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Feature

Navigating the Rough Seas of Independent Publishing

Duo finds publishing niche and great adventure along the way. Interview with the Fine Edge Productions' skipper and first mate.

By Francis Caldwell

Don is a businessman, adventurer, climber and sailor, with 150,000 miles of cruising experience. A native Californian, he holds degrees in Electronic Engineering and Business Economics, and an honorary membership in the exclusive Cape Horner Society. He has authored five books, co-authored another five, and has written magazine articles for the yachting trade.

Reanne (a descendent of Ernest Hemingway) holds a BA in French from Poloma College, attended the University of Grenoble, and Claremont Graduate University. A former French instructor, she writes full-time and is chief editor for their company.

Fine Edge Productions, owned jointly by the Douglasses, specializes in marine exploring guides and route-planning maps. Their series of "Exploring" marine guidebooks and mountain biking titles are the backbone of their business. Reanne's CAPE HORN: One Man's Dream, One Woman's Nightmare is the best-selling account of the Douglass's attempt to round Cape Horn, during which their boat pitch poled when struck by a 70-foot-high wave. Badly damaged, they limped into the Strait of Magellan, then fought fierce winds and dangerous passages to Punta Arenas, Chile. The book has been translated into French and Italian.

This interview was conducted aboard the Douglass's forty-foot Nordhavn-built yacht, Baidarka, while anchored in Armentieres Channel, Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. The Douglass' are on one of their annual "exploring" voyages to research or update their yachting guidebooks, but on this day a southeast gale is blowing and rain slants sideways past the galley windows -- a good day for staying on the anchor.

Independent Publisher: Exactly how did you and Reanne get started writing and publishing in the first place?

Don: When we first retired, in the 80's, we were the primary founders of the International Bicycling Association and deeply involved with land access issues. This led to our publishing a series of mountain biking guidebooks. We wrote and self-published the first ever mountain biking guide book in 1987. It was stapled, and retailed for $5.95. We've sold over 150,000 mountain biking guidebooks since then. We now have 24 authors writing for us and the books now retail in the $15-20 range.

Reanne: In 1993 I wanted to write my Cape Horn book. I sent the manuscript to a large agent house. They liked the manuscript but wanted me to fictionalize it. I refused. After several other rejection slips we decided to publish it ourselves so that I could retain editorial control.

Don: Over the years since we've sold over 50,000 nautical guidebooks and route planning maps and ship between thirty and forty-thousand books annually.

IP: Before a book can be successful, it must fill a niche. There's no shortage of marine guidebooks about the Northwest, yet several of your books are about those same subjects and they seem to be well received and selling. Did you research the market and then decide your books would be more valuable to mariners than the competition?

Don: There's been a lot of changing technology, as well as an increasing thirst for more local knowledge. Plus the government's reduced budget on research for outdoor recreation has opened up some tremendous publishing opportunities. Our titles leapfrog any of the existing books out there, including government publications. Our titles are known as "no nonsense pilothouse guides," and are the first to include GPS waypoints and local knowledge; exactly where to anchor, what the bottom is like for holding, and what to expect in the way of shelter. Our prices were over twice the competition and we now outsell all of them. Our Exploring Southeast Alaska guide now retails for $60, perhaps the most expensive paperback book in production. Being boaters, we recognized the need caused by the new technology of GPS and the new people with boats that wanted very specific information. We did not use the narrative style as many guidebooks in the past, and find there's a tremendous thirst for that approach.

IP: OK. You found a niche, did extensive exploring and research of the particular area in your boat, using the latest electronics such as G.P.S. chart plotters, radar and etc. After the text was done, did you do your own layout and design, or hire an expert in PageMaker or Quark Express to turn the text into a finish product?

Reanne: After we finish our research we return to the office, input our data and edit it, using Microsoft Word to do our final editing, then work with a graphic artist who does our diagrams, and work very closely with the artist, editing and determining the layout. After we've put the book together we send it to our book designer and work with her extensively deciding what the book will look like. Our principle graphic artist will generally work in Quark.

Don: Our first book, published in 1986, which we did entirely by ourselves on the first Macintosh that came out, happened to be a financial disaster. Ever since then we've used outside experts for cover design and diagrams, yet maintaining editorial control, the key to non-fiction accuracy in numbers, something you cannot expect someone else to do. With over 92 titles to date including multiple editions, all have been self-financed through the profits of proceeding titles. Only a handful have not been financially viable, out of 92 titles published. IP: Marketing. Your web site, FineEdge.com is professionally done, and I assume it is your primary marketing tool. What can you tell us about setting up a successful website and any other marketing techniques you use?

Don: A good website is a vital way of telling the world about yourself. It's new technology that allows inexpensive communications and transactions with people throughout the world and has to be the center of any future business plan. Start small and smart, and pour your resources into things that work for you. That's what we've done, and so far we are pleased and have big plans for the future. But like everything else, we try and make these things pay for themselves, not only in selling our products, but creating credibility with suppliers and research workers. While we're talking to these folks on the phone, they can quickly pull up our website and see chapters and diagrams from out of our books.

IP: Let's explore the various promotion methods you use. Direct mail and review copies?

Don: Direct mail is certainly an important method of sending out promotional materials. We find it very useful, especially for getting reviews and encouraging our retailers to check their inventory from time to time.

IP: Speaking engagements?

Don: Probably our number one success. There's great opportunity. Everyone is happy to hear from experts and a great way to become an expert in the public's mind is to give talks on specific subjects to groups who are interested in your publications. We speak every year at several dozen places, yacht clubs, universities, lunch clubs, and now we've reached the stage where we're paid to give talks at major boat shows.

IP: Trade show presentations?

Don: Trade shows are a very important method of getting the word out to customers, especially people who may stock our books. We've found that cooperating with other people at trade shows, whether it be retail stores or your distributors, if you can work out time schedules where you can be there to meet with store owners and the public, is very important to building your reputation. Equally important is to get feed back from your customers about the products.

I'd like to add that our strategy, as a niche publisher, is not to try and be mainstream and hit best sellers to the public. Being non-fiction, we're more specific and interested in selling single copies of a high quality product, instead of investing a lot of time and energy in something that's going to sell a hundred thousand copies. We've had a number of books that have sold over ten thousand copies.

IP: What are your future plans? Your subjects are mostly destinations. Do you anticipate running out of places to write about?

Don: No, we don't. We have more ideas than time. Time is our biggest stumbling block, not capitol. The opportunities that Reanne and I face almost every day are unlimited. The question we ask ourselves is how hard do we really want to work. We're doing numerous experiments that are exciting-selling parts of our books through e-commerce, through other distributors by e-mail, and other related products. So we have a very bright future and find that the demand for access to the storehouse of knowledge has never been greater. In the non-fiction field, where quality sells, there seems to be an insatiable appetite.

Reanne: I share Don's opinion that we might run out of time. I think that I'm very good at describing personal experiences and I have a number of personal experiences I'd like to write about. Some are about nautical experiences and some are not. I'm afraid I'll run out of time before I get too old.

IP: I notice you carry titles by other authors. Do you expect to expand this aspect of the business?

Don: Probably, because of our success of selling books on our website at retail, I think we're going to include some books by additional authors. I'm usually doing three or four experiments at a time. If they work, I'm willing to pour more resources into them. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. We demand that everything be viable. If they're not, we discard them.

IP: What advice can you give others who are seriously considering getting started in independent publishing?

Reanne: Anyone interested in independent publishing must realize it's a lot of hard work and a demand upon your time. They will have to be prepared to either wear many, many hats, or hire people who can help them reach their goals.

Don: Definitely take time to think about assembling a research and business plan. We've just come off this tremendous dot.com bust, and the reason that happened was that a large percentage of dot.com businesses did not have a viable, well thought-out business plan. I have never taken a single publishing course, but I do have an MBA, and simply follow the rule that what's coming in the door has to be larger that what's going out. If not, you'll find out that publishing will reduce a moderate sized fortune into a smaller fortune.

We're looking for strategic alliances when it comes to other people's products. We're looking for people that have complimentary skills and knowledge, so that if we join together there's a synergistic effect. You cannot stand alone in this day and age because competition is fierce and ever changing. We intend to be a survivor.

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Interview conducted by Francis E. Caldwell, an author and photographer with several awards to his credit. One recent Caldwell title (self-published by Anchor Publishing) Beyond the Trails, (1998) received the Best Book of the Year award from the North American Bookdealers Exchange. Caldwell has authored six books and hundreds of magazine articles.