Update on our books.

Many thanks to those taking the time to read this post; I will try to keep it brief!

As many of you will know, myself and Hans are feverishly working on Volume 2 of our IX Troop Carrier Command book series. Vol 2 will focus on the 53rd Troop Carrier Wing and will be a follow-up to Volume 1, which focuses on the 52nd TCW. Many will have seen social media posts indicating that our aim is to have Vol 2 ready for the 80th Anniversary of "D-Day" in June 2024, but a decision has since been made to post-pone this release to coincide with the 80th Anniversary of Operation MARKET GARDEN in September 2024. Hans and I appreciate that this may come as a disappointment to many, but it comes with good reason, and to fully explain, we must look back to Volume 1.

Volume 1 remains exclusively available in the UK via Overlord Publishing, a company that has been nothing but extremely supportive in allowing us to produce a book we're both proud of. However, much of the work in preparing the book for release and the documents that were provided to the printer was prepared by myself (Adam), and as part of that process, I essentially had to learn how to do it (the main reason for this being our particular desire to have it appear a certain way). We also set ourselves a pretty strict deadline to have it ready by June of 2019, and, cutting a long story short, part of the process was a bit rushed. The result is that, despite it having been proofread a number of times by several people, some spelling and grammar errors did slip into the final version, and there are a number of editing errors for which I can only really blame myself. As such, we are left with a book that doesn't leave us 100% happy with the final version.

Another issue we have with Vol 1 is that with Overlord Publishing being UK-based and printing here in the UK, distribution is problematic, and we have no doubt that several people reading this from European countries or in the USA will have been put off by the shipping costs, which are very much out of our control.

Moving on (and I will come back to Volume 1), we initiated a conversion with Flying Pencil publications to handle the printing and distribution of our books in Europe and the USA, moving forward whilst leaving UK publication to Overlord. We have had a number of discussions about Vol 2, when it will be released, and how it will be presented.

In making Vol 1, Hans and I had to keep our page count to an absolute maximum of 600 pages. Anything beyond 600 pages affects the structural integrity of a book and risks it falling apart in the reader's hand. As such, we were forced to cherry-pick pictures to be excluded from the final print, which, I'm sure you can appreciate, was not a fun experience as it left us having to leave out images we would simply rather not. As such, in discussion with Flying Pencil, we came to the decision that in order not to have to do the same with Vol 2, we could consider having the book printed as two separate books, sold as one in a slipcase. This gives us the freedom to put as many pictures in as we please, giving you, the reader, better content.

However, this would make Vol 2 different in appearance from Vol 1, and whilst Vol 2 would present itself almost as a collector's item, Vol 1 would not. In conversations with Flying Pencil, it also became clear to them that Vol 1 not only contained errors but also that it could have been significantly longer, and therefore a decision was made that if Flying Pencil were indeed to reprint Vol 1 for re-sale in the USA and Europe, that those errors should be rectified, and a second edit of the book released with more images, updated text, printed as two books sold as one in a slipcase.

The end result would be that both Vol 1 and Vol 2 would be more consistent in design, look better on your shelves, and, most importantly, be more complete content-wise.

Additional considerations had to be taken over the time the whole process took to reach the point of having a physical copy of the book available. It would, perhaps, be fair to say that my perception of this was flawed and that I did not fully appreciate that timescale. There is still some work to do on Vol 2.

As such, while I will continue to work on Vol 2, some time will be allocated to adding additional content to Vol 1 for a revised version to be released in June 2024, meaning we're now aiming for a more realistic launch date of September 2024 for Vol 2.

We value your continued patience on this and hope that you can appreciate that these decisions are made with several factors in mind. The primary factor is that what we want readers to end up with is a book that is as good as we can make it, but we also don't want you to have to pay the earth to get hold of one. By moving forward in this way, we will make the books significantly more accessible to customers in Europe and the USA.