Writing the Veresov

When I was offered to write a book on the Veresov for Everyman Chess, I had no idea how much time I was committing myself to this book. After all I had been playing the opening all my life; so how difficult could it be? I only started examining the Move by Move format after signing the contract. This is a question and answer format pioneered by Everyman Chess which is quite different to any chess book I have encountered.

All in, it took a year to get a first draft out and another four months before the book was ready for publication.

So what goes into producing an opening book? Roughly the steps I went through were:

1. Sieve through as many games as possible from various sources.
2. Decide which games were suitable for inclusion. It did not matter who the players were or what format it was played under (blitz, rapid, online etc), as long as I thought it was of some value to readers.
3. Going through my own analysis and notes for inclusion.
4. Structuring the chapters. I started with less common lines before moving on to the main lines.
5. I mainly did all the work in Chessbase and using an external program to engine-check the games and analysis.
6. Finally, transfer everything from Chessbase to Microsoft Word
7. Prepared the List of Games at the end of the book. This was very trying because as I checked my work, I kept making changes and everytime  I had to update the page numbers for every game!

Still , it was a great experience and I learned a lot about writing on chess openings. So much that I have contracted on a second book!

Copies of the book can be purchased from me directly by contacting me at cmliew@gmail.com or cmliewjimmy@yahoo.com. Alternatively my mobile is 6019-6571628. The book is priced at RM98 plus RM10 for postage.