This 'Hometown' girl makes good - A guide to Pasadena proves self-publishing can succeed. Next stop: Santa Monica.

Almost a year later, "Hometown Pasadena" has not only sold 10,000 copies, it has also turned into a small empire: Local bookstores, both chain and independent, Costco and even a hair salon now carry it, and Bates is branching out to other cities. Next week, "Hometown Santa Monica" will appear in stores there, and Santa Barbara and Berkeley will have their turn next year.

Bates' formula for the books is simple: "It's about how to really live in a place, and be in a place, and understand a place, even if you've lived there for 20 years," she said recently. "I've never seen anything like it. My model was to not have it look like a Fodor's guide."

Her insistence on staying local and forgoing major publishers' backing makes sense, said Michael Cader, a book packager and founder of the Publishers Lunch website. "That's how the Zagat guide started," Cader said. "You can go to cities that have 'underground driver's guides' that tell you the back-street tips to get you from one place to another. There's certainly a tradition of very local, very focused books that usually aren't suited to larger enterprises."

Bates' book taps into the growing desire to conduct the business of one's life as locally as possible, in an era of crazy traffic, expensive gas and worries about the effect of a sprawling lifestyle on global warming. As Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, noted, books about local topics and niche themes are thriving nationwide, helped in part by digital technology that makes it easier to self-publish books with a professional look.

"I think people are interested in themselves. As everything gets more global, the local stuff seems quaint and personal," she said.

"Hometown Pasadena" features well-illustrated sections on eating and drinking, cultural offerings, and where to take the kids, as well as less-typical features: several pages on the Metro Gold Line, a chapter on public and private gardens, and page-long interviews with key local players, such as architectural historian Robert Winter and Pasadena Playhouse artistic director Sheldon Epps. Bates and her four co-authors also know enough to treat the city as the bull's-eye of a cluster of communities that includes Sierra Madre, Eagle Rock and most of the San Gabriel Valley.