Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) is a recently proposed multicarrier modulation technique. Due to its flexibility and many desired features compared to the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), GFDM is considered as a potential airinterface technique for the next generation wireless networks. However, GFDM suffers from self interference due to the non-orthogonality of its subcarriers. In this paper, we propose two novel precoding techniques to achieve better bit error rate (BER) performance in GFDM systems with linear receivers. The two-stage precoding that we present here achieves higher diversity gain with a reduced complexity linear MMSE receiver, when compared with GFDM system with no precoding and conventional MMSE receiver. Assuming full channel state information at both ends of the communication link, we propose another precoding method based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Coordinate Interleaving (CI), which we refer to as SVD-CI. By interleaving the coordinates of the symbols sent over different eigen-subchannels of the channel matrix, SVD-CI achieves significant improvement in the BER performance, compared to the SVD precoding proposed earlier. We present the BER performance of the proposed precoding schemes, obtained through Monte Carlo simulations, to validate our claims.