The wrong order

Today is 2 October. For months this was the date on the listing, the date in my head, the date I told myself I was building towards every time I opened the manuscript one more time. It has arrived, and the book has not. If you noticed the date quietly disappear from the site a few weeks ago and wondered why nobody said anything, this is why, and I am sorry it took this long to tell you. The silence was not a decision. It was me not wanting to write this post until I had something more useful to say than "it is delayed."

Here is the useful part. Pantheon now comes out on 1 November, and I want to tell you honestly how that date got chosen, because it was not really a choice.

The retailer that runs my pre-order lets you postpone a release exactly once, by up to thirty days. One button, one dialog, one number you can move the date by. I sat with that dialog on 13 September and did the arithmetic anyone in my position would have done. Thirty days from 2 October is 1 November, and that is the furthest the date can go. Not a date I picked because it felt right. A ceiling I found because it was the only one available. There is no second postponement. Whatever happens between now and then, 1 November is what I have.

What put me in that dialog is worth saying plainly, because I got the order of things wrong and I would rather tell you that than let you assume something more dramatic happened. I set the release date first. Then I went looking for a cover. I went looking after the listing was already live, already carrying a date, already being shared. That is backwards, and I know it is backwards now in the specific way you only know a thing after paying for it.

The cover on the listing at the moment is a placeholder, built on a licensed stock photograph, and it has done the job a placeholder does. It is not the cover I want on the book when it goes out into the world. So I have commissioned an illustrator for the real one: the cover itself, plus two close portraits of the leads. Their calendar opens in the second or third week of October, and that is simply when the work can begin, not a delay caused by anyone but me. Nobody is ahead of this. There is no line to wait in. There is a person whose time I am asking for, and a date on which that time becomes available.

I am not going to tell you what it looks like, because I do not know yet either. And I am not going to promise you it is on the book on 1 November, because that promise is not mine to make on somebody else's working week. What I can tell you is the decision, which stays true however the dates fall. I would rather wait for a painting made by a person than ship on time with something that was never quite right.

None of this touches the review campaign, which is still running on its own timeline through all of it. Copies are already out with readers. One listing closes to new requests on 11 October, review copy claims close on 23 October, and reviews are due back on 8 November, a week after the new publication date. If you have a copy, nothing about your part of this has changed.

Commissioning a cover is something I have never done before. I set the date the way you set a date when you have not yet learned what else has to be settled first: because committing to it felt like the responsible thing to do. Next time, and there will be a next time, I will commission the cover months before I let a listing go live with a date attached to it. And I will keep that listing as a draft, unannounced, until the art is actually finished. The date can wait. It should have waited this time too.