Two Books In Three Months

Dimitri Rotov astutely points out that I have two books being published by Savas-Beatie Publishing in a period of about ninety days. While that’s certainly a true statement, it was never intended to be that way. I thought I would take a moment and explain how it happened.

My own publishing company, Ironclad Publishing, was originally going to publish the Monroe’s Crossroads book. However, a little over a year ago, we, the owners of Ironclad, made a unanimous group business decision to publish only those books that are a part of our The Discovering Civil War America Series for the time being. Because the Monroe’s Crossroads battlefield is stuck in the middle of the drop zones at Fort Bragg, it definitely does not lend itself well to the history/tourguide format of The Discovering Civil War America Series, so I volunteered to withdraw it from consideration, and it fell out of the publishing queue. I approached old pal Ted Savas about it, since Ted has had a lot of success with Carolinas Campaign stuff, and he readily agreed to take it on.

The book was originally supposed to be published last October, but when Ted got into laying it out, he determined that the series of nearly 30 maps for it were unacceptable. They all had to be re-done. When the cartographer had health issues, the whole damned thing got thrown off track, and what should have taken a few weeks ended up taking nearly three months, and perhaps even a little longer (I’ve lost track). Ted then scheduled it for the end of January, and we missed that date also as a result of the cartographer’s health issues. So, what this means is that instead of an October 2005 release date, we’re now looking at March 21, 2006 (which cannot come soon enough).

In the interim, JD Petruzzi and I were plugging away at our book on Stuart’s Ride during the Gettysburg Campaign, and it was rapidly coming to its conclusion. It was originally intended for inclusion in The Discovering Civil War America Series, and was originally planned as a volume in the series. However, the farther we got into the project, the more aware we became that in order to do this the way we wanted to, it needed to address the controversy over the ride, too. Once we got into that, we realized it needed to be a hardcover book, and that took it off the radar screen for Ironclad for the reasons stated above. Hence, we took it to Ted, and he grabbed it up, too. We decided to push to get it out in time for the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, so that meant a short time frame in which to edit it and lay it out, and we are on track to meet the projected release date early, due to an event in Westminster, Maryland the third weekend in June (we have a detailed treatment of Corbit’s Charge at Westminster on June 29, 1863 in the book, and the organizers of the annual re-enactment have invited us for a booksigning that weekend).

There was supposed to be a nine-month gap between the two books. Obviously, that’s no longer going to be the case. It is an interesting scenario, and we will have to see how it plays out.