pre-orders – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Pictured on this table: Lebanese salad, tahini, beef shawarma, fried eggplant, homemade hummus, homemade baba ghanoush, fried chicken, hand-cut French fries, and Lebanese rice, along with pita bread, both homemade and store-bought garlic spread (made for the chicken, but also delicious with the fries,) fresh parsley, pickles, tomatoes and a homemade tomato sauce to go with the eggplant. Not pictured: a thousand deserts, including about thirty different varieties of baklava and nammoura, which I had never had before this weekend and oh my God.

I don’t know if I made this clear, but my cousin married a Lebanese woman, and for this and a whole lot of other reasons it is very clear that marrying her was the best decision he ever made. And this was only one meal. Like, these folks don’t cook, they COOK, and trying to claim you were full was just not going to work. I can think of three-day periods where I have eaten better in my life– work trips to Nashville and Raleigh come to mind– but I have never come close to eating this well for three days in a row when literally everything in front of me was home-cooked, and she (well, not just her; my cousin definitely pitched in, but it was clear who was in charge) didn’t break a sweat doing it, either.

(Have I paid for my overindulgence today? Maybe a little, yeah. Worth. It.)

Click is still very much available for pre-order, and to go even deeper into asking my audience for things it would be super duper if a handful of those of you who have already read it would review it over on the Amazonmachine. Currently available for just under five of your American moneydollars, and launching f’real f’real on July 26.

As of right now, I’ve sold fewer copies of Searching for Malumba today than there were pre-orders for it. Now, don’t get me wrong– I was quite pleased with the number of pre-orders, and in fact I have reason to believe that I sold a copy or two to people who did not actually pre-order the book.

Which leaves several people who appear to have not gotten their pre-order.

I mean, I pre-ordered the damn thing myself, right? I know how this works. The date rolls by, they send you an email that the thing’s on your Kindle, and boom– there it is. So how is it possible that I have people who haven’t received their pre-orders yet? Do I just have a handful of people whose credit cards aren’t clearing or something like that?

(Also, once again, the book isn’t getting credit for the number of sales today, meaning that doing pre-orders actually hurts your ranking on launch day– meaning that I won’t be doing this again.)

Any theories, other than that I know several grown adults who literally don’t have $4.95 right now? Because that seems somewhat unlikely.