There comes a time, before the official release of a novel, when the ARCs come in. These Advance Reader Copies aren’t exactly what the finished novel will be, but given the schedule, I try to make them pretty close. I invite a number of Book Bloggers to take a copy and cross my fingers that a review will show up. The big publishers have a schedule with a longer time frame, putting out there ARCs several months in advance, but I’m an independent and most of the reviews that I get also come from blogs and on-line magazines with a much shorter time frame than the big names like Publishers Weekly. I tried to match that long range schedule originally, but since it proved highly unlikely that the big review houses would touch a self-published novel, I changed to a schedule more in line with my realities.
So I started sending out invitations to bloggers, and hoped that the books would arrive by the time the requests started arriving. I checked the FedEx tracking data and discovered that it was due yesterday, Friday the 13th. I started checking the driveway, about once an hour, because I know that sometimes, when the driver is in a hurry, he won’t wait for me, sometimes I suspect that he doesn’t even walk to the door. Like this delivery. The box of books was balanced on the rear view mirror. I was in the house. No one knocked. I had to go get Mary Ann and show her before I touched it. We laughed. At least he didn’t hide the delivery in the pool chemical box like a DHS guy did.