My Book Has a Release Date (Or, the Day Synchronicity in Grief Went Live on Routledge’s Website)

There is a moment when a book stops being a document on your desk and becomes a book. That moment came this week, and it was almost an accidental stumble on my part. The publisher did not tell me---the book’s foreword author reached out to ask about adding her publication to her CV, and when I retrieved the newly issued ISBN, I decided to search Google with it. 

I typed the hardcover ISBN into a search bar, and there it was: a page on Routledge’s website, with a cover, an October 15, 2026 release date, a September pre-order date, a sign-up to be alerted when the book is released, the full table of contents, and a description.

If you have never published a book, this is one of the small, unmarked milestones no one warns you about. Not the contract, not the final manuscript, not the copyedit — but the day the book gets a face and a home on the internet, a release date and a pre-order date, designed and built by people you have mostly never met, for a book and its ideas that you have carried privately for years.

I did not make the cover, but I did get to choose it from a catalog of options. Yet, opening the book’s webpage on Routledge’s website to see it for the first time was still a sweet moment, and I knew I had chosen the right cover. Something about green and gold seemed like the spirit of the book itself. Peeling back the green to get at the gold. Grief is a transformative process, and these colors and designs reflect that peeling away of the old to reveal the new.

The table of contents is public now, too. Anyone can read the nine chapter titles — from birth-parent loss to pet loss, grandparent, parent, and life-partner loss, and the conclusion chapter that weaves the whole book into a whole statement about what it is like to experience synchronicity in grief. For years those chapter titles were in my head and my files. Now they are there online and almost printed.

I have been writing this whole process down as it happens — the waiting, the copyedit, the letting go, the patience of publishing I keep calling it. Here is where we are: I submitted the manuscript in June. The copyedit came and went; I answered every query and sent the corrections back this past weekend, four days early. The book goes to typesetting now; the page proofs come to me in a few weeks, and then I will build the index. Pre-orders open on September 15. Publication is October 15, 2026.

This is a book about grief and synchronicity — the meaningful coincidences that happen spontaneously in the wake of loss, and how these experiences affect how we rebuild meaning and stay bonded to the people we love after they are gone. There is something fitting in the fact that its own arrival into the world keeps coming in small, meaningful moments like this one: not a fanfare, but a webpage appearing where there was none, a cover where there was only a manuscript.

If you would like to see it, the page is live on Routledge’s site. And if you would like to follow the rest of the publishing process as I live blog it through the stages of print — proofs, index, pre-orders, publication — subscribe to the newsletter and updates will arrive in your inbox.

I feel quiet, and grateful, and a little disbelieving. Onward to the proofs.

It takes a village to raise a book.

The patience of publishing.

Warmly,

~Jennifer