I wrote a trilogy about time travel. About going back and changing one small moment to see if it fixes everything.
So it feels right that I’m about to do the same thing to the books themselves.
The Oak Tree Series is getting a new name. Starting now, it’s The Five Minutes Series.
Somebody else got to the tree first
The idea for these books hit me under the oak trees on Victory Drive in Savannah, Georgia. If you’ve never seen them, picture a whole road wrapped in giant live oaks and Spanish moss. It’s beautiful.
So I called my first book Under the Oak Tree. It meant something to me.
Then I found out there’s another Under the Oak Tree. It’s a fantasy romance by Suji Kim that started as a Korean web novel and became a New York Times bestseller, with a huge, devoted fandom.
Honestly? At first I didn’t care. I thought, what the heck. My title has meaning. I’m keeping it.
A good title is a lot like my smoking hot wife. People can see it. They can bask in the beauty of it. But it’s MINE.
Except in this case, it wasn’t mine. It was Suji Kim’s.
When her readers search for Under the Oak Tree, they are not looking for two guys from Corner High and a glowing rock. I was never going to win that search, and I shouldn’t. That’s her book. Mine needed a name that was actually its own.
Why five minutes
Here’s the part I don’t talk about much. These books are based on a story that is basically true.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine died. Years later, sitting under those oak trees in Savannah, I caught myself wondering something I’d never let myself wonder before.
What if I had called her? What if I had wasted five minutes of her day? Would it have still ended the same way?
That was the moment. That’s where the whole series came from.
Unfortunately, the real story kind of fell apart as fiction. I couldn’t time travel. And my friend didn’t live anywhere near me. She was barely in my time zone. So I had to make it work.
A five-minute delay. Could I just stop her? Not for my sake. For her. For her family.
Then the next thought showed up, the one every time travel story eventually runs into. When you change something like that, you don’t just change one thing. The butterfly effect kicks in.
I won’t spoil it. Let’s just say five minutes leads to the destruction of life as we know it.
So these books were never really about the oak tree. They were about the five minutes. Here are the new names:
- Book 1: Five Minutes Sooner: One Call Before Goodbye (originally Under the Oak Tree)
- Book 2: Five Minutes Later: The Future We Broke (originally Leaving the Oak Tree)
- Book 3: Five Minutes Forever: The Cost of Never Dying (originally Beyond the Oak Tree)
What’s changing (and what isn’t)
The stories aren’t changing. Same characters, same Alabama, same rock you probably shouldn’t touch.
The free chapters are staying up. You can still read Five Minutes Sooner from Chapter 1 right here on the blog.
The books on Amazon will change soon. For now, they’re still listed under their original titles. Once the new editions are live, the old ones go away.
Which means if you want a copy with the original branding, this is your window. Call it a collector’s edition. Call it a first printing. Call it the version that came out before I knew what SEO was.
Get the original edition of Book 1 on Amazon while it lasts.
Building this in public
I’m going to document the whole rebrand: new covers, new listings, the mistakes, and whatever I learn about how much work it actually takes to rename a book that already exists.
Follow along on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube at @RealDrewTolbert.
Turns out you can go back and change the past.
It just takes a lot more than five minutes.
There’s always a story under the story.
If this one stuck with you, I’ll send the next one straight to your inbox.