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This Month: A Regional Focus is Advantageous in a Downturn -- Footprint Press Achieves 35% growth in a Tourism Niche

by Sue Freeman

While tourism dollars have declined this year for things like airline tickets, hotel stays, amusement parks and winery sales, Footprint Press, Inc. has seen a 35% growth in the sales of regional guidebooks. Footprint Press publishes guidebooks that show families where to have free, healthy fun outdoors in Central and Western New York State. The guides cover hiking, dog walking, bicycling, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, bird watching, backpacking, and exploring waterfalls.

People are traveling less and spending less when they travel, but they are still looking for ways to have fun. Regional guidebooks fit that need nicely. A guide can be purchased for under $20 that offers weeks of fun outdoors and doesn't require travel far from home. So, people are out and about. They're exploring regional trails and waterways. Along the way they may buy gas at a gas station and eat in a restaurant but they're not likely to stay overnight at a hotel or pay for a visit to a tourist destination.

A shift occurred this year and Footprint Press is happy to be poised to fill the developing need with ten regional guidebooks that help people explore the diverse natural area around them. Footprint Press's home turf is the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of New York State. It's an area that was sculpted by glaciers and now sports enough lakes, hills and waterfalls to inspire anyone to linger. Plus, it's an area of active volunteerism. Many of those volunteers are building and maintaining recreational trails. Footprint Press helps publicize the trails and makes the area accessible to people through their guidebooks.

Footprint Press is a small, two-person operation that both self-publishes and publishes guides by other authors. Our marketing approach can best be described as "in-your-face." We try to make our books visible and accessible throughout the limited geography that our guides cover. We sell through several nonexclusive wholesalers and distributors, each of which reaches a different segment of the market. We make direct face-to-face sales calls and get our books placed on counters and shelves in gas stations, bike shops, nature center shops, gift shops, grocery stores, coffee shops, dog biscuit bakeries and any shop that will listen to us. Then we follow-up with phone calls on a regular basis to garner reorders. To increase visibility and impulse purchases of our books, we provide retailers with plastic stands to display the books. When we hear people comment "we see your books all over," we know we're doing well. One marketing technique that we've tried and abandoned is direct mailings. We found an 80% success rate with face-to-face selling and a less than 2% success rate via mailings.

We exhibit at local festivals and outdoors events, especially ones that cost only our time. We give talks and slide shows and always offer back-of-the-room sales. This past year we created a color brochure for our ten guidebooks and put a concerted effort into getting them distributed in brochure racks and trailhead register boxes throughout the area. We network and co-market with Chambers of Commerce and Tourism Agencies by offering display copies for their visitor center counters and participating in brochure exchanges. It's mutually beneficial since our guides give people a reason to stay in the area longer.

Footprint Press has developed a very detailed media list for Central and Western New York State and we use it extensively to send targeted media releases and story ideas. Working within a limited geographical area allows us to target even the smallest community newspapers, radio stations and libraries.

We're constantly on the lookout for co-op marketing opportunities, such as discount coupons in the member newsletters of health maintenance organizations and humane societies. We offer hiking, biking, birding and skiing clubs a dollars per book sold rebate offer for free ads in their newsletters. We worked with the Landmark Society to get our books in their annual holiday catalog. Our free email newsletter goes to over 1,000 subscribers and is filled with articles pertaining to nature and the outdoors and, of course, promotes our upcoming books and events.

One of our more unusual marketing ideas has been to ask printers to send waste signatures with the final books. Then we offer free sample trail maps and descriptions to people who send in a self-addressed, stamped envelope. It amazed us how many newspapers will run the media release with the offer of free maps to local trails. Of course, along with the sample maps the requestors receive a copy of our brochure and upcoming event schedule.

This is the sixth year of operation for Footprint Press. We've been profitable every year. Since focusing on regional books also means limited sales volume potential, we've achieved profitability by being ruthless in minimizing expenses. We reuse and recycle wherever possible -- especially packaging supplies. A local bookstore saves freestanding cardboard display stands (dumps) for us that we reuse to display our books at bike shops and grocery stores. After a few years of making plastic display stands for our own use, we began to offer them for sale to others. This has become a nice add-on business for us, especially since the only marketing expense is the maintenance of another web page.

Of course, part of our success this year is a matter of timing. We have built a good reputation and gotten our guides into places where they will be seen. Now, people are feeling a need to spend more time with family and reconnect with their surroundings. They don't want to travel far during these risky times. Our guidebooks are the right product in the right place at the right time. It has taken a lot of work to get to this point, but it's fun work. We feel we are contributing to the wellbeing and good health of the people in our community.

There have been mistakes along the way. We strayed once from our geographical region of Central and Western New York State and published a travel narrative about the Bruce Trail in Ontario, Canada. This is a very popular trail in Canada but is virtually unknown in the US. We found that marketing and distributing a book to Canada was cost prohibitive so we were left with only the limited market in the US. Now we know to stay within the geography that we can reach effectively. By specializing in outdoor recreation guidebooks for a limited geographical area we are able to focus our marketing efforts and leverage each book on the ones proceeding it.

That's OK with us. The part of being guidebook authors and publishers we enjoy most is the field research. It's the days we spend splashing up a creek bed, looking for the waterfall we know must be hidden there because the lines on the topographical map converge upstream. Or the day we hiked a trail to a waterfall, to find a couple in fond embrace behind the wall of water -- he had just proposed marriage. We decided to write 200 Waterfalls in Central and Western New York: A Finders' Guide because we happened upon so many of these hidden gems as we hiked trails while researching our "Take A Hike" guidebooks. Besides, who doesn't love a waterfall?

We have two books in the research stage now and no lack of ideas for the future. One will be a guide to flat water paddling for canoes and kayaks. Like all our guides, it will be geared to family use, not extreme sports as is all the rage in the media. The second book will be a driving tour of cobblestone buildings. Ninety percent of all cobblestone buildings in the USA are within a 75-mile radius of our hometown of Rochester, NY. So, we paddle one day then drive around and examine cobblestone buildings the next. In the process, we're exploring, learning and having fun.

Not a bad life, this publishing business.

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Sue Freeman is the author of eight guidebooks and the publisher of Footprint Press, Inc. Free maps and information on Footprint Press guidebooks can be found at her website www.footprintpress.com. When not working on guidebooks, Sue and her husband Rich are off on adventures hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, hiking across Spain on the pilgrimage trail Camino de Santiago, and other such follies. Contact her at PO Box 645, Fishers, NY 14453, by phone (800-431-1579), or online at www.footprintpress.com.