Finding A Place Among The Best-sellers

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Writing a best-selling nonfiction book isn't easy. Writing one, publishing it, and promoting it without any experience in publishing or marketing is even harder.

Three college professors at Long Island University set out to do exactly that two years ago. Their book, Finding Your Best Place to Live in America, published last year by their own Red Lion Books of West Babylon, N.Y., now has 80,000 copies in print and is selling well.

The three are Thomas F. Bowman, a professor of educational administration; George A. Giuliani, a professor of special education; and M. Ronald Minge, also a professor of special education. Their book doesn't name the country's single best place to live, but it helps the reader determine his or her own favorite. In easy-to-read charts, the book compares 80 metropolitan areas according to wage rates, housing costs, taxes, crime, pollution, weather, growth rates, and even the ratio of men to women.

After each man worked about 20 hours a week for 1 1/2 years researching and writing the book, the team spent $30,000 to print 10,000 copies. But nobody was interested in handling it.

"We knew we'd have to be unorthodox," Bowman says. So they paid $18,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times, the only advertisement they ran. "We learned that the key to success in publishing is to promote a book, not to advertise it," Bowman explains. "There's a psychological aspect -- a full-page ad in the Times makes you look successful."

The tactic paid off. A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal got curious, read the book, and gave it a good write-up. This time B. Dalton, the bookstore chain, agreed to put it in its stores. Other stores now carry it, and it is selling steadily at $9.95 a copy. Red Lion nets $3 on each sale.

"There would be no way to justify all the work we did if this was the only book we publish," Bowman says. "It gives us a platform to do more." The three are now working on a book about how to select a mate.