Hello, everyone. I’m really sorry to make you all mad, but Flying High–as some of you who might’ve pre-ordered the book may already be aware of–will unfortunately not be coming out tomorrow. I really don’t have a good excuse this time, except that in my haste to get the book uploaded on time in the middle of an extremely stressful week, I literally uploaded the wrong manuscript. At least, I’m pretty sure I did, but by the time I realized my blunder, it was too late to go back and check, as it was already in the phase of publishing on KDP when changes can no longer be made.
I thought I might be able to exploit a sorta-loophole the night before release day (meaning, tonight), by uploading the correct manuscript at midnight GMT, or 8:00 my time, pray that by the time it was 12:00 my time the changes went through, and then ask KDP to push the updated content to any readers who had received the wrong version of the book earlier.
Buuuut… it gets worse. I have no idea what I did to deserve such bad luck, but when I went to look for the correct final draft to upload, it turns out that a number of edits I’d made hadn’t been saved, and what I’d thought was the final draft was simply not there. So, after dramatically banging my head on my desk and weeping pathetically for a bit, I really started to panic, and that’s when I proceeded to make more dumb mistakes. First, I sent a desperate email to KDP to ask them to pretty please push back my pre-order’s release date a few days so that I could re-upload the book once I redid those edits. Unfortunately, as it was already past the upload deadline, nothing could be done. Normally, I’d just accept that I’d have to go back to plan A and try to use that timezone loophole to sneak in the new manuscript, but for the past several days I’ve still been incredibly busy and burned out from work and things that are still going on with my family, I was starting to panic that I wasn’t going to be able to make those changes to the final draft again in time.
So, here we are now, with another long-winded explanation you didn’t want, for why a book you probably no longer care to wait for has been delayed for another week. The bright side for me is, I discovered far too late that due to the pandemic, KDP is temporarily relaxing their strict penalties for delaying or canceling pre-orders, so since I asked pretty-please, I am now able to set up pre-orders in the future. But… that still means that you won’t be getting Flying High until August 22. I’m so sorry and so embarrassed that I keep pushing this book back by a week and canceling pre-orders; all I can do is promise you that this is the last time, and hope that you believe me. And another bright spot: for those of you who like audiobooks, production finally just wrapped up on Strictly Business, so it should be coming to Audible soon (though their review process can take anywhere from a couple days to a month, so who knows).
Thank you all again for sticking by me; trust me, I know just how frustrating this is, and if you think this book is no longer worth the wait, I completely understand and wouldn’t blame you at all. But if you don’t mind hanging around for a little bit longer, I promise you you’re in for a fantastic continuation of Kiera and Caleb’s story.
