PUBLISHING THE FRESH AIR SITE GUIDE

It all started when I went to Arthur's Seat in Natal (again) and got lost (again) while touring with my paragliding mates. We were in a bad place. I had been sure that the launch-site and campsite was somewhere nearby ... but it was dark. We wuz lost. 

And then some twit took a shot at us with an air rifle. Bugger this for a holiday, I thought. I’m not going to be lost again. So I went home and began on the FRESH AIR SITE GUIDE. I wrote a book for myself listing all the sites I knew. That's when I discovered how bad my memory was. I had to go and visit a lot of the sites again. Honestly. With my paraglider. Just in case.

That took me three months of full-time work. The concept and information was good, but the printing was bad (ie. cheap and nasty). I had a lot to learn about publishing, but also I had no idea how many people would want to buy the book. 100? 200? (I still don't know, I just take bigger chances). I printed a small run in black-and-white. When I sold out, I took the money from sales, rewrote the book (another three months full-time) and printed a bigger run. I've kept the same formula. So it's the same capital, reinvested in stock.

When the 4th edition came around, it was time for a major revision. There were new sites, contact details had changed, and with my training as a photographer I wanted more than ever to see colour photos in the book. I also felt that sections needed to be rewritten, to make it easier to read. But such things take a lot of time. That's the downside of a 'directory' or 'guidebook'. It needs constant work to keep it up to date. It also means you have to do small print runs or you'll end up with piles of dead stock.

But doing a small print run is very expensive. I’ve learned that anything under 3000 books is ineffecient, which means you don't make much money for your efforts and struggle to sell at a profit if you're using any kind of retail store for distribution. When you print in colour, your costs multiply by a factor of 4, because you’ve got a separate plate for each of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. I’ve always wanted to produce a colour version of the book, but I knew I would have to print at least 500 to even consider it. Now there are only 650 licenced paragliding pilots in South Africa, and I’d already sold 750 books into this market (over three editions). The only way I could be sure that I wouldn’t risk my time and money was to make the book that much better that everyone would be happy to buy the new edition.

Since it is a reference book, I struck on the idea of placing some advertisers, all of them within the free-flying community. It reads like a who’s who of free-flying in South Africa. This makes the book more useful, because you can use it as a reference for contact details of all the major dealers. That helped to fund part of the increased costs of colour printing.

Another clever ploy to reduce the production costs was to alternate the printing of colour pictures with text. This halved the colour-plate-costs because every other plate is black-and-white.

A paragliding book in South Africa has a limited market, so I don't expect to bump The Da Vinci Code off the bestseller lists, but the book should be able to sell enough to cover the costs of printing and continued development. 

With the 5th edition, I contracted a professional translator to convert the text to German. Why? Well, I'd contacted the German Paragliding Association and asked them how many members they had. 30 000. Since German-speakers are the most common flying tourists in South Africa, I decided to invest in making my work more accessible. 

Of course I had to visit the Alps during their summer season to promote the book on a 'business trip'. Hah! Now that's a book worth writing.