No Ship Date. Full Refund. Fifty Three People Paid Anyway.

There is no locked release date for my book.

I have that written on the page in plain English, right in the questions section where anybody about to spend money will run into it. There is no locked date yet. The manuscript, the editing and the printing schedule are still being finalized, and every milestone gets posted to the updates page. You can read it yourself.

Fifty three people have pre-ordered anyway.

I want to talk about why that works, because it is the opposite of what everybody told me to do.

The advice you get when you sell a book is to pick a date. Any date. Put it on the page, create urgency, deal with the slip later. Everybody does it. Readers have been trained to expect a date and trained to forgive a delay.

I would not do it. Not on this one.

The whole argument of my life for the last five years is that the record is the record and you do not get to shade it. I have spent years asking other people to release the tape, produce the file, name the source, and stop telling me a story I am not allowed to check. If I turn around and put an invented date on my own product to move units, then I am the same thing I have been complaining about, just smaller.

So the page says there is no date. And right next to it, the refund answer says this on my own site. Full refund anytime before your edition ships. Email me and it is done. This should feel safe, not risky.

Read those two together and you can see the trade I made.

I gave up urgency. I kept trust.

Here is what the page shows for the launch group right now. Seventy four people have joined the founding launch. Fifty three of those pre-ordered and paid. Twenty one are on the list for updates without paying.

Fighting Shadows founding launch, as published

Source: Fighting Shadows book page, launch counters, fetched September 3, 2026 ↗

More people handed over money for an undated book than signed up for a free email about it.

I did not expect that. I expected the reverse. I expected everybody to wait and watch and see if I actually finished.

The reason it went the other way, I think, is that the refund removes the actual risk. When somebody can get every dollar back with one email at any point before the thing ships, the date stops being the scary part. There is nothing to lose by being early. And people who have been lied to by institutions for years are extremely alert to the difference between a promise with an exit and a promise without one.

That lesson has nothing to do with books.

If you are selling something that is not finished yet, you have two levers. You can manufacture certainty about when, or you can remove the risk of being wrong about when. Most people reach for the first one because it costs nothing to say. The second one costs you something real, because you have to actually honor the refunds when they come. That is exactly why it works.

One more thing I will say plainly.

This book is a memoir. It is my account, in my own words, of January 6 and nearly four years inside the federal system. Where the events rest on my recollection, the page says so. Where there are filings and transcripts and grievances, it points at them. That is written on the page too, not buried in a footer.

I am not asking anybody to take my word for the parts a record can settle. I am asking people to read the record next to the account and weigh it themselves.

That is the only way I know how to sell anything now. Show the terms. Show what is missing. Let people decide.

No date. Full refund. The record stays honest.

That is the whole pitch.