Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - Crag & Route Beta

Crag & Route Beta

Area	Location	Sub Location	Crag	Links
All NSW	(General)	(General)	(General)

Topic Date User

new nowra guide badly produced 30-May-2011 At 10:16:51 PM onsight

Message

On 30/05/2011 ry wrote:
>His claim that the photos and topos in the new guidebook are crap is completely
>untrue. Use the Nowra guide and you will find out that you can accurately
>locate and climb a far greater percentage of routes than the “honned” mentioned
>Simon Carter guide. Sure the layout in the new Nowra guide is not up to
>the same standard, but to hire a graphic designer would then bump the price
>up to the same as the Carter and Tempest guidebooks.
...
>Climbers are
>a very cost conscious bunch, and after writing the guidebook and financing
>it myself I could have paid out even more money and got a graphic designer
>to touch it up and then bump the price up to $60.- like the Carter & Tempest
>guides. What would this have achieved? Money to a graphic artist, the
>extra percentage mark-up to shops for a more expensive wholesale price,
>and a guide that is not one bit more accurate or useful?
>The font is larger than Simon Carter’s guide but the routes are generally
>opposite the photo topos rather than having to search ahead and back to
>find routes matching that topo, if in fact there is a topo to match the
>routes. Someone posted that the text is too large, but I say the text
>in the Blue Mountains guide is only small so that Simon could fit so many
>routes in, that doesn’t make it a standard guidebook text size!
....

Hi Rod

Well I wasn't really going to comment on or criticise your guidebook, I know how much work goes into them and would prefer to focus on the positive. I can understand you'd be feeling a bit defensive of your design decisions after the comments here, but I think some of your comments about my 2010 Blue Mtns guidebook are disappointing and miss the point.

We produced the 2010 Blue Mtns guidebook which covers a large geographic area and over 2700 routes in 336 pages and it sells for $60. It has a "tight" design with little wasted white space but if it had not been this way the size, weight and cost of the book would have skyrocketed. Our 2011 Blue Mtns Selected Sport book covers 550 routes in 112 pages and retails for $29.95.

If you need to make comparisons then, then I think your 700 (or so?) route Nowra book would be far better compared to our 550 route 2011 book, not the 2010 one which covers over four times as many routes as yours and has very very different design considerations! I can't remember how many pages are in your book but if you're concerned about costs then producing a slimmer book is one of the best ways to do that.

I just think you are wrong in saying that using a professional designer would have added significantly to the cost. I used a designer for several weeks with our 2010 book and two days for the 2011 book and I know he saved me an enormous amount of time (which enabled me to work on other aspects) as well as definitely helping create a far nicer, better, more usable publication -- and save on print costs. Good design has a lot to do with usability, not just athletics. If you'd just got a designer for a few days at the start of the project -- to set up the styles and page templates -- then I'm sure they could have saved you a huge amount of time too. It might also mean that more people are more inclined to buy the book which, surely, is the other side of the cost equation.

Anyway Rod, good effort, you got it finished and that's the main thing. I hope it does well for you.

Simon