I suppose there are any number of "you know you've arrived"-s in this process of becoming an author. I've talked about paneling with your idols, the green room, seeing your first printed book cover - to name but a few. Yet through all that (and I'll readily admit that this may be the paranoid writer in me) you're still not sure you've really arrived ("arrived" being relative). In the back of your mind you think it's still possible that someone from the publisher could call you up and say, "whoops. Sorry, Dani. Our mistake. The timing's just not right for the idea. Thanks for playing." And then the party's over. No more panels. No more green rooms, no more blogging. It's not so crazy when you realize that our book was supposed to be released in November (as in now) but that due to "marketing considerations" was pushed off until March. Who is this "marketing" and how could they put our dream on hold? But they did (way back in April) and so we bit our tongues and nodded our heads like the unworthy supplicants all the years of knocking on doors (and having rejection notes slipped back through them) had turned us into. Tor's reasoning was even sound, mind you. Trying to sell first-time, unknown authors in the static of pre-Christmas shopping would be folly. And given the current dour market and depressed shopping season it turns out their thinking was prescient indeed. That still didn't stop me from worrying; didn't stop me from believing this thing I'd worked so hard to achieve might actually slip from my grasp.

But then the day arrived. In the from of a "dude, you're on Amazon!" email. The demon had finally been put to bed. And thank goodness for that. It was only a pre-order (and still is) but it was a marker. Tor had planted a flag and had essentially said in unequivocal terms, 'come hell or high-water The Unincorporated Man will see the light of day in March of 2009.' And so it will.

Unfortunately the laurel I planned on resting on was rather rudely yanked away.

I immediately got to work on the mailing list I'd generated from our website. A pretty good 125 interested souls. It was a finely crafted letter with the requisite hot links to the amazon page including the "please tell your friends" and "thanks for your support." It was also, apparently spam. My big moment to lift my leg and pee on my tree was unfortunately shut down without prejudice...the tree carted off for evidence. It took me three days to get my name removed from my ISP's spammer list (ring, ring, "hullo? Yes, I'd like to be taken off the blacklist...what's that? Oh yes, you see I'm an author and I was sending out an email list to potential readers...no really...no really, I swear...uh huh...uh...huh, can I speak with your supervisor?"). Caveat - before you send out a mass email make sure you know your ISP's max limit.

One final confession. The book's been up on Amazon for almost two months now and I couldn't bring myself to write about it. The irony is that I created the blog to sell the book but the book had very quickly become ancillary to site's raison d'être. Strange as it sounds I felt that the "First time on Amazon" story would amount to a conflict of interest.

And it was at that point that my brother smacked me upside the head and said, "butthead, there's only one first time you see your book on a major reseller's website and if you don't write about that then what in God's name are you writing the blog for?" Hard to argue.

And so here I am, late as usual writing about something I've been dreaming about for almost 8 years - seeing my name in the digital lights of a major bookseller. It felt great to see it. And in fact continues to. Still, he couldn't get me to post the link. ;-)

Thanks for listening,

Dani