, artists, and everyone else involved in the production and it is a cheaper way to produce the story itself. I f everything was done as straight graphic novels, the expenses would be higher, because they have no gage on how well a book might sell. Single issues ARE the gage for the collected books. If a single issue run is selling well, then they know the trades probably will too. If singles don't -- and this was the case at Mirage when I wrote the TMNT -- then sometimes you don't even GET trades of the material, because the publisher can't justify the costs and effort when the on-paper math doesn't project a good future.
It's long, it's convoluted, and it may or may not be broken, but that's unfortunately how it is. What I can promise you is that Defiance is a very, very single issue friendly book.
Also, just so you guys know, there'll be a guest artist coming in at #3 and #4 (some of it from the looks of things) so I can get ahead on the heavier shit that comes after that... but it's gonna be wild. They both very character centric "episodes" (you'll see what I mean when #1 hits) and I'm a big fan of the artist coming on and he's gonna rock it pretty hard.
Anyway, back to the point, if you can get into your shops and start/add to your single issue standing order, that's the best way to tell Dark Horse you want more. Trade sales obviously help (and if you're like me, you can just get the trade later and give the single issues to a kid -- get THEM into it all too), and digital comics via the Dark Horse app are great too, if you don't have a comic shop nearby.
