Quality Chess Blog

John just received this e-mail:

Dear John,

I pre-ordered your book “King’s gambit” last autumn for my son as a Christmas present. Do you know when it will be published?

Regards,
xxx

John has finished Chapter 1 of the King’s Gambit. This does not mean that he has now started on Chapter 2 – this was done a long long time ago. Of the 22 chapters, only 3 remain; and none of them are too challenging.

Chapter 1 is mainly original analysis and spreads over 82 pages in the book. No wonder it was wearing him down.

I predict that this book is written in two weeks from now. Last I did prediction (read gambling on chess results) I lost 16 out of 16 bets. Luckily the betting agency sponsored the blitz event and I won my money back. Here is the prediction regarding some of our publications this year.

We have a guest blogger this week. We will put it up tomorrow.

Folks, I hereby invite you to click the following link and witness our dazzling new 2013 catalogue. We’ve made plenty of changes, including new photos of our friends Hou Yifan and Boris Gelfand. Quotes and tag lines are all well and good, but the real stars of the catalogue are of course the forthcoming titles for 2013. Before any conspiracy theorists ask about The King’s Gambit – let me reassure you this title WILL be published as promised. The only reason why the cover photo doesn’t appear in the catalogue is that we have so many other books to publicize, many of which our customers will not yet know about.

Apart from the books themselves, we are especially pleased with our new cover designs. Canadian artist Jason Mathis has done superb work on Jacob’s Grandmaster Preparation series (as well as last year’s Mayhem in the Morra). Meanwhile our long-time cover designer Barry Adamson has produced a bold, striking design to complement the title of Axel Smith’s book, and generally done a sterling job with everything from the Tromp to Tal to Tiger.

Yes you read that correctly – Tiger Hillarp Persson will be back in 2013 with an updated version of his bestselling Tiger’s Modern. We decided to call it The Modern Tiger – clever eh?

Last time I came with a publishing schedule, I felt rather risky when I put in the 14th March as the publication date for three of our books. In the end this was a combination of blind optimism in both our own abilities to finish the books in time, as well as the printer to have a slot and be willing to put 3000 copies of Strategic Play together in only two weeks.

I was wrong. The correct publishing date is the 15th of March, not the 14th! I simply did not manage to read the calendar correctly. The moral of the story is probably something along the lines of: you can work out all the angles on all the factors you take into account; but if you rule out your own stupidity, you will never be right.

As some of you will probably notice, Colin will put a few extra front covers in the Coming Soon box, but not allow you to order them just yet. It is not that we do not want your money; we just prefer to ask for it when we know when we can deliver the product! Those who bought the King’s Gambit in 2008 will know what I mean!

Talking about the King’s Gambit: Maybe the 800 pages projection is a bit over the top. It seems that it will only be 700 pages or so. The reason for this is that we have used a slightly smaller font size than usually. Our books have been in size 10.5 since 2008, but the King’s Gambit, to save the environment, will use size 10 as most other publishers and as we did until 2008.

We have just uploaded Grandmaster Preparation – Strategic Play to the printer. Excerpts and so on will follow next week. They have told us that they should be in time for the books to be available in our warehouse on the 14th of March.

This is by far the most difficult book I have written, both for the reader and the author. I am so empty right now that I have no feeling if this is a good book or not. I just hope you guys will like it.

I want to thank Sabino, Marina, Boris, Surya, John, Colin and Andrew for their help with this book. I did not put this inside the book, but I am truly very grateful. Especially to Surya, who annotated five games for the foreword, showing that he does understand chess to a much higher level than could have been misconstrued from the game we played in Politiken Cup 2010, annotated in Positional Play.

I was in Denmark training seniors and amateurs over the weekend. I promised to put a link to a short Danish text here on the blog. For those less prone to Danish or reading in general, here is Andrew in action (struggling second from the right) in the weekend. (Some German won…)

John is a bit moody these days. Suddenly it is “two weeks till the end of the King’s Gambit”, then it is “this bloody book will never die!” the truth is somewhere inbetween. It is clearly a race; will John complete the book in this lifetime?

Anyway, we have asked the printer for a quote for 800 pages. Please tell us that you will buy it, or better yet, actually buy it! We have also revised our publishing schedule ever so slightly:

As always, these are just the books waiting just around the corner. A lot of books are waiting just under the surface, waiting to jump up like Nessie herself!

Before anyone says anything: This is not all the books we ever want to publish or even this year. This is just the ones I feel most confident about telling you about (as regular readers of this blog will know, we do change our minds, make other plans or simple get bogged down for a while in a difficult project).

Anyway, this is what I am hoping the immediate future will look like. Again with the caveat that not all manuscripts have been handed in, in their final form and some things still have to be written.

Colin McNab for pointing out the most desperate of several mistakes of this advert in progress. (Let me get the excuses in early: very tired, not focused, early draft, the wind was blowing and Sabino has no advantage after the opening…)