There’s been some confusion regarding the release date of my upcoming nonfiction title: The Prepper’s Workbook. My contract for this book with Ulysses Press was initially discussed before the release of my novel, The Pulse last July. At that time, it was to be my next project and was scheduled for release in January, this year. This is the reason it was listed on Amazon back in the fall of 2012 and available for pre-order then. Although I did not announce it here or on any of my other sites, Amazon’s automated book marketing methods such as placing listings on the same page as similar titles led many people to find the book and place their orders. So many that in fact the book was selling in the top 300-400 in all books on Amazon right around that expected January release and continued to sell well for several weeks, while it should have been taken off the site because of changes made to the book and the publication schedule in the meantime.
By this time my publisher had already rescheduled the publication of this book to early fall of 2013, because of a new contract I signed for another novel, The Darkness After, which was pushed ahead of the workbook project. In addition to this change in the order of project priorities, another change to the Prepper’s Workbook was that I brought on board a coauthor to broaden the scope of the book and add another perspective. Scott Finazzo is a writer, adventurer and professional firefighter who is lending his extensive and varied experiences to this project. You can read more about him on his website and about his adventures on his excellent Lure of the Horizon blog.
The new version of The Prepper’s Workbook (with Scott Finazzo’s name on the cover along with mine) actually has a different ISBN number than the original, but for some reason Amazon and maybe some other online book vendors as well still have listings posted for the old version. All of this has been beyond my control but still, I want to apologize to any readers who ordered this book expecting to receive it in January. Although Amazon allows pre-ordering of books months in advance of publication, at least charges are not made to credit cards used in the order until the books are shipped. I’m not sure if orders will be transferred to the new version of the book or not, but it is now available for pre-order also at this link and will still be released this year, but in early September. My editor is also working on getting the cover completely updated to a new design, but for now it is listed with the old cover and Finazzo’s name added:
I think with what Finazzo brings to this, the book will be much better than it would have been had I written it alone, and hopefully those patient enough to wait for it despite all this confusion will agree. Finazzo is busy on it right now, and while he works on that, I’m wrapping up the manuscript for The Darkness After. A young adult novel set in the same scenario as The Pulse, The Darkness After will be published before The Prepper’s Workbook, in mid-July. Then in the fall, I’ll be writing the sequel to The Pulse, picking up the story with the characters I left in the riverbank at the end of the first one. More about both novels soon….
