Making and Selling Great Guidebooks: The Focus of Our Annual Publisher’s Summit

With about 40 guidebooks selling strongly across the US, our publisher (Avalon Travel) makes time each year to come up to Edmonds for a summit and brainstorming conference. We’re so thankful to have a partnership where we combine our talents with theirs. After a festive party at my house with a dozen of my staff and a dozen of their staff actually talking about something other than making–and selling–great guidebooks, our Avalon friends have flown back to their home office in the Bay Area. They left us feeling synchronized and stoked for a great 2012. You, my traveling readership assembled in our virtual Facebook Hall, are the closest thing I have to a stockholders meeting, so here’s a dry–but, I hope, interesting–summary of the guidebook world and how we fit.

Rick Vintage
For thirty years now I’ve been seeking out Europe’s back doors. While I no longer wear my “I’m not a tourist, I live here” tee-shirt, I still travel with the same philosophy. (This cool door, which graced the cover of my guidebook Europe Through the Back Door in its third edition in 1982 is from the ruins of “King Arthur’s castle” at Tintagel in southwest England.)

The year 2011 was a big one. At the start, the giant retail chain Borders was sick but still floating, while our cruise guidebook and color pocket guides were just ideas. At the end of the year, 600 Borders stores were gone, but our new books were a reality. In the wake of the Borders collapse, electronic sales did not take up the loss of overall retail sales in the book industry–but our guidebooks saw no drop in sales (meaning we gained in market share). Our new Pocket Guide series (starting with Pocket London, Pocket Paris, and Pocket Rome) and our Mediterranean Cruise Ports book are in the bookstores and selling strongly today. In fact, in January our cruise book logged in at number 12 on the national list of the top-30 guidebooks.

Currently, of the best-selling travel guidebooks in the US, the top-30 titles are dominated by guidebooks to Disneyland and Hawaii–and by Rick Steves books. While Frommer’s and Fodor’s are still there, Dorling Kindersley, Lonely Planet, and Let’s Go (which used to be larger players) have no titles on the list.  While print is a smaller part of the Lonely Planet mix–and they are well-distributed worldwide–in the US market for guidebooks about Europe, they have faded dramatically. If you take out Disney and Hawaii, Rick Steves guidebooks hold the big majority of the top-30 spots on the list.

You could make the case that the last four years have been the biggest in publishing history since Gutenberg. First, the economic crisis really shook things up; 2008 saw a big drop in sales industrywide. Then the Kindle (which is just four years old) and its ereader competition changed the way people read. The phrase “There’s an app for that” became a part of our lexicon. Millennial Generation travelers, who are value-oriented and get their information in different ways, are coming on strong and are a market segment to be respected.

With the advent of ebooks, it’s exciting to follow trends in publishing. Overall for 2011, print sales were down 6 percent while electronic sales grew, varying widely from genre to genre. For example, while about 50 percent of fiction sales are ebooks, children and travel ebooks are still only 10 percent of sales. Although romance readers are gravitating to tablets, guidebook readers still prefer print. As fiction goes electronic and travel stays print, the travel genre is of relatively more importance to brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Meanwhile, we’re ready for the future. The powers in electronic guidebooks are Rick Steves (Avalon’s parent company, Perseus, is enthusiastic about being a force here), Frommer’s (whose new head is a futurist with a passion for moving beyond print), and Lonely Planet (now owned by the BBC).

With each annual meeting our publisher brings us their wishes for new books, although the list is getting smaller since we’re satisfied that we’ve covered Europe well. The 2013 publishing season will likely see a new Rick Steves’ Barcelona and a Rick Steves’ Northern European Cruise Ports–and in the pipeline are new Pocket Guides for Athens, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Prague. The biggest untapped market is not covering new destinations, but introducing more people to the destinations we already cover, in part by making it easier for them to purchase and download guidebooks while they’re on the road.

At the end, we all agreed to hold the line on prices as much as possible, that my gang will continue to focus on generating good content while Avalon will publish and distribute it (as they do so well), and that Europe as a destination fits the teaching soul of the Rick Steves enterprise.

Having sat through a day and a half of meetings, it’s clear to me that the brand “Rick Steves” would be nothing without the hard work and wonderful talent of our co-authors, our editors here in our office, and our good friends at Avalon Travel. Here’s to great guidebooks making happy travels for 2012!

Comments

9 Replies to “Making and Selling Great Guidebooks: The Focus of Our Annual Publisher’s Summit”

  1. Rick, you have the respect of all of your readers and whatever you write, with the help of the people above, your books, videos, app’s etc will always be appreciated and used. Happy Travels to You (taken from you and changed a little bit).

  2. Rick – Love how you give us glimpse into the “back door” of Europe Through the Back Door! The transparency is great, and fascinating (not dry at all).

  3. Rick: I have loved your books for years, especially the one on the Cinque Terre. It, by far, is my favorite. I have a thought-provoking question. How do you think the role of technology will change how travelers consume information during their trip? And how will you change the way you distribute your information given these new technologies?

  4. Rick,

    I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had in Europe started by either my having or my conversing partner having a Rick Steves’ guidebook in hand. Whether it was the lady in Orvieto who’s own guide book was in the Hotel ;) (so we read mine in the Duomo), to the charming Australian lady marveling at the olive trees in San Gimignano and of course the lovely lady in Civita who upon seeing me with your book asked us in to see the view from her garden, I’ve had enjoyable European experiences simply by carrying a Rick Steves book around.

    So you see Rick your books have helped me not just for explore back doors but open new ones along the way.

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