To the Beach! And an update on The John Green Catastrophe

It is finally here! The holiday I have been waiting for! The post-Christmas, post-New Year's comp time that I most definitely earned. Tomorrow morning, amazingly wonderful husband and I will take off for a wonderful 3 night/4 day stay at our favoritest place on the Oregon Coast. To say I am looking forward to it, would be a gross understatement. To say I have been living for it, would be a bit closer to the truth.

Over the past week I've been (slowly) working through the first 30 pages of my manuscript, inputting edits I'd made to the print copy back in October. The time away has been good and the most creepy and satisfying bit is when I'll be reading through and thinking of a correction and then I'll look down on the paper and there it is, already noted by the Me From Three Months Ago. It makes me feel like I'm on the right track.

What I'm trying hard not to feel is overwhelmed. There are a great many changes that need (and will) happen with these words and with these pages. Right now I've been struggling with where to begin. Part of me wants to simply dive right into the heart of it and the other part of me wants to take it slowly, to work page by page. So far, page by page is winning out. My goal, for this time at the beach, is to get through the first 220 pages of edits and then begin the merging of the two year's projects and to start a similar editing process for the second half. Soon I'm going to need/want some more readers and I'd like to have the manuscript in good enough shape for that by March.

Since my Christmas Day blog (to date, the most viewed blog of mine...and still getting views) about the John Green Catastrophe* (as I'm, with great sadness, referring to it now), I haven't been able to let it go. That week between Christmas and New Year's, the whole situation was still really bothering me. Mistakes were made and I felt horrible for how John Green was feeling and what he was going through because of a mistake my company made. So I sent an email to a contact in the corporate office.

Then waited.

I didn't have to wait very long before she responded, delegating the task to someone else within our corporate structure. Over the past week, that someone and myself have played phone tag. Yesterday we finally got to talk. Turns out the story is much more complicated than John Green (and by extension myself and the rest of the world) knew. Apparently the mistake of the pre-orders shipping early from bn.com was NOT Barnes & Noble's fault, but the publisher's.

I have no great grasp for how the management of an SOS (Strict-on-Sale) title between the publisher and the seller goes, but I trust that at this point, my source, having done her research to prepare for a possible apology, knows what's going on. This makes even more sense as reports of other bookstores around the country have put the book out on their shelves early.

Barnes & Noble will still be reaching out to Mr. Green because we do care, but it can't be an apology for messing up.

This week, stage 2 of the John Green Catastrophe went into effect. The signed pre-orders. John Green committed to sign every single copy of the entire first print run, some 150,000 books. It's been kind of a big deal. Lots of fans/readers have been asking questions about where they can get their signed pre-orders and when they have to pre-order to get their signed copy. The answer has always been something along the lines of, "Don't worry. All the books will be signed no matter where you get them. You could even walk into a bookstore on January 10th and one will be waiting for you."

Turns out, someone (fingers pointing towards the publisher), messed up.

We received our stock of the book this past Thursday (which we will, in turn, begin selling on January 10th). Of that initial shipment, only 38% of the copies were signed. I went through and made sure that the pre-orders DID get one of the signed copies, especially the very sweet teenage girl who came in a week early just to make sure she was going to be able to get it on the release day. We had a lovely conversation about how excited we were to finally be able to read the book and how awesome John Green is.

I do still feel horrible for John Green who is, according to his tweets, not sleeping. I feel horrible that this has not been the release he was hoping for. But at least his fans have been incredibly supportive and good natured about the whole thing.

*It almost sounds like a band name a la The Jane Austen Argument 

Read upon David Levithan's suggestion. He has yet to steer me wrong.

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