Prospectors, mercenaries and those eager to find a new life flock to those lands, only to find the greed and violence of their pasts following them, even those of honourable intentions. Gold has been discovered in the hills and mountains of the Far Country, that untamed frontier beyond the Old Empire and far to the west of the Union. Often if you miss a publication slot it can be months before the next one comes up. So the nearest available slot was three weeks later. Once you've missed the date, you can't necessarily shift it back a few days, because you've got to re-organise any promotions and such like and you may also have other books coming out you don't want this book to clash with. By then, evidently, it was too late for them to get all their setting, printing and distribution done in time for their publication date, so they had to drop it back.
But some cock up had occurred somewhere in which the US people were given the wrong date, and although the book was well finished from my standpoint by that date, the final set, proof-read files weren't actually available until a couple of weeks later. In this case we'd worked out a schedule that would deliver the final UK files to the US publisher in time for them to hit the date, and my editors and me worked to and hit that schedule. So the US need a good deal more lead time, basically.
The physical distribution also takes a fair bit longer in the US, the distances are far greater and the supply chain more complicated, so it takes a lot longer to get books from printer to bookshop stock rooms ready for them to go on the shelves everywhere at once.
They then check their setting over, there's some number crunching involved in getting the files ready for the printer, apparently. Not totally sure why they choose to do this - their own house style, differences in paper stock and hence page count, slightly different traditions in the text size and spacing. But then they set them again their own way. The US take the finished, typeset files from the UK publisher. The text between the UK and US editions is identical.
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