I’ve hit a significant hitch with this launch.
The good news is that for now everyone is at least getting the book they ordered within the expected timeline. The bad news is that I was going to surprise everyone with some new additions not mentioned anywhere, and because of a problem with the printer some of you will get a version of the book without those additions.
Remedy 1: Right now I am trying to see if I can switch the orders that have not already sent.
Remedy 2: I had already said that I would set up a place where I could give updates to people who bought the book directly from me. I’m going to set that up a bit early, so I can post missing chapter there in the coming weeks. Until that is set up, you can email me and I will send you the missing portion.
The state right now: At least 5 books and up to about 1/3 of the books have already gone out, and 1/3 are ordered but sitting in limbo until I get an answer from the printer about switching them. I am hiring someone to just sit down for a few hours and manually fix the rest of the orders before Dec 31.
How to tell if your book is the version I wanted: There is a version number on the bottom-right of the inside title page. If you have version 1.31, you have the version I had intended. If you have an earlier version, your version is different as outlined below.
Differences between versions:
The main difference is the order of chapters, one new chapter (arguably two). And also the back cover.
- Chapter Order: This is the main difference, especially for new readers. There is a chapter called Pushed, which talks about some of the wider real-world implications of what we are doing in the book. I felt this should come later in the book because I had not introduced anything but the invisible rope. So a new version, I moved it to the end of the book.
- New Chapters: When I moved Pushed to the end, I added a chapter with some thoughts on part two of the book. I also added some commentary to Powerless that I really enjoyed. Both of those chapters are missing from versions before 1.31.
- Back cover: I decided to take the long-running inside joke off the back of the book. There are just too many new readers for it to make sense.
It explains a bit more in the book, but in brief ever since the first edition where I had to send the book to various shady printers to see how to get it made, I always made the book sound terrible from the outside so nobody would read it. Over time, I kept making the book sound more and more terrible on the outside which became a running joke with quite a few people. In this version, there were so many new readers that I decided to take the joke out. But that was in version 1.31.
So now a lot of you get a version of the book with the back cover introducing the author as delusional and possibly kidnapped by a wealthy cat lady.