As explained in this article, owners of the most recently announced title are given an opportunity to place their order two days before the public pre-order. This system grew out of requests from customers who wanted to match their number and/or letter to the next publication.
Once the Matching Pre-Order period has ended at 8am on the Saturday of the week of announcement, depending on how many copies are available of the Numbered, Lettered and/or Roman Numeral editions, we may sell these copies through a lottery system. The lottery is open until 12pm on the Monday following the public pre-order and winners are selected at random.
Winners are contacted by email between 12pm Pacific on the Monday after the lottery closes, and 12pm Pacific on the Wednesday. We only contact the winners, so if you entered the lottery, and have not heard by Wednesday then that means you were not selected. Be sure to check you spam folder because our notifications sometimes end up there. We also do not publicly announce the names of the winners in order to respect their privacy.