We’ve published a lot of books about time, time travel, alternate history, and relativity here at WMG Publishing, but the one thing we haven’t managed is the actual manipulation of time itself. If we had, we’d find enough time in the day to do everything.

When Allyson Longueira came onboard as our publisher in April of 2012, we assumed that one of her first priorities—after the e-books got converted to print books, the entire backlist went up, and all the new books made it into print—would be contacting bookstores.

Well, unfortunately, Allyson insists on a standard eight-hour workday (to be fair, she works about ten hours each day), the chance to spend weekends with her family, and time to sleep. It’s easy to imagine projects completed quickly, but for some reason, it takes actual hours to design books, deal with staff, market projects, and hit a publishing schedule.

Who knew?

Actually we did, but we chose to ignore that. Otherwise, the task ahead of us in April 2012 would’ve been too daunting to attempt. Which is all a long way of saying that in dealing with the backlist, the existing inventory, designing new projects, finding spectacular employees to help with important things like website design and maintenance, the actual cultivation of bookstores got put off.

And, it looked like, that cultivation would get put off until 2014 or even longer.

Instead of figuring out how to manipulate time, we figured that we needed a partner. Enter Ella Distribution. Ella works with independent publishers on a non-exclusive basis, putting books in bookstores, selling direct off the website, and selling special projects through specialty markets like eBay.

Bookstores who want to work with WMG can now go through Ella to get our products at a spectacular discount with free shipping.

The other great thing that Ella allows us to do? Preorders. In the past, when we had an upcoming book that excited us, like the latest Retrieval Artist novel, Blowback, we had to do preorders on this site or not at all.

There are a lot of reasons for preorders, not the least of which is convenience for you, our readers. Kristine Kathryn Rusch deals with some of the other reasons in last week’s business blog.

Now Ella will do all-important preorders for us. Right now, we have two exciting projects ready for orders. You can order the first issue of Fiction River a month before it appears, and you’ll get a copy on the April 23^rd release date. Or you can bring this information to your favorite bookstore, and the bookstore can preorder as many copies as it wants.

Of course, you can still subscribe to one full year of Fiction River on Fiction River’s website and bypass the bookstores altogether.

But you won’t have the subscription option on most of our upcoming books. And that includes Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s next standalone novel, Snipers. Snipers, which will premiere in July, combines Rusch’s award-winning historical, mystery, and science fiction skills into a thriller like no other you’ve ever read.

To read more about it, go to Ella’s preorder page. Maybe you’ll want to order a copy. Or maybe you’ll just want to contemplate the preorder goodness.

Or rejoice in the fact that WMG has found its own way around the limitations of time.