Seven tips how to write a successful chess book

The chess book market is bigger than ever. After 2020, many titled players moved from playing to training or writing, be it temporarily or forever. It’s become harder to grab attention of the readers. The following tips might help you in this respect – or not.

1. Put a picture of a chessboard with a white a1-square on the cover page. This will attract attention of most chess players and while some of them might find you silly, others might buy the book – if only to find out if it is as bad as its cover. Controversies often sell the books. At the same time, this one doesn‘t harm anyone.
2. When introducing yourself, don‘t forget to use some reference to famous people, for example that you once played football with Magnus Carlsen or dined with Vishy Anand, if it‘s true. (Other famous names would also work well.)
3. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. On the contrary, make a big mistake at the beginning, to make the readers more attentive, reading the text more carefully, trying to spot more mistakes. (Many years ago I studied two old classical books on endgame strategy after Levon Aronian had recommended them to be. The general principles and the games looked very inspiring and significantly improved my endgame play. That said, really many variations were wrong, which stimulated me to focus on them, read attentively and argue with the author’s conclusions. By contrast, arguing with Stockfish isn’t much fun.)
   Make another mistake in the middle of the book to fuel readers‘ interest and support their activity when the initial enthusiasm is over, yet the end is still far ahead. Attribute a quotation „The pawns are the soul of chess“ to Steinitz rather than Philidor, or blunder soon after giving a diagram, so that most readers can spot it.
   Finally, make a third mistake near the end of the book, making the reader feel happy to be more clever than the author.
   There will surely be some mistakes in between. If you fear there might be too many of them, skip step 3.
4. Use interesting life stories to make your book more readable and vivid. Don‘t use names when the stories show someone in a bad light. Ideally the readers should recognize their neighbors in the stories, not themselves. In the worst case, they realize that it’s your own story.
5. Find a coauthor who is ready to do a bigger part of the work. Even better, a one who will do that work well.
6. Oscilate between a serious tone and a humorous one. This gives you more freedom to interpret your statements. It also gives more freedom to the readers. Those who want to see you as a clever person will do so and will be feeling happy. Those who prefer to see you as a silly person will do so and will also be feeling happy. And happy readers are more likely to buy another book next time!
7. If you followed the recommendations 1-6 and your last book was too bad, write a next one under a pseudonym.