Got mine in hand. It arrived with yesterday's shipment.
Special orders always arrive far sooner than the store copies, so unless you ordered one it's unlikely the nearby store has received theirs yet.
Got mine in hand. It arrived with yesterday's shipment.
Special orders always arrive far sooner than the store copies, so unless you ordered one it's unlikely the nearby store has received theirs yet.
Out of curiosity, special orders through whom?
As soon as Amazon shows a book as being "in stock", I write down the ISBN # and go down to the local bookstore and "special order" it, and usually get my copy before the book store receives its regular shipment and puts it on the shelf.
I actually work for a major chain bookstore, and if you have a standing special order they'll almost always ship first before the store's shipment. They ship directly from the warehouse instead of being lumped in with the regular product to be shipped to a store. This can include lots and lots of backlist, new products, etc. that's already in line to get sent to us.
To give you an idea, I got my copy of These Haunted Seas a good week and a half earlier than the store got theirs. It gets priority shipped instead of coming with the regular truck which has dozens of boxes of replenishment product, new stock, etc. and since these aren't strict on sale products and have a fuzzy release date they usually arrive within 7-14 days of the listed date. If it's listed at the end of the month, it'll probably be there the first week or ten days of the next month. Sometimes there's exceptions of course.
However, your special order hits the warehouse and they ship it right when the book hits their stock... so once the books arrive at distribution, it gets boxed and shipped. The only thing you wait for then, is ship time.
Long and short, ask if you can pre-order and you'll get it earlier than the store almost every time. The only exception is of course strict on sale dates, with an advertised and contracted hard release date.
YMMV with other chains, locations, space/time continuums... but this has always been my experience and what I tell my customers.
Since I don't see a thread for this anywhere else, I thought I'd post one.
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