You are exactly right that “usually ships within” is an important variable in sales. The bad news is that this is something that is entirely controlled by Amazon, but the good news is that this is something that will resolve itself shortly without intervention from us.
The gory details: Amazon bases its availability times on a “feed” from the POD printer, Lightning Source. For b&w interior books, LSI always promises same day shipping (if you order before, IIRC, 2 pm PST). For color interior books, which are subject to a more exacting (and less proven) production process, at first they only promise 1 to 3 weeks shipping times.
The good news is that for any book that sells more than a few copies a month, Amazon orders a bunch of them to have in stock, and as soon as it receives those, the availability will become “ships immediately,” and after some number of sales, you will see the “countdown” begin — “only 4 left in stock,” etc. (I say “some number of sales” because I have a nasty suspicious mind and I am not 100% sure that Amazon doesn’t play games with the countdown numbers — I wouldn’t be surprised if they start showing it early because they know that it drives sales.)
There are some things that can disrupt same day shipping for a brief (but seemingly interminable) period. For sure, if we make any revisions to the book after publication, when the revisions go through, the same day shipping will be replaced by “temporarily out of stock.” (There’s a whole ‘nother issue to making revisions, but I’ll discuss that in another article…) Technical problems at Amazon and LSI can also disrupt same day sales. The good news is that although we are a little fish in a big pond, there are a lot of big fish who are also affected by the same problem, and you can be sure that any disruption to the LSI/Amazon shipping process is a major issue for both of those companies.
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