4:41pm

I need to duck on on a mini supply run before nasty weather hits, but I wanted to explain the date change on the pre-order for Dawn of the Sorcerer while it was on my mind.

I originally planned for it to go live on Knightsfall Press the day I published it (so, the 8th, I think?) and the pre-order everywhere else to go live on March 5th. That was before I uploaded the title to ACX, which is the audiobook production arm of Amazon that feeds Audible and a couple other places. I didn’t realize there was a special procedure to create a pre-order there. I mean… why would there be? Everywhere else, you just set the street date (or release date or whatever they call it), and BOOM! You have a pre-order.

Oh, wait… this is Amazon we’re talking about. I’m pretty sure when it comes to people working with them, their philosophy is something along the lines of, “We don’t give two shits (or even one shit) about you, and you can survive with the tools we give you… because we’ll make money either way.”

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m very grateful that Amazon developed the Kindle and started the avalanche toward indie authoring being feasible, but they’re kinda the bully in the schoolyard at this point. They really don’t work with us; we work with them. I’m pretty sure they’ve forgotten anything they ever learned about working and playing well with others… assuming they ever learned any of that to start with.

All of which meant that I discovered a few days after uploading Dawn of the Sorcerer‘s audiobook to ACX that I already had a sale. When I investigated how that could be, I discovered ACX’s special procedure for creating a pre-order.

So, rather than flip my shit and throw things or generally blister the sheetrock with profanities that would make a sailor duck and cover… well… I just adjusted the pre-orders of the eBook and other audiobook distribution everywhere else to be as close as possible. After all, flipping my shit might make me feel better in the moment, but it won’t actually change anything in the long run.

I’m still sorting out my procedure in response to this discovery, but it will either be going back to putting the eBook on pre-order and letting everything else go live after the eBook goes live (or I remember to publish it, whichever comes first) or… just not do pre-orders. Yes… there are some excellent business reasons to do pre-orders, with data behind them. But when it comes down to choosing whether to focus on business or focus on storytelling, I feel like that should be a fairly foregone conclusion to those who really know me. (Spoiler… you’d be wrong if you guessed ‘focus on business.’)

But anywho…

I should probably duck out for that mini supply run. I’ll be back later tonight with an update on my writing challenge.