New Vocabulary Word: Pallet-Jack
Turbo-Schlock has been temporarily displaced from his place of honor in my garage by 5,000 copies of Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between on two pallets. 
The smaller pallet weighs right around 2250 lbs, or just a hair over one metric ton. The larger pallet (deep in the shadows in the first picture, or off to the right in the shot below) comes in at around 2437 lbs, which is 1.107 metric tons. 
Between the two of them, they outweigh my wee motorcar by around 750 pounds. Turbo-Schlock will be parked in the driveway until the books have been carried downstairs, or mailed to you. Blessedly, this time around we did not have to break the pallets down, because a) they stayed intact, and b) the shipping company had a lift-gate and a pallet-jack, allowing us to move these two huge masses quickly and easily. But we will have to break these pallets apart in order to proceed, and that is a lot of work. That brings us to the call to action: Every book you buy before November 14th does NOT have to be carried down two flights of stairs to my basement. Oh, the manual labor you can spare me Sandra from! Here is a completely un-retouched photograph of the merchandise that has you, even now, reaching for your wallet (in order to make sure Schlock hasn't eaten it.) 
As an added bonus, all FedEx orders will ship this coming Monday (or Tuesday, if you overwhelm us with manifold couplings of impatience and deep pockets.) The rest of the orders should ship on or before Thursday or Friday of next week. Here's an interesting piece of statistics: As of this writing we've pre-sold about 650 fewer copies of The Blackness Between than we pre-sold of Under New Management back in April and May. The pre-order period is not over yet, though, and there have been far more sketch editions sold, so it's not a straight apples-to-apples comparison. Still... I'd love to see May's madness outdone. This time around the mailers are much sturdier, there are more shipping options, and the book itself is 20% bigger.