I’m starting to get emails asking about where that big Peanuts Artist’s Edition that Amazon said would ship at the end of April is.

It’s not out yet.

It’s not just Amazon who doesn’t have it yet. Nobody does. The book is late…. but not unexpectedly so.

Publishers who focus on the comic book store market tend to work a bit differently than those that focus on the bookstore market. When a new book is published for the bookstore market, it has generally been printed up months in advance, waiting until the preannounced release date to hit the stores. Publishers want to have enough copies on hand for months of reorders, and if anything goes wrong it means that they maybe have the books two months in advance, not three.

The comic book store market is built more around the periodical comics, which the shops order 2-3 months in advance of publication, and only then are they printed, allowing them to print to orders and just a little more (although actually a few publishers are now guessing the print run in advance, so that they can print overseas and ship slowly-and-cheaply, reckoning that the savings on print costs will make up for any sales lost by underprinting or the lost costs of printing too many.) And books aimed at the comic book store (mostly trade paperback collections of comic book stories) are often handled in this manner as well.

In the case of the Peanuts Artist’s Edition, they were clearly looking to print to orders. You can tell this because they solicited it early, soliciting it for April release at the same time as they were soliciting most of their March books. That gives them extra time to get the book ready – an oversized high-end hardback like the Artist’s Edition is not as easy a project as the typical comic-book-sized paperback. Because they are not being printed months in advance, if there’s any little glitch in the printing or the shipping of the book, it pushes back the date it actually reaches readers.

The publisher IDW had a talk at Wondercon in Anaheim, California about their Artist’s Editions, mostly announcing some new books that were in the works. During it, they mentioned (as the LA Times reminds me) that the Peanuts book was a month and a half away. That panel was April 19th, so a month-and-a-half would be, um, May 34th. Something like that.

That means that you can still place preorder the book from Amazon, and lock in the good price. The one caveat that I’ll make is that because they are aimed primarily at the comics market, IDW tends not to do large overruns on these books (although they seem to have loosened up somewhat, now that the line of books is a proven success) and won’t always do second printings on books that sell out. I have no idea how many Amazon initially ordered, and it is at least possible that they will have trouble reordering to meet demand. But go, order, the worst that can happen is that they refund your money.

(I will also note that the pricing on this is somewhat illusory. Amazon says the list price is $149.99, but actually the book had no list price. It has a wholesale price of $75; Amazon is just estimating a reasonable list price based that…. and then discounting from there.)

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