By Brendan O’Meara
Hey, CNFers, what you’re seeing is the beautiful, brilliant book cover of The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine, set to come out by Mariner Books on May 20, 2025, ten days shy of the 50th anniversary of Steve Prefontaine’s death (spoiler alert).
This is the pre-order link: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338
You can use it to pre-order from your favorite online bookseller be it Bookshop.org or … Amazon1.
We all know that pre-orders help determine to what extent the publisher is willing to invest in their talent2. I suspect you’re plenty sick of getting barraged by authors like me begging — and make no mistake, it’s begging — for pre-orders. Not only is it expensive ($32.99) but you have to then wait five months.
Anyway, consider pre-ordering a few copies. If you order five or more for your reading group, I’ll be sure to do some kind of Zoom chat. Email me the receipt and we’ll coordinate a time.
So many people make a book happen. Editors, designers, sales team, media teams. I hope you’ll consider buying it as it supports the entire enterprise, not just the little keyboard troll.
Thank you so much.
- Here’s the thing: We can all agree that Amazon sucks ass for authors, but most people buy their books from Amazon. I still buy books (Kindle primarily … I hate clutter) from Amazon. I’m never going to hate on anyone who buys one of my books from Amazon. No sense in shaming any book sale. ↩︎
- Here’s the thing: We can all agree that this is ass-backwards. The publisher, seeing a robust pre-order binge then doubles down on the talent. It’s a chalk-eating-weasel (horse racing term) move, betting the house on an even-money favorite. ↩︎
