The Price Is a Date. The Name Stays Yours.

There are three ways to pre-order my book. I want to walk through what each price is doing, because I did not pick a single one of them by running a margin calculation.

Fighting Shadows is my first-person account of January 6 and the years that followed. The book page lays the whole arc out, chapter by chapter, and you can read it there. I am not going to re-argue any of that here.

Today I want to talk about the checkout. The checkout says something too.

The bottom rung is a date

The Early Release Digital Edition is listed at $17.76, marked down from $29.99.

That is not a pricing exercise. That is 1776 with a decimal point dropped in it.

I know what a normal launch price looks like. Nine ninety nine. Fourteen ninety nine. Something ending in a nine that a spreadsheet picked for you.

I wanted the cheapest way into this book to say something before anybody read a word of it. A man writes a memoir about years he spent inside a system, and he prices the entry copy at the year this country decided it was done being ruled by somebody else. If you catch it, you catch it. If you do not, it is still under eighteen dollars and you get the book.

Fighting Shadows pre-order tiers, published price in dollars

Source: realryannichols.com/book, pre-order section, fetched September 7 2026 ↗

The middle rung is just a book

Seventy nine dollars gets a signed paperback when it is printed, plus the digital edition.

That is the least interesting tier on the page and I am comfortable saying so. Some people want a thing they can hold and hand to somebody else. There is no cleverness in it. It is a book. Not everything has to be a statement.

The top rung is where the real decision is

Two hundred fifty dollars. Capped at 250 copies. Signed and numbered, with the digital edition and access to the evidence appendix when that exists.

And then one line that is the reason I am writing about a checkout at all. Your name gets listed as an early supporter, if you opt in.

If you opt in.

The man who publishes everything built a checkout that hides your name

Go read the questions section on that page. Somebody asks whether their name becomes public if they buy. The answer is no, not unless they take the Founding tier and actively choose to be listed. Otherwise the purchase stays private.

I built this whole platform on the idea that the record belongs in public. I publish filings. I publish what happened to me. I ask people to put their names on things.

So why is the default on my own checkout set to private.

Because I know what it costs to be a name on somebody's list.

I spent a long time being exactly that. I have watched what happens to a person when an association gets attached to them in a searchable way and then never comes off. Some of the people who want this book have jobs, employers, clients, and family members who did not sign up for any of it. Making them choose between backing the work and being findable forever would be me running a small version of the thing I write about.

So the name is opt in. Every tier. Every time. You have to reach up and ask to be on the record. If you do not, nobody knows but me and the payment processor.

What any of this has to do with the comeback

A few years ago I did not have a checkout. I did not have a domain. I had no way to sell anything to anybody, and no lawful way to receive the money if somebody had tried to hand it to me.

Now there is a ladder. Under eighteen dollars at the bottom, two hundred fifty at the top, a refund policy published in writing, and a privacy default that protects the buyer instead of protecting me.

That is not a fortune. It is not going to be a fortune.

What it is, is mine. On a domain I own. With rules I wrote. And nobody can pull the page down because they did not care for the man who wrote the book.

Getting to write the rules is most of what getting back up was for.

Do not threaten anyone. Do not harass anyone. Do not contact anyone in my name. Read it. Share it. Put eyes on the record.