Book Publishing Running Ahead Of Schedule

I was very happy to see this week that Lulu, where I print my AgileMan books, was able to produce and deliver the print drafts of More Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Year 2: Easier Said Than Done) and The Complete Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Two Years of Lessons Learned in Going Agile) in less than a week! I ordered them Sunday afternoon and they arrived the following Friday! That's quite impressive and in fact exceeded my expectations by about 50%. (That's the good news; the bad news is that even their cheapest shipping option is now more expensive than it used to be, meaning that they've already started eating into my profit margin before I even sell the first copy!)

After Vicki and I checked over what had arrived, I made a few minor tweaks and then placed an order large enough to cover all of the requests that have come in to-date plus a handful of extra copies of each book. Based on the estimate provided by Lulu on the order, I would think that they might arrive sometime during the week of Dec 15th, or possibly earlier if I get really lucky. It's hard to predict just how much things will slow down in December because of holiday-related activity, though. It's still possible that the books won't arrive until after Christmas, which would be more in line with what I imagined when I planned out the self-publishing schedule leading up to this.

In any event, we're on the last leg of the journey for the 2nd AgileMan book, and those of you out there who are eagerly awaiting it (c'mon! stand up and be recognized, both of you!!) should know that it won't be much longer before you have it in your hot little hands. I still have to figure out, logistically, how I'm going to get copies to all of those people at my former workplace (I can't exactly book a meeting room for it, after all!), but I'm sure that we'll figure something out.