One of the big differences between traditional and self-publishing is around release dates. When you’re working with a big publisher, they choose the release date and it depends on a lot of things including marketing and their other planned releases. As a result, there’s typically a long wait between when the editing is done, the cover’s all designed and everything else is ready, and the actual release date.
With self-publishing, when you think it’s ready to go (even if you’re wrong!), you can hit Publish.
Or you can choose a future date, committing to be ready by then. On Amazon, this allows pre-orders of e-books and a scheduled release of paperbacks. The problem is, if you aren’t ready by the release date, you can’t move it out. If you’re ready sooner, though, you can change the date to a closer one. This is why you will sometimes see authors (especially inexperienced ones like me) pick a date and then say they actually plan to release earlier.
All of which is to say, I have a cover for The Heart of Percival and the book is with the editor to get a final lookover, to make sure we didn’t miss anything and I didn’t introduce any new errors in the editing process. The current listed preorder date is the end of April, but I’m fairly confident that I will be able to hit my personal target date, March 10, 2026. (Looking ahead, I’d love to release the third book in the trilogy by the end of this year, but we’ll see about that, since about 80% of it still needs to be written.)
And if you’ve gotten this far, here, have a cover!
