The Strange Month Between Pre-Order and Publication
Pre-orders for Synchronicity in Grief opened at most retailers at the end of the summer, and on Routledge’s own site on September 15. The print and Kindle editions come out on October 19. In between, on October 2, the ebook went live more than two weeks early, and I found out by accident.
So since early September, the book has been in a liminal state, fitting for a liminal book. The book is copyedited, proofed, indexed, and is now finished. The cover image is live, the ISBN issued and searchable, and Routledge has set the price. People can now buy the ebook, and some already have. At the same time, it is also not out yet, because the physical book is being printed as we speak. The physical book and other ebook editions (Kindle, Barnes & Noble) will be out 2 weeks from yesterday. I planned this post for late September, as a real-life, inside-publishing account of the month between proofs and publication, before the early release of the ebook overtook the plan.
What the month looked like from my desk
Not much of it looked like publishing my book and I was honestly glad to have the gap because my seasonal dissertation work began in earnest in September.
I had seven clients, a graduate course to design on dissertation writing for a university I partner with, 3 peer reviews, twelve-hour days. My book was quiet, and I was glad.
Early on, I typed the ISBN into a search bar to see what would come back, and found the book on a dozen retailer pages, each one slightly different from the next. One spelled synchronicity with an s in the description. Routledge’s own page showed the wrong release date for a while. For weeks there was no cover image on any of them, just a grey placeholder beside my name.
I rebuilt the book page on my website that month so that it gave the right date and listed every place the book could be ordered. I set up author pages on Amazon, updated ORCID, and Google Scholar. On Goodreads, the book had been filed under another Jennifer Hill, an author with fifty-one titles to her name, and it took a support request and a few days before the record was corrected to show me as the actual author.
A week after I published this post calling the author index the last thing I would ever do to this book, the typeset index proof came back for my approval. I read it through and signed off. That was the actual last task and then things went quiet.
Near the end of the month, Routledge and its production partner sent a survey asking how the copyediting process had gone for me. I filled it in. It was the first thing anyone had asked me to do for the book since the index.
What is happening at the publisher
From the outside, nothing. From the inside, as far as I can piece it together, quite a lot, and none of it needs the author.
The corrected proofs were finalized in early September and went on to the printer. The same final files became the ebook. The book’s metadata — its title, description, dates, price, and cover — went out to retailers through data feeds, and every retailer updates on its own schedule. That is why one site can carry a typo that another does not, why a date can be wrong on one page and right on another, and why the cover appears in one place a week before it appears in the next.
An ebook has no printing and no shipping to wait for, so once the file is ready it can simply be switched on. The moment Synchronicity in Grief went live, the book also became available to libraries through Taylor & Francis eBooks, which means a librarian somewhere can add it to a catalog. Meanwhile, the hardcover is being printed and sent to warehouses, and I have claimed my author copies and am waiting for the box to arrive.
What an author can do, and what she cannot
Here is what I could do this month. Fix my own website. Set up my author profiles. Ask readers to recommend the book to their university libraries. Write to my production editor to ask how a reviewer gets a copy, and what the next steps toward launch would be. Point out the wrong date. Write these posts.
Here is what I could not do. Change a word on a retailer’s page. Supply the missing cover myself. Move a date in either direction. Make the Goodreads record mine without someone at Goodreads doing it.
If you have ever waited for a committee to schedule your defense, or for a journal to send a decision, you know this state. The work is done and in other people’s hands, and the only things left to you are small ones. My clients live there for months at a time. I tell them to do the small things and then go do other work, and this month I took my own advice, most days.
Then the ebook came out
On October 2 I went to claim my author copies and found the ebook already live. I wrote about that the same day, so I will not retell it here.
One detail about it belongs in this post, though. Routledge’s page lists the copyright year as 2027. That is normal for a book released late in the year, and it means a book that came out in October 2026 will be cited as Hill (2027) for the rest of its life. I am an editor. I have explained this rule to authors more than once. It is still odd from the inside: the book is out, not out, and dated to a year that has not started.
Why the quiet is not nothing
The quiet was the book being made real in systems I will never see: a printer’s queue, a metadata feed, a library catalog, a warehouse. People may already be reading it. The participants whose stories are in it, who told me things they had told almost no one, are reaching strangers now, and that began on an ordinary Friday with no launch and no party, and without me.
That is what I most want to say to the academics I work with who are heading toward a first book. The month before the release date is not a lull before the real event. The book is being distributed, cataloged, and read during it. The author simply is not part of that work anymore, and that is how it is supposed to go.
Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss is out now as an ebook from Routledge, and the print and Kindle editions follow on October 19, 2026. Libraries can get it through Taylor & Francis eBooks. Every link is on my book page.
I will write once more when the print edition is in my hands.
— Jennifer
The patience of publishing.