Apples and Oranges

an excerpt from an article by Steve Sorensen
(originally published in the San Diego Reader)

          Like a lot of micro publishers, Gene Kira fell into publishing almost by accident. What he really wanted ten years ago when he sold his flower growing business in Encinitas and moved his family to the a large, plateau-top home in Valley Center, was to publish a slick magazine for travelers to Baja. He even wrote several articles for the would-be magazine before he realized the project wasn’t financially feasible at that time. "It was a decision," he says, "which probably saved me a couple hundred thousand dollars."
          About then Kira made the acquaintance of Neil Kelly, an older fisherman who had made the outrageous claim of catching 20,000 fish in Baja using a lure. Kira eventually realized that Kelly’s claims weren’t outrageous at all—rather he was a master fisherman—and they began collaborating on a fishing and travel manual for Baja California, beginning with Kira’s articles from the abandoned magazine project.
     Also about this time, 1985, Gene Kira discovered what he calls, "the mind-blowing power of the Macintosh computer." He became obsessed with exploring the technical capabilities of those new machines and became what he considers one of the top experts in Macintosh art. He realized immediately that the Macintosh gave him the ability to publish his Baja book himself. He used the Mac to create a delightfully colorful cover, to draw maps and detailed black and white drawings of fish, and to set type.

He then started a small publishing company, called Apples and Oranges, and published The Baja Catch in 1988. Though the book was technically superior to almost any desktop publishing at that time, as soon as it was released Kira was forced to realize he was perfectly naive when it came to the economics of publishing: how to price a book, how to market, distribute, or promote. What saved him from disaster was the happy coincidence that the Baja tourist market was exploding, and there were less than ten books on Baja available. The Baja book market was being ignored by large publishers who saw it as too small to fool with.

"By now my knowledge of publishing had gone from perfectly naive to pretty naive," he says. Like many small publishers, he had learned from Dan Poynter, the self-publishing guru from Santa Barbara whose Self-Publishing Manual has helped inspire the rapid growth of micro publishers. "One thing Poynter says is that bookstores are terrible places to sell books. We really found that to be true."

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          The problem isn’t the small bookstores, who are usually willing to deal with small publishers, but are struggling to survive; it’s the large bookstores and the chains, who often will only buy from one wholesaler, and don’t want to be bothered with small publishers who have only one or two books to peddle. Because of the massive conglomeration of major book publishers ("There are less than ten major publishing companies that aren’t subsidiaries of some other company," Kira says), as well as the consolidation of book wholesalers, the book industry is in turmoil.
          The solution to the problem for Gene Kira, and many micro publishers, was to focus on his niche market and find ways to sell directly to it. He would visit Baja travel clubs, present his book to stores that sold fishing gear, get reviews of the book in club newsletters, and run ads in fishing and travel magazines so fishermen could buy the book mail-order from Apples and Oranges.
          The Baja Catch sold out in its first printing of 10,000 copies, and then its second. Now in its third printing, with more than 30,000 copies sold, The Baja Catch has become an indispensable classic to Baja fishermen.

(Post Script)
To his chagrin, Kira, an intensely private person, found that he couldn’t travel to Baja without being recognized by his readers, who flocked to him for autographs and inside tips. Sometimes fishermen would follow him in their cars all day, convinced he was headed for some secret fishing spot he hadn’t revealed in the book

Read about or purchase The Baja Catch