It Takes a Village to Make a Guidebook

Since 1980, we’ve been producing guidebooks. My first book was self-published. I gently drove the precious little bundle of 256 lovingly typed pages (with white-out fixes and ballpoint-pen drawn maps) to Ed Wise, the owner of Snohomish Publishing. A couple of weeks later, I took delivery of 2,500 copies of my first edition of Europe Through the Back Door. I stacked the boxes along the side of my piano-recital studio, where family members could sit on them–if there were no seats left–when their children performed.

Flash forward 34 years: I’m hosting a monthly all-staff meeting as about 60 of my co-workers are gathered together. And we have four guests joining us from our printer, Friesens, an employee-owned company located in the little town of Altona near Winnipeg in Canada. They have traveled here to Edmonds to present us with a delightful handmade quilt of one of our book covers—a tradition when they print a million books for an author and publisher. (While we don’t have a single title that sells in that range, Friesens has collectively printed a million of our guidebooks.)

Photo: Patricia Feaster

As our guests explained how thankful and proud they are to print our books, and how their little town of 3,500 includes 500 people who work in their plant, I enjoyed the beautiful thought that it takes a village to bring a guidebook to our travelers, too. And the people who make sure the pages are in order, the covers are crisp, and that the right paper stock is in supply are as critical as the researchers in the field and the sales reps who visit the bookstores.

It’s fun to work in an age of dramatic change. And we’re leaders in our field in electronic guidebooks. But I remain “a print guy.” Fortunately, the print market for guidebooks is steady and we’re selling more books in print than ever before. Of all the travel guidebooks sold in the last six years in the USA, our market share has more than doubled—from about 8% to about 18%. And for that we have a lot of people to thank… including you! Thanks for helping keep our Canadian friends in Manitoba busy and us as well. And happy travels.