Having mulled this over for some time, we have decided to yield to the demand for hardcover editions of some of our titles. I had originally said that it would increase the price by 20-30 euro, and it would if we were planning to sell the books through the usual outlets. However, we will only be selling them on this site, and they will be in a limited quantity.
We have thus ordered 32 copies of The Cutting Edge 1, of which 5 copies have already been spoken for. So, 27 remain. The selling price will be 29.99 euro, which basically covers the extra cost of having this limited edition, and hopefully does not leave us with too big a hole in our pockets!
Later on in the spring we will have limited editions of GM4-7. After this we will think. In connection with this I have to violate something I said on the blog earlier – that we will not offer these before an excerpt is up. We will. However, I will not be limiting the number of the edition until three weeks before publication, so those waiting for an excerpt will have a fair shot.
The Limited edition category on the website will go live on the 5th of April.
Grandmaster Boris Avrukh – author of the highly successful books 1.d4 vol. 1 & 1.d4 vol. 2 will visit the blog, tomorrow, Tuesday. He will be happy to answer any general questions you might have, about chess, his books and so on. The only thing I have been asked is not to come with anything he needs to analyse, as this is supposed to be light and fun.
Avrukh has added a line to the GM2 update. You can find it in the free e-books section.
A few of you have asked about Hardback special editions. It would be possible only at a great increase in cost, maybe 20-30 euro more than the softcover’s cover price. (but not this time around, as it would have to have been earlier in the process.) It would be a strictly limited edition of 25 copies only of a work. Who would actually buy this?
At times I am asked if strong GMs ever read books. The case with some of them is no. One GM I talked to this about a few years back said that he had not opened a chess book for 10 years and that they were all junk. I gave him Marin’s two books on 1.e4 e5, Beating the Open Games and A Spanish Repertoire for Black to see if he would change his mind. He did, and is now a regular customer, especially for Marin books…
It seems we have another fan. Hannes Stefansson apparently gave an interview (in Icelandic), explaining how he used his newly acquired copy of Beating the Open Games to beat French GM Nataf. I have annotated the game and stuck it in a pgn-file.
It is no secret that we in Quality Chess are a bunch of nerds, obsessively trying to take our books to a higher level. It is thus with great pride we noticed this morning that Mihail Marin was voted Opening book of the year on the site occupied by people like us, Chesspublishing.com. The link is here: http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1257965955/115
Today we received 132 copies of GM2. Here at 12:50 Andrew and John have just taken off to the post office with the first 40 websales. They will soon be back for the next batch. The final result comes in at 1,025 grams (2.25 lbs) at our office scale (which was expensive) and looks damn good in our opinion. The photo is a bit clumsily doctored, but I did not want to struggle to pretend these guys could look good in a photo at the same time…

Recent Comments