I do have some questions about the timeline here.
If you've ever worked in publishing or self-publishing, the chronology here is a little confusing, though it may be easily cleared up:
Up until about a month ago, there was a release date of Dec. 8 for the self-published edition of Redefining Fast, in both black-and-white and color editions. The big round of Instagram reels with affiliate pre-order links went out about four months ago.
If they were planning to offer a prestige color edition, that suggests the self-published edition was going to have photos.
Producing an illustrated book is a much more complicated enterprise than producing a straight prose book. There's securing the photos, maybe securing releases for the photos, getting all the captions right, and then paginating the whole book so it flows with the photos, getting it to a printer (likely overseas to save costs), checking proofs, maybe doing a press check, and then shipping the completed books to a distribution center or someone's garage before the long, tedious process of putting each book in a mailer to ships to the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who ordered the book.
It's a serious logistical task that requires months of pre-planning, and all of it happens on top of promotion tasks — setting up interviews and media appearances, etc.
If they were even remotely going to have a chance of shipping out all those books on Dec. 8, they should have had them back from the printer way before Dec. 8.
So my questions are these:
When were the self-published books printed?
When the publishing house acquired the title (officially announced Nov. 18, and probably negotiated several weeks in advance) did they agree to cover the costs of all those printed books now (presumably) sitting in someone's garage?
Is Atria Books — an imprint of Simon & Schuster — going to go with the self-published cover and interior design, which may or may not be up to Simon & Schuster's standards?
Were the books never printed, in which case they were totally going to blow that announced Dec. 8 deadline?
Why is the One Athletics website still listing this book for sale, even if the "Buy Now" buttons don't work?
Why doesn't the One Athletics pre-order page announce the new publishing deal?
Did Brosnan ever line up any December promotional and media appearances to help sell his self-published book?
And this is where one could get a little conspiratorial, but not unreasonably so: Was this whole self-publishing thing always really just meant to drum up a commercial publisher's interest?
The simple answer is probably Brosnan et al were sworn to secrecy by an NDA as they negotiated a deal, which would put them in an awkward spot, presuming negotiations began after soliciting pre-orders in August. Still. There's a story there.