Two More People Bought a Book That Still Has No Date

I went and read my own pre-order page this morning the way a stranger would.

Two more people have paid for a book that does not have a ship date.

That is the whole story and I want to sit in it for a minute, because it says something about what actually sells and it is not what I would have guessed five years ago.

What the page says today

The pre-order page shows four counters. Seventy six joined the founding launch. Fifty five pre-ordered. Twenty one on the list. Two hundred forty six Founding spots left out of two hundred fifty.

Those numbers add up, which I checked, because I do not publish a number I have not checked. Fifty five who paid plus twenty one who only gave an email equals the seventy six who joined. Four Founding editions claimed out of two hundred fifty leaves two hundred forty six.

Founding launch: people who paid versus people on the list

Source: realryannichols.com pre-order page, fetched 2026-09-19 ↗

An article on this site on September 7 recorded those same counters at seventy four joined and fifty three pre-ordered. Today they read seventy six and fifty five. So they moved. Twelve days, two more buyers.

Nobody is getting rich off that. That is not the point I am making.

They bought without a date

Right under those counters the page says it plainly. Delivery dates will be announced as the manuscript, editing, and printing schedule is finalized.

No month. No quarter. No season.

Fifty five people handed over money anyway, at twenty nine ninety nine, seventy nine, or two hundred fifty dollars, for a thing with no delivery date attached to it. Every one of them can get a full refund any time before their edition ships, which the page also says, and I would rather hand every dollar of it back than name a date I cannot hit.

The note I am proudest of on that page

Near the bottom, under a heading that says a note on the record, there is a paragraph most people will scroll past.

It says Fighting Shadows is a first person memoir and documented account. It says some events are based on personal recollection. It says others draw on records, filings, transcripts, grievances, and supporting materials, which are referenced where available.

Read that again, because it is doing something unusual for a book page. It is telling you, before you pay, which parts of the book are memory and which parts are paper.

Most memoirs do not do that. Most memoirs let the reader assume the whole thing is equally solid, because sorting it is work and because certainty sells better than honesty.

And that is why the book is late

My store page carries a line that governs everything I sell. No legal advice, no outcome promises, no fake certainty.

I wrote that for the services.

Then I sat down at the book and found the same rule staring back at me, and the rule does not care that it is inconvenient in a memoir.

The fast version of this book was writable two years ago. The fast version is the one where the man telling it knows exactly what everything meant. Every cruelty gets a motive. Every silence gets a reason. Every person who did not show up did not show up for a clean, nameable cause. That book writes itself in about ninety days, and it sells fine, and I would have to walk back a third of it inside a year.

Because I do not know all of that.

I know what happened to me. I know what I saw. I know what the paper says. I also know the difference between the paper and my memory of it, and those two are not always the same size. Where they are not the same size I have to stop and say so, and every time I stop and say so the chapter gets harder and the whole thing gets later.

One disclosure

An article on this site on September 7 recorded the entry edition at a launch price of seventeen seventy six. Today that page reads twenty nine ninety nine, with the banner showing the same figure twice.

I am not going to tell you the launch discount ended, because I did not watch it end. What I can tell you is what the page says today, which is twenty nine ninety nine, and that if you saw a lower number here before, you were not imagining it.

The part I did not expect

I thought the honesty would cost me buyers.

Fifty five people have looked at a page that refuses to name a date, refuses to promise the whole thing is documented, and offers to hand their money back at any time, and they bought anyway.

Turns out a man who tells you what he does not know is easier to trust with what he does.

The book is late. It is late for exactly the same reason the services page will not promise you an outcome. The standard is the product. Break it in one place and nobody has a reason to trust it anywhere else.

Do not threaten anyone. Do not harass anyone. Do not contact anyone in my name. Read it. Share it. Send receipts.