Guide to Selling Guidebooks : Publishing: There are books offering advice on how to do almost anything in Southern California. Together they provide a primer in micro-marketing.

Looking for love in all the wrong places? No problem. A guidebook titled “The Best Places to Kiss in Los Angeles” might be just the romantic compass you need.

Likewise, if you are trying to find a quicker way to cut through Southern California’s traffic or a restaurant serving peppery calamari, there is a growing stack of handbooks providing advice.

Eight centuries after the philosopher Maimonides scratched out his “Guide for the Perplexed,” an army of obscure authors and publishers are cranking out guidebooks for everyone else. But this time around, the reason for publishing has more to do with micro-marketing than metaphysics.

Just as consumer products companies are reaching out to customers by tapping small niches in the marketplace, book publishers and retailers are offering titles appealing to readers’ interests in a diverse mix of local topics.

A few big New York travel publishers provide regional guides such as the Fodor’s and Frommer’s series, but they generally are aimed at vacationers and are sold across the country. The most off-beat travel books and the top-sellers locally tend to come from California publishers, including many mom-and-pop firms taking advantage of new desktop publishing technology.

Any author hoping to make a killing on a hot new local guide is in for a bad surprise; the markets for the books are limited by geography, so even fairly successful titles rarely bring in more than $10,000 to $15,000 in royalties. Plenty of writers still go ahead with these projects, however, motivated by the fun, prestige or ego boost of getting a book published.

For many of them, “it’s an elaborate hobby more than a living,” said Richard Saul Wurman, an author and owner of the Access Press guidebook publishing firm.

In Southern California, generally ranked the nation’s first- or second-biggest book market, the result has been a wealth of offerings on everything from Santa Monica Mountains hikes to cheap places to eat in Silver Lake.

The locally produced guides range in quality from shoddy to inspired. Taken together, though, they speak volumes about what life is like in Southern California, particularly when it comes to the region’s love/hate affair with the automobile.

By far and away, the leading sellers here are the Thomas Guide map books. “From the Rolls-Royce driver to the truck driver, everyone has them,” said an executive with Crown Books, the leading bookseller in the Los Angeles area.

A big hit recently--and a better example of the new generation of quirkier regional books--is L.A. Shortcuts, a breezy guide with cartoon-like illustrations for drivers who want to avoid jammed freeways.

As a category, though, the hottest-sellers after the Thomas books are restaurant guides. Two of the leaders: “Paul Wallach’s Guide to Restaurants of L.A. and Southern California” and the “1990 Zagat Restaurant Survey of Los Angeles.”

Weekend getaway guides are popular too. People “want to go somewhere not necessarily 400 miles away,” said Gary Todoroff, sales manager for Publishers Group West, an Emeryville, Calif., book distributor. “They want to get away for a weekend and find some unusual spots.” In fact, industry observers say, one of the driving forces behind the growth of the guidebook market is the rising number of short trips that Americans are taking.

Increasingly, readers are gravitating to the more exotic books. “There are guides that will tell you about Farmers Market and the Santa Monica Pier, but people seem more interested in the ones that will make sure you see Watts Towers or the open-air market in East L.A.,” said Doug Dutton, owner of Dutton’s Brentwood Books.

Another fairly strong seller in the Los Angeles area is “California’s Nude Beaches.”

“I’m not sure if people just look at it, or if it really gets used,” Todoroff said. He insisted that the book’s photos are in good taste and an accurate reflection of what a visitor would see at a nude beach.

Hiking and other types of outdoor recreational books, though, appear to fare better in other West Coast markets such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle.

Also, architectural history guides, by and large, sell fitfully in relatively rootless Southern California. “No one is really from here, so there isn’t that kind of regional pride there is, say, in Texas. In some Texas stores, that seems like all they sell,” said the Crown Books executive.

Book publishers and retailers are enthusiastic about guidebooks and expect the market to grow, but it still is a relatively small business.

No one has solid sales figures. However, Joseph J. Esposito, president of Fodor’s Travel Publications, estimates conservatively that stores sell about $150 million worth of regional guides annually--a tiny fraction of the $14.7-billion in total retail book sales in 1989. (His estimate for regional guidebook sales does not include street guides or atlases.)

At B. Dalton Bookseller’s 73 stores in Southern California, local guides other than map books and related publications bring in about 1% of overall sales.

Still, “there’s no end to the potential in regional titles,” said Karen Perea, West Coast regional buyer for B. Dalton. “We love these books.”

Experts differ over how profitable a market it is. Esposito maintained that publishers and retailers find travel books and guides highly profitable because sales volumes are relatively predictable, making it easier to manage inventories.

Even so, the knack for spotting potential hits in Southern California and elsewhere often eludes some of the leading publishers of regional guidebooks.

Southern California is “an unpredictable market,” said William LeBlond, a senior editor with Chronicle Books in San Francisco. “It’s very difficult, even after many years of doing this, to figure out what you people want there in the way of guidebooks.”

One of the disappointments: “Sunshine and Wealth,” an illustrated history of Los Angeles. Chronicle has scored recent successes, however, with “Very LA: The Native’s Guide to the Best of Los Angeles” and “Places to Go With Children in Southern California.”

Success is fleeting for many of the biggest hits, although some can be kept alive with updated editions. “Three or four years ago, you couldn’t get enough books on country inns” located in the West, said Dutton, the Brentwood bookseller. Now, he said, their heyday is over.

“Los Angeles Access,” once a fixture on every newcomer’s bookshelf, still sells well. At Crown Books outlets, however, it has been overshadowed of late by such titles as Places to Go With Children.

The two biggest regional guidebook publishers are Random House, which owns Fodor’s Travel Publications, and Simon & Schuster’s Prentice Hall division, which publishes Frommer’s and distributes Los Angeles Access and the rest of the Access series. The big publishers typically hire their own writers and editors and have them follow a similar format, whether they are putting together a book on London or Los Angeles. Given their high operating costs, the big publishers can’t afford to take a chance on less conventional books with dubious money-making prospects.

As a result, many of the guides on local retailers’ shelves come from small businesses that squeeze out a living selling no more than perhaps five or 10 titles. In other cases, authors publish their books themselves, either out of desperation or to make a little more money.

Improvements in personal computer technology have fueled the growth of what’s known as self-publishing. Using desktop publishing software, authors can write books and design professional-looking pages. Then it’s mainly a matter of finding a printer to produce the books and then marketing them to stores, either directly or through a distributor.

The economics of self-publishing differ from book to book. To use a simple example, though, an author who publishes his own soft-cover book with a suggested retail price of $10 probably could get 5,000 copies printed for $2 a copy. Then, if he deals directly with bookstores to avoid paying a middleman, the author might be able to get about $6 a copy, or $4 a copy more than his printing costs, for each book sold.

That apparent $4-a-book profit, however, is illusory. There also are expenses for illustrations, research and marketing. All told, though, authors who put out their own guides can earn more than their counterparts who cut deals with small publishing houses and earn perhaps $1 for each copy of a book that retails for $10.

Among books aimed exclusively at local markets, only the biggest hits sell more than 15,000 copies. For example, L.A. Shortcuts, which hit the bookstores in July and was B. Dalton’s top-selling regional book in Southern California last year, reportedly has sold 14,500 copies so far, and sales are beginning to level off. The authors hope to boost sales with an updated version next year.

In the future, regional guides are expected to zero in on ever narrower topics as more small publishers enter the market. One example already at the bookstores: “A Guide to the Restaurants, Dives & Bistros of Glendale/Silver Lake.”

Although big publishers have been slow to computerize, Fodor’s now is loading its guidebook information into electronic databases so that, eventually, it also will be able to produce in a flash a new book on, say, Beverly Hills restaurants or Orange County hotels.

Book industry observers, in short, see lots of room for regional guides that do a good job of pinpointing groups of readers.

“There are plenty of niches to be found in regional books. It’s a matter of research and knowing what you’re writing about,” said Richard Schwadel, co-author and co-publisher of L.A. Shortcuts.

Top-Selling Southern California Guidebooks

The following is the ranking of B. Dalton Bookseller’s top-selling Southern California guidebooks during the period from Jan. 1 through Feb. 24. The results come from B. Dalton’s 73 stores in Southern California. Sales of street guides are not included. 1. 1990 Zagat Los Angeles Restaurant Survey 2. Paul Wallach’s Guide to the Restaurants of Los Angeles and Southern California 3. The Los Angeles Job Bank 4. L.A. Shortcuts 5. I Love Los Angeles Guide 6. San Diego Trivia 7. Los Angeles Access 8. Southern California Trivia 9. Very LA: The Native’s Guide to the Best of Los Angeles 10. Places to Go with Children in Southern California