Now it is in real shops

Cards on the Table went on sale on 11 September. Two days later it sits in the Boekscout webshop, on five Amazon storefronts, on Bol, at Standaard Boekhandel, at Bruna and in the Libris catalogue. Five countries. One ISBN: 9789465443089.

Writing the book was a private business. Months with a manuscript, arguments with myself over a chapter, paragraphs cut that I was fond of. Nobody watched any of it. Then a printer turned the file into 157 pages, a distributor gave it a number, and a shop put it on a list next to everything else.

I am used to a different kind of publishing. A position paper goes to a Commissioner. You can follow it. It gets quoted, or it gets ignored, and within a month you know which. A book in a shop offers nothing like that. Someone in Utrecht clicks buy on a Tuesday evening and I will never learn what made them do it.

That is the part I find thrilling.

The eight personas were tested in rooms I could see. Association executives, board meetings, a card game passed around a table at ESAE. People laughed at the Skeptic because they had sat opposite him that same morning. The room was already on my side. A shop is a harder room. A stranger reads the back cover, owes me nothing, and decides in twenty seconds.

Unfortunately there is no way to hurry this. Books move at their own speed. A listing today becomes a conversation in a month, and a recommendation, if it comes at all, in six.

So the manuscript is out of my hands and into a supply chain I do not control. Ten shops, five countries, and no idea what happens next.

Now I get to find out.