My New Book is Half Unloaded on the Amazon Lot

A publication date of December 31 (I saw it on Amazon) for my newly birthed book, Inside the Changing Circus, felt magical. For a few days, I could see treating it as "Santa's sleigh on standby alert for overnight rush deliveries of new book to roll off presses on Christmas eve!" How romantic. How short-lived.

In the publishing world, a date is only a time frame.

So my book showed up on Amazon's lot a few days ago, looking half unloaded. Still is. No image of the cover. It will arrive in a day or ten. And the brief description bears an error for which I plead guilty. I was the one who penned it for a back cover blurb. It reads "from Cirque du Soleil to the bottom feeder big tops," and I've since revised it to "from the Kings of the sawdust rings to the bottom feeder big tops." But it didn't make it to Amazon.

I fear the phrase could easily be construed as placing Cirque high above all the other circuses, the others being bottom feeders. Not my intent. But it does sound elitist.

BearManor Media has dispatched a sign painter out to to the Amazon lot to revise my hasty choice of words . It will read either "Big Apple Circus and Cirque du Soleil" or "the Kings of the sawdust rings." I gave my publisher the option.

Still sorry they could not have raised the curtain on Christmas eve. In the book world once, boxes of new books straggled into book stores days before and after official "publication" dates. Nowadays, they have a way of sneaking into Amazon land before anybody else can see them.

So, I will be far from the first person to see my own published book.

But this can't compare (I trust, UPS ...) to the plight of my first book, Behind the Big Top. It was out floating around for months before I finally received, after intense communication with the publisher, my first copy.