nocteus wrote on 05/23/19 at 20:50:13:


How did you reach these conclusions?

RoleyPoley wrote on 05/02/19 at 22:03:09:

That's interesting. I'm not familiar with the posts you mention -- I hope the publishers were not giving the authors one target page count early and arbitrarily a different target late. That would be disconcerting to say the least.

I was trying to agree with your earlier post, but I wasn't careful with my wording/tone, so I managed to make it seem like I was correcting you. Sorry about that. I probably overstated the "rarely" adjusted part, but the point is they can't just add one page at a time, they have to add 16 pages. Whether they are flexible must differ by publisher, but for instance many of the Everyman books that come out in series magically have the same page count each time.

Looking at Keep It Simple 1.e4 as a concrete example: total 368 pages (16*23), but not all of that is by Sielecki. In-between the front-matter and end-matter, the author gets pages 9-357, for 349 out of the 368 (but three of those 349 are blank; apparently NIC doesn't mind starting a chapter on a left-hand page, but they always start a section on a right-hand page). Anyway, the author doesn't really know how many pages his content will print out to. It's all a big guessing game for the author, especially because the publisher controls the layout. I wonder if there is a rule of thumb for scaling ChessBase pages to book pages? (Depending on layout of course.)

Then again the publisher can change their mind, after they see the first draft. Bigger book, smaller book, split it into two books, etc. I think Quality Chess does this almost every time. On the other hand they don't give page counts months in advance.

I predict the White repertoire will be: Italian, Bb5 Sicilian, French Tarrasch, Exchange CK.

Ray F wrote on 04/29/19 at 21:00:54:

NIC will be publishing other books this year too, this will have to find space amongst them for printing and advertising.

Having a page count listed doesnt mean that is the actual number of pages of the book - sometimes publishers give a number which is then adjusted closer to the time.