Earlier in the year, we chronicled the adventure known as "The Re-Launch of the Frommer Travel Guides"--a project occupying the lives of my daughter and myself on a seven-day-a-week, dawn-to-midnight basis, throughout those months.
As you may have heard, we re-acquired these books, and have now worked together with the best of our authors--almost always persons living in the cities or countries covered in the guides--to publish an initial 30 titles, all designed for use in 2014, all freshly-researched and written with love and passion. For the past several months, we've been in constant touch with those talented folk by e-mail, Skype, and even personal conferences, editing their chapters as they arrived, making suggestions, withdrawing suggestions, arguing, laughing and shouting, but mainly complimenting them on the best, the most personal and opinionated, the most up-to-date, relevant and usable, travel texts we've read in years.
To repeat: The best and the most talented of the Frommer authors (they include Pauline Frommer, our top editorial director for the books, and Jason Cochran, our website editor-in-chief) have all shared our excitement and enthusiasm about the re-appearance of the Frommer line on bookstore travel sections across North America.
And we've been especially enthusiastic about our new "Easy Guides" format which compels our authors to squeeze their best recommendations and most fervent preferences into 256 pages. Our "Easy Guides", as we say on their covers, are Quick to Read, Light to Carry, For Expert Advice, In All Price Ranges.
Well, the first dozen of the Easy Guides have now reached the travel shelves of bookstores all over the country and are currently on sale. The remainder of our first 30 titles (both Easy Guides and "Day-by-Day Guides") are also on their way, and will be arriving in the bookstores in a constant flow over the next several days and weeks. Each week will find more on sale.
We hope you'll pay an early visit to a bookstore in your community, to take a look at the "Easy Guides", among other Frommer titles. They cost only $10.95 per copy--sometimes half the price of many competing guidebooks, sometimes far less than half--and from all early reports, they're selling like hot cakes.
We also hope you'll append a review of the first Easy Guide you read, so that all our readers may get a glimpse of the new direction taken by these books. We cherish your reactions and your support.
