The scale of these kinds of books is often small, at least at first. But like "Hometown Pasadena," some local books have exploded from cottage-industry presses, such as "The Ultimate Hollywood Tour Book," which has sold more than 40,000 copies through author William A. Gordon's press, North Ridge Books.
Appropriately enough, Pasadena's premiere local bookstore, Vroman's, took a chance and devoted an entire table to "Hometown Pasadena." The store's head buyer, Marie du Vaure, calls the book's pace of sales "phenomenal. We were gobbling up her print runs at some point" partly, she said, because the book not only filled a gap, but also because its design was so appealing.
New technologies have also made Bates' independent approach potentially more profitable, said Gary Young, president of the Publishers Assn. of Los Angeles, a group that helps support and educate local publishers and booksellers. Internet marketing can work well for self-published books, Young said. "With a good platform and a savvy Internet sales initiative, many books can do well whether self-published or not."
California, in particular, has been fertile ground for projects like Bates'. San Diego-based literary agent Sandra Dijkstra said that many publishing innovations, especially with small and niche publishers, have been in California. "There's a whole movement, started in the Bay Area, that has its own arena," she said, referring to the array of mostly independent presses that came out of the Beat, counterculture, environmental and self-realization movement, such as City Lights Books, Sierra Club Books and Amber-Allen Publishing.
And, in fact, the magazine world has recently seen the rise of the Ojai-based "Edible" franchise of intensely local quarterly foodie magazines. It now ranges across the nation, including Edible Atlanta and Edible Cape Cod. Bates' decision to publish on her own press comes from her experience with the New York publishing world, beginning in the early '80s when she edited a series of French-originated guidebooks for Simon & Schuster, to her co-writing "Storybook Travels" in 2002 with Susan LaTempa (now the deputy food editor of The Times).
That book, which visited the locations of children's books, including Beatrix Potter's Lake District of England and Pinocchio's Tuscany, came out close to the Sept. 11 attacks, when travel books were a hard sell.
