I have a great relationship with my publisher. I’ve been with them from the start (1984). They like what I do, and I couldn’t do it without their support. A few days ago, they brought their staff who works most closely with mine to Seattle for our big annual review.
As the scope of our coverage has ballooned and the economy makes it more difficult to visit every place in every book in person every year (as I’d like to do), we have maintained that standard — unmatched in the publishing world — for our lead guidebooks. And the books covering less-visited destinations (with correspondingly lower sales) have become “biannuals,” which means they’re lovingly updated in person only every two years. (That’s why some of my books no longer have the year printed on the front cover.)
An advantage of the biannual plan, along with the obvious savings in research expenses, is that we don’t need to let the shelves go empty each winter. It used to happen that, due to the time constraints of our production schedule, the new annual editions of our less-selling books wouldn’t come out until springtime. Many booksellers took the previous edition off the shelves in December, when their year was up…leaving those books in sales limbo for peak sales months. Ironically, this made it easier to retail books that were not updated annually (i.e., no date on the cover) than the yearly editions. We’ve done biannuals long enough now to have hard sales results, and — as my all-knowing publisher predicted — sales didn’t go down with the biannual approach.
With the financial situation we’re all in, we are concerned with trends. Sales are down about 25 percent overall, but our market share continues to grow. I made the point that as a businessman/writer, I see sales totals as outside of our control. But as long as our market share is holding or growing, I’m satisfied. With the drop in sales and increase in costs to actually update with in-person visits, we need to be as smart as possible to maintain our high guidebook standards and stay in the black.
Every year I am pressured (for my own good) into producing more titles. My publisher has a huge appetite for getting more titles to sell. This is the only thing I dread about these meetings. This year (with the arrival of our new Athens & the Peloponnese guidebook in a few weeks), we have Europe pretty well covered. My publisher supports my priority to maintain the unique quality of our existing guidebooks before adding new destinations.
Bill Newlin, the boss at Avalon, is the ultimate guidebook publishing wonk. He internalizes all the sales data and lives and breathes ways to meet the market’s always-changing demands. I’m glad he’s on my team. He uses sales figures to make his case like a lawyer uses evidence. Back when we had a “Spain & Portugal” guidebook, he convinced me that the book would actually sell better if it were just Spain. We separated the two countries, and sure enough, Spain sales took off…and I had another book, to boot: Portugal. Two years ago, Bill said there’s a big appetite out there for Istanbul. I believed him. And now Istanbul is a solid part of our program.
Avalon would like guidebooks covering Barcelona and Scotland. But their new enthusiasm is for “full-color pocket guides.” Sales figures make it clear that customers want smaller books. Our competition is finding that the slimmed-down, pocket-sized, full-color versions of their established beefy country and city guidebooks are selling at least as well as the big books themselves.
As I begrudgingly accept this reality (I don’t want to enable travelers with a short attention span to base their trips on “lite” versions of my carefully researched books), I realize that the “lite” approach is already in my publishing DNA. A decade ago, my books were small and light — exactly what people are demanding today. In fact, on the back cover of each book, it said, “Don’t be fooled by overweight guidebooks.” Eventually these morphed into the full versions — Paris is now 570 pages rather than 200. While I’m satisfying the needs of people who want it all, I’m losing sales to people who like my work…but want a pocket guide more. They’ll pick up a lite version of the competition rather than a Rick Steves’ heavy. I’m now convinced that offering a small version won’t cannibalize sales of my big versions; it will just let me compete better in that new niche. So we are exploring ways to produce a parallel series of slimmer, more portable, full-color versions of some of my city guidebooks.
Another issue on the agenda was digital publishing. Sony and Amazon (Kindle) are battling it out for the electronic book market. E-books are already great for novels, but still clunky for reference works (such as guidebooks). I think guidebook information will eventually be used via digital screens. The iPhone format may eclipse the e-book format. My eyes glaze over whenever we get too deep into this, but I’m glad Bill is a futurist. I just repeat my mantra: “Content is king.” I will stay focused on creating the actual content…and let my publisher keep up with trends.
One digital opportunity that I am enthused about is iPhone apps. We agreed to aggressively come up with a way to design and share our various types of content (audio, video, and written). This will supplement our guidebooks and will be helpful to our travelers via their iPhones. Because of our archive of very practical podcasts, vodcasts, radio shows, and audio tours, we have a wealth of material to share with travelers who don’t even realize how helpful it would be…until they’re in Europe, confronted with all that potential experience and joy, and wishing they had a little direction. I am determined to make our audio and video material available for free to anyone who can figure out the latest applications.
We are well into a long and costly revamping of all our maps, which makes them computer-generated but keeps the personality and user-friendliness that my talented map man, Dave Hoerlein, gives them. (I have over 70 work-mates at ETBD, and Dave was the first to join me back in about 1980. He knows Europe intimately from top to bottom and makes all our maps.) Computerizing our maps is necessary because when we morph into future digital applications, we don’t want to be caught flat-footed with hand-drawn maps that can’t be manipulated for various emerging electronic platforms.
I asked Avalon about how my odd products are doing. Journals? I’m not talking about them enough, so, while nifty, they aren’t doing as well as they might. Maps? Borders carries them. Barnes & Noble does not. Phrasebooks? Hot, hot, hot. DVDs? Big hit with Costco.
What other European guides is my publisher also selling? They just partnered with the Let’s Go series for student travelers. Let’s Go will maintain the Harvard student researcher formula. I love the series, see it not as a threat but as complementary to mine, and wish it well. Time Out guidebooks are distilled from a series of entertainment magazines produced by Europeans. It’s top-notch and just right for a sophisticated European traveler or the American who wants that style of coverage. The Moon guidebooks, while still strong on the Americas and Asia, are pulling back on their Europe coverage.
According to the industry sales numbers, I’m happy with the way our books are doing. Our Rick Steves’ Italy, Paris, Ireland, Spain, and London — in that order — are in the top dozen best-selling travel books. They are the leading guidebooks to foreign destinations. The books that beat us are guides to Hawaii and Disney, and specialty/trendy titles like 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, and Getting Stoned with Savages(which I imagine would be a very good read). The first non-Hawaii/Disney guidebooks to make the list (after mine) are Fodors Italy, Lonely Planet Costa Rica, Dorling Kindersley’s Top Ten Paris, and Frommer’s Washington DC, in that order.
Thanks for your interest in our work as we continue gathering, organizing, and sharing all that information that helps us all travel smarter. Happy travels.
