Quality Chess Blog

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…)

Not sure anyone are interested, but I am in the process of putting the exercises for Grandmaster Preparation – Strategic Play into Word. It will take to the end of the week. There will be a bit of extra organising of the remaining material as well as a bit of extra writing to do, but I am more than 90% there. It has been a very challenging book to write so far (the hardest bit should be over) and it will be very difficult chess wise. I appreciate that this book will not be for everybody, but it was a book I always wanted to write. And after all – it is Grandmaster Preparation, not amateur training :-).

The yearly vote on ChessCafe’s book of the year is now on. First round ends Monday, I think. I would like to encourage everyone to vote for whomever they desire to win. Winning is not greatly important to the bottom line, but it is to the authors! And to win when a lot of people has voted is clearly nicer than if just a few have voted. Thus, please go and have your say.