A cou­ple of folks have asked me when Spider’s Bite is com­ing out. Since my new pub­lisher, Pocket (part of Simon & Schus­ter), does things a lit­tle dif­fer­ently, I thought that I would address that here on the blog.

Tech­ni­cally, Spider’s Bite is a Feb­ru­ary 2010 book. But the on-sale date — the date the book is sup­posed to be on the shelf at the book­store for you to buy — is Jan. 26, 2010.

Why? Well, Spider’s Bite is a mass mar­ket paper­back, and Pocket has a pol­icy of releas­ing all their mass mar­ket books the last week of the month before they’re sup­posed to come out.

New books usu­ally come out on Tues­days, like new DVDs do, and most books usu­ally come out on the first Tues­day of the month. So really, the release date for Spider’s Bite should be Feb. 2, 2010. But because of Pocket’s pol­icy, folks get the book a week early on Tues­day, Jan. 26, 2010. At least, they should — some­times book­store don’t put out the books when they’re sup­posed to for all kinds of rea­sons (the books didn’t arrive on time, Johnny called in sick that day, whatever).

So why does Pocket release the books a week early? I’m guess­ing here, but I would assume it would have some­thing to do with sales. Most mass mar­ket books don’t stay on the shelves that long — a cou­ple of months if you’re lucky. So Pocket is get­ting an extra week of sales in by releas­ing their books a week early.

I also think it could have a lit­tle some­thing to do with help­ing an author get on a best-seller list. Since most new books come out at the begin­ning of the month, I would think the com­pe­ti­tion to make a list wouldn’t be quite as strong at the end of the month. In other words, every­one eager to get their hands on their favorite author’s lat­est book would have bought it the first week it was out at the begin­ning of the month, not nec­es­sar­ily dur­ing the last week of the month. At least, these are my the­o­ries — I could be com­pletely wrong. (And if I am, some­one please let me know).

But more and more, I’ve been notic­ing pub­lish­ers who are releas­ing new books in the mid­dle of a month. For exam­ple, the release date for Kres­ley Cole’s lat­est Immor­tals After Dark book, Plea­sure of a Dark Prince, is Jan. 19, accord­ing to Ama­zon — which is in the mid­dle of the month instead of at the begin­ning. (And yes, Cole is pub­lished by Pocket just like I am).

And this same thing will hap­pen with the next two books in my Ele­men­tal Assas­sin series. Web of Lies, a June book, will be out on May 25, while Venom, an Octo­ber book, will be out on Sept. 28.

So that’s the deal with the release date. You should be able to get Spider’s Bite as early as Jan. 26 — which is only a lit­tle more than a month away now. Not that I’m count­ing down the days or any­thing …