I want to preface this by saying The Uprising will still release on January 16th–probably a day earlier, considering the events that have unfolded this morning.

In my years of self-publishing, this is the worst news I’ve had to share with my readers. When you see multi-billion dollar companies have to admit to mistakes and recall tens of thousands of products, knowingly losing customers in the process, the true significance of what that means never really weighs on you.

At least it never did for me. Not until now.

I missed Amazon’s deadline to have my completed novel uploaded to their servers by three hours–a stupid mistake that I never made with my first two novels.

Now, I’m forced to unpublish the pre-order. This means, for those of you who have pre-ordered it, your orders have been canceled and money will be returned. You will have to purchase again on the day of release.

I’m an author, yet I can’t express in words my disappointment in myself. If this is what it feels like for someone like me, on a much smaller scale, then I can’t even fathom the emotional distress of the higher-ups in those multi-billion dollar companies.

Think Samsung with their Galaxy Notes “blowing up”, or Toyota, when they had to recall a bunch of cars because of malfunctions in their brakes.

I sat on the floor for probably twenty minutes, face in my hands.

What else does this mean? It means I won’t be able to use Amazon’s pre-order services for a year. That’s the punishment for missing the deadline, which is understandable and justifiable. All of my future books won’t be available for purchase until the day of release.

I guess this is a lesson learned. I have yet to royally screw up on a scale of this size; I must have been overdue.

For those of you who have preordered, I’m sorry. This blog post is a gesture of transparency, an explanation as to why you’ll be receiving emails from Amazon saying your order has been canceled.

What should have been an exciting weekend leading into The Uprising’s release has turned into a monstrosity straight out of Cloverfield.

For those of you who were waiting for release day, you won’t be affected by this. In fact, now the book might release earlier than planned.

And I can’t make this clear enough:
This will never happen again.

Have an ethical day,
Grand Director Farris