Quality Chess Blog

We are sitting four people in the office far beyond our normal time of departure, fighting to get Karpov’s Strategic Wins 2 – The Prime Years away to the printer this evening. The scheduled publication date of the 29th of April remains realistic. The first volume has already been printed, so there are no issues there.

At the same time we have just agreed a four day seminar in Glasgow from the 5th to the 8th of May with Grandmaster Boris Avrukh. He will lecture on issues from the opening and middlegame – ‘but tell them, no endgames!’.

The price for participating will be 120 pounds for all four days, with a discount of 50% for everyone wanting to come from outside Scotland to follow the lectures. If we have more than 20 full price paying participants, a copy of any of Boris’ four books (including Experts on the Anti-Sicilian, shipping to stores today, where Boris wrote a small chapter) will be given to each participant. Those wanting the Grunfeld book will have to wait until it is released on the 3rd of June (hopefully).

A more detailed announcement will follow.

We are estimating that Grandmaster Repertoire 8 – The Grunfeld Defence by Boris Avrukh will be available at the 3rd of June. Those who are eager to take up the Grunfeld before then, are recommended to look out for Delchev’s book for Chess Stars, which should be available in 2-3 weeks. We expect to have Vassilios Kotronias beautiful middlegame book The Grandmaster Battle Manual ready for the 3rd as well.

As something new, we will try to get the excerpts to you a bit early, even though they will not have a reliable contents page at this early stage.

On top of this we have made an agreement with Boris that he will work on a GM Repertoire book on 1.d4 deviations. This means a repertoire for Black after 1.d4 not followed by c2-c4 – be it for Grunfeld/KID players, Nimzo or Queen’s Gambit players. We hope to be able to include this book in our production for the end of the year, or early 2012.

Now I am off to send off the contract.

With all 440 pages uploaded, we have managed to get a publication date from the printer confirmed, as well as to speculate about the upcoming publication dates. The following titles might not be all the titles we will publish in 2011, but we hope to publish them all in 2011. If that makes any sense.

Sending a book of to the printer happens on a Friday night one time in three. Outside it is getting dark and dangerous, while we proofread the 440 pages a final time – undoubtedly missing something important. At the end of all books, we hate them. Or rather, we just want to go home…

It seems the book will be out on the 12th April in some countries, and a few days later in others. We will start sending websales on the 11th.

In these times where Saif Gaddafi claims to have paid for half of Sarkozy’s election campaign, where the Danish Minister of Defence says she had not considered that, when asked what would happen if Lybia would retaliate against Danish ships in the Mediterranean once in war, also Quality Chess has suffered hostility against our brand. This afternoon, we found the following evil note on our door:

We are outraged! We assure our readers that this is absolutely untrue! Our draughts are at least decent…

John says I have to go back to Experts on the Anti-Sicilian now :-(. Seems it should be available to ship to shops on the 8th together with Chess Lessons…

As if I had all the time in the world, I have now wasted some of it creating a Facebook account for the company. Among other things – this is because I want to seriously limit the amount of friends on my personal account. It is for a few friends and family – and family photos…

http://www.facebook.com/QualityChess/

The Award Season is truly upon us. After the ECF, Guardian Book and ChessCafe of the Year awards, it is now time for the biggest one of them all, the ChessPublishing Opening Book of the Year.

Sorry for not putting a publishing schedule up, I was busy editing Starting Out in Tic Tac Toe.

The next publication is 25 Feb. Besides the list here, I want you to know that the Yusupov Box Set is meant to be out in the summer – the first one – and Build up your Chess 1 and 3 will be ready in hardback before then. Already available in hardcover is Attacking Manual 1+2 and GM Repertoire 1, as of a week or two back.