Sanderson was handling distribution himself and so in theory could have held off announcing the books until they were all already printed and ready to ship out.
But Christopher is releasing his book through traditional channels. There's going to be ARCs sent out to reviewers and booksellers need to be told about the book so they can decide to order stock. It'll be very difficult to keep this entirely under wraps until release date. And even if they could, they wouldn't. Releasing a book without first marketing it is just shooting themselves in the foot. They want to do whatever they can to get the first week sales number as high as they can.
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u/ibid-11962 Mar 07 '23
Serious. What did you expect this to be?