Silly me! I naively thought that maybe this time around the “launch” of the book could actually be nailed down to “a day“.
You see, back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s when I wrote my other four books, it was a different era. Amazon.com wasn’t quite the enormous industry player that it is today. You sent your text and edits into the publisher and then sometime a book showed up at your house… and sometime after that it appeared in local book stores. Sometime… whenever…
Fast forward 8 years and I thought it might be different now. I thought the launch date could be nailed down. I watched friends like Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel and Steve Garfield all focus on “launches” of their books on specific days… and figured it would be similar for mine.
Nope.
Now, granted, all of their books are targeted at the larger marketing/communications audience… and maybe they planned for a date after availability… and given everything else on my plate, I didn’t really spend that much time working on a launch plan. I just sort of thought it might work out easier.
The editors, publicity folks and others at Syngress were all great. They told me…
… the book should be available in their warehouses on April 28th and, yes indeed, you could order if directly from Syngress on that date… if you wanted to pay the $24.95 list price. But what I found in myself was this:
I wanted to know the date it was live on Amazon.com!
That, to me, seemed to be “the launch date”. And sadly… no one could tell me that. “It all depends upon when it gets to Amazon’s warehouses” … and … “it’s completely out of our control.”
Interesting.
When “the day” came, naturally I went to Amazon to see if it was available and met with:
Even though the site did say the 28th:
Checking back on Amazon on April 29th showed me that it was available, but with a 1-4 week availability! Which brought about amusing screens like this one (given that the date was April 29th):
And then today it is now showing as “Temporarily out of stock“:
Which I guess is a good thing in that initial demand must have been higher than their supply… maybe? (or is that the books didn’t actually get into the warehouse in the first place?)
So in any event… the book is kind of launched… you can’t really buy it from Amazon.com… you can buy it direct from Syngress if you want to spend $8 more… and in theory you should be able to get it in your local bookstore sometime soon…
All in all a bit of strange experience. But it’s out there… which is cool!
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