Edmonds

We just enjoyed our annual meeting with our publisher, Avalon Travel. They flew to Seattle this time, and twenty of us sat around our conference room table for most of the day getting up-to-date on our guidebook work. I’m thankful to have a publisher I’ve been friends with for 15 years with a staff that works well and closely with mine. We’re all enthusiastic about the mission of our teaching. And when we get together, either in Seattle or in Berkeley, we break from the huddle ready to make our guidebooks better and more efficiently than ever. We know Europe, and Avalon knows publishing.

The two most quotable quotes of the day from our publisher:

“Our sales are up, but that’s to a great degree because Europe guidebook sales were down the most in the economic crisis last year.”

“How you’ve grown without being aware of what others are doing is truly remarkable.”

We used to brag, “Don’t be fooled by overweight guidebooks” — celebrating that our books were light and easy to pack. Now most of our editions have put on weight and come in at 600 to 900 pages. We asked if this was a concern. Our publisher replied, “No. As long as your books are lean, crystal clear, and poetically charged, more is more.” (Though he did admit that our page count — combined with our priority to keep the books portable — is “pressing the limits of modern printing technology”).

While everything used to hinge on annual updates, now we update with nearly every printing whether it’s a “new edition” or not — so the actual new edition is less important. We are “constantly updated.” This means that some of our biannuals (the lesser-selling half of our books, which are undated and come out in “new editions” only every two years) are actually updated more often than every other year — just without a new cover. Not having a date on the cover is a plus for bookstores because they don’t need to clear the shelves each 12 months. So with “constantly updated,” we get the best of both worlds: shelf space and updated content. The biannuals are selling as well as they would if they had dates on the cover, it’s more efficient for the retailers, and we sneak in our updates between new editions when we reprint the book.

 New printing technology makes it easy to make small but efficient print runs, enabling us to publish shorter and much less expensive guidebook excerpts we call “Snapshots” (for example, Norway, Stockholm, and Denmark, which are derived from our bigger Scandinavia book). This allows readers to buy just the destinations they want. It also takes the pressure off us to address the market demand for these regions, and it lets us test-market destinations to see where a full-fledged guidebook would be justified. Of our twenty-some Snapshot titles, Barcelona is a top seller. That indicates that, if we were to publish another full-fledged guidebook, it should be Barcelona.

Traditionally, my publisher is always pushing for more new titles. But now he’s satisfied that we’ve covered Europe pretty well. The one thing we’re missing is “pocket guides.” Our competition is selling lots of these smaller trim, full-color, distilled versions of standard guidebooks. Until now, we’ve given them a free ride. In 2011, we will get into that game.

 Our sales are pretty good. We’re in the top tier (Frommer, Fodor’s, DK, Lonely Planet, Rick Steves — in no particular order), and the top tier leaves everyone else in the dust. Out of every 100 books we sell, 82 are sold in the USA, 9 in Canada, 5 in Europe, and 4 everywhere else. Everyone’s excited about electronic books, iPhone apps, and digital publishing — but it’s still only 3% of our total sales revenue. Both my publisher and I are encouraging our staffs to keep our eyes on the prize: printed-on-paper guidebooks.

With our phrase books, we took on Berlitz and won (outselling them in bookstores). With our journal, we took on Moleskine and lost. We designed a cool journal in two sizes, but it just doesn’t sell. I think it’s overpriced, and encouraged my publisher to go wild in reconsidering their pricing. Stay tuned.

The big stress in the book business is how to adapt royalties and author payments to electronic books. Amazon and Apple are jockeying to lock up the electronic sales. Map sales are going to hell in a handbag — hit much harder than guidebooks by Internet alternatives (Google Maps and GPS). The American Booksellers Convention is not the vibrant thing it used to be.

The thirtieth anniversary of my first edition of Europe Through the Back Door is this May. We’ll have a little party.

Now that I’m home again, people keep asking me, “Where’s your next trip?” I honestly don’t know. After four months of the last five in Europe, it’s simply good to be done traveling for a while. (I hope you enjoyed traveling with Cameron via this blog the last couple of weeks as much as I did. Thanks, Cameron, for packing us along.)

I’m overdue for a blog entry. Why the delay? I’ll blame my email taskmaster. As my friends and family know, if you want me to do something, give it to me in an email. My inbox is my taskmaster. For example, here’s a few of the tasks that fill my inbox and assure me I’ll have something to do tomorrow morning at work:

1. My radio and Web staff sent me the list of audio files deconstructed from our radio show archive, which we’ll design into our vision of “tour guide radio.” We’ll offer the various interviews from our radio programs in country-by-country “playlists” for listeners’ enjoyment on the road. I need to write the file titles and descriptions.

2. We’re producing a new public television pledge special. Its working title: “Mediterranean Hopscotch.” (I like the name because it sounds fun and we’ll hopscotch from Barcelona to Istanbul, but some of my staff thinks it sounds too much like Scotland.)

3. The production cost from our presenting station seems high, and we need to haggle a bit on that.

4. I’m giving a talk next month in Fort Smith, Arkansas. My travel agent assures me a 50-minute connection in Dallas between here and there is safe. (I’m nervous, but you have to rely on the airlines, and they have yet to let me down — thank Wilbur, Orville, and God).

5. I have a newspaper article due in two days (a weekly chore) and my staff has submitted the raw material from my recent Frankfurt trip with past writing on the city from which to distill the 750 word piece.

6. I’m giving a talk about “community in Europe” for a fundraiser breakfast supporting the adult day care program. A script for the Elder Health video that I’ll read is ready to review.

7. Alison of the ACLU, who met with Obama’s drug czar (former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske) and our congressman (Jay Inslee), shares the letter the ACLU gave them explaining why they believe we should treat drug abuse more as a medical problem and less as a criminal one.

8. I’m giving a talk at our state legislature in Olympia in a couple of days sharing with our legislators how European drug policy compares with America’s. The ACLU sent me some PowerPoint slides referring to the law being discussed in Washington State to incorporate into my presentation.

9. I want to have a single DVD packed with general budget travel material in a simple cardboard package that we can spread around liberally. An email explains the extra cost for a four-hour disk rather than a standard three-hour one.

10. Ab Walet, my favorite guide in Amsterdam, has confirmed that he’ll meet some friends rain or shine for a city tour (by bike if they like) at their downtown Amsterdam apartment. They’re taking our Spain/Portugal tour next month and overnighting in Amsterdam for a crazy finale. It’s their first time there — and I want to be sure they max out on the experience given their limited time. So no museums…just Ab, bikes, and four hours exploring the city capped by a big Indonesian dinner.

11. Sayed, our guide from Iran, emailed me saying, “I hope some better days come up so you can bring tours to Iran.”

12. Class sign-ups for our teach-a-thon this weekend at the Edmonds Theater are looking good. I always push to overbook by about a third, which makes my events director nervous. But we almost always have no-shows, causing empty seats. My new classes: a general “What’s New Review After 2009 Travels,” and much-improved shows on Spain and Scandinavia after the fun I had there this year.

13. Another email gives me the files for class handouts listing all the places covered in the talks, which need to be updated accordingly.

It’s a lot of work. But I’m so endlessly entertained by it all. That’s why I have such a cozy relationship with my sweet Taskmaster Inbox.

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.