Celebrating National Small Press Month
One Small Press—Five Years of Successful Publishing

Menlo Park, CA, 3/27/07—"I plan to keep updating and marketing it as long as I can or until I am 80 years old—whichever comes first!" writes author Janet Chapple, illustrating what it takes to give a book a long life. Wholeheartedly believing in your book is the first of many requisites, according to the author of Yellowstone Treasures: The Traveler's Companion to the National Park.

This popular guide to Yellowstone Park grew out of a lifelong love of the park and a desire to make it easy to find all the park's wonders. Researching and writing the book became an obsession: "It took over my life," says Chapple. Seeking a publisher, on the other hand, was a discouraging battle, as she explains in a September 2005 article in Publishers Marketing Association's Independent newsletter, which is available at www.pma-online.org.

With financial and moral support from her family and a determination to learn what went into publishing, Chapple formed her own company, Granite Peak Publications, and published the first edition of Yellowstone Treasures in 2002. This four-color, 384-page book won the Gold Award for travel guides in ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year competition. By October 2004 the book's distributor, Independent Publishers Group, declared it one of their ten top-selling books in the ten years of their Trade Distribution Program.

The year 2005 saw a second, fully updated, edition of Yellowstone Treasures. A short article about the book's steady sales appears in the March 2007 issue of the PMA Independent. Granite Peak Publications has also published a booklet about Yellowstone's thermal areas, titled Visiting Geyserland, available at the park visitor centers and from the book's Web site: www.yellowstonetreasures.com.

Enthusiastic users write such comments as "absolutely indispensable," "undoubtedly the single best resource on Yellowstone," "I'm finding all these neat little places and side-roads I missed!" and "the equivalent of a highly knowledgeable tour guide."