Where to Ski: Europe Guides

[ChrisC]

These were excellent guides for skiing, lodging, eating, etc. I own them all and found them helpful.

Unfortunately, they are being cleared out at great prices.

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www.editors.co.uk

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​ ​ Dear WTS reader Please forgive me for sending this one message to four groups of people. I'm not an email management expert.​ If you received the original message below at some point in the last 10 days and ignored it, I apologise for bothering you again.​ If you received it and bought some books, thank you – and apologies again for the delay in fulfilling your order.​ If you received it and replied to express your appreciation of what Dave Watts and I have done over the last 40 years, I offer heartfelt thanks. These messages – many of them quite moving – run into hundreds, and it would be a mammoth task to respond individually.​ If you didn't receive the earlier message, it may have gone into your spam folder because of a technical problem that has only now come to my attention. This resulted in my own email address being replaced by one based on a Wix domain. The problem is now (I hope and believe) resolved.​ Here is my original message: I've been putting off the job of writing this bulletin for months – arguably for a year, given the time that has elapsed since I was last in touch. But the time has come. With regret, I am winding up the Where to Ski business. It's 43 years since I started planning the first edition of the Good Skiing Guide. I edited seven editions of that ground-breaking book before I fell out with the publishers and, in partnership with Dave Watts, started up Where to Ski, subsequently Where to Ski and Snowboard. The Good Skiing Guide and other rivals fell by the wayside but Watts and I plugged away from 1994 to 2015, when we finally came to the realisation that spending our summers revising a 700-page annual guide was too much like hard work. After a year off, I then spent the summers of 2017, 2018 and 2019 producing the new Where to Ski series covering Austria, France and Italy. I would have spent the summer of 2020 producing Where to Ski in Switzerland, but Covid-19 intervened, bringing work on that volume to an abrupt halt in January. The pandemic proved to be something of a watershed for me. In its aftermath I found I had no appetite to resume (largely to repeat) my work on Switzerland. And rather to my surprise I also found that I no longer had much of an appetite for skiing itself. That's largely an age/ fragility/ confidence thing. I took a while to come to terms with it. The good news for some recipients of this email is that I now need to dispose of the remaining stocks of the WTS guides. They are now for sale on the Guide Editors site for not much more than the print cost – £1.99 a copy. The charges for post and packing make this offer less of a bargain, I know, but they are inescapable. My warehouse would tell you that the charges reflect their costs – that they pay their staff a decent wage and don't make unreasonable demands on them – but that may not be the whole story. If you don't have the full set of three guides, you really should. If you have chums or rellies who lack them, now's the time to put that right with a Christmas gift. Here's the link to our online shop. Don't delay – I'll give you a few days to pick up the copies you need, before launching a social media campaign to clear the rest. And when they're gone, they're gone. Whether you do or you don't want to buy, if you are active on social media it would be really helpful if you could find the time to spread the word about this offer – quoting the shop address www.editors.co.uk/shop. Thanks. Why not sell the business? I hear you say. The short answer is that I would expect it to be hard work. Mr Watts and I invested a lot of effort in trying and failing to sell the original Where to Ski and Snowboard property a decade ago, and I don't see the current Where to Ski property being any easier. Of course, if anyone out there fancies themselves as a writer/ editor/ publisher, and likes the idea of combining business with pleasure, I'd be delighted to hear from you. No reasonable offer refused. I'm not putting my feet up. I am working on an exciting new product about the wonderful South West Coast Path for publication next spring, which may lead to others. When I've worked out how to do it, I'll send out another bulletin that will allow you to register interest in that publication. Thank you for your support, in whatever form, over whatever period. (There are people on this list who have been with us since the start.) I hope you have found the books Watts and I have produced over the last 40-odd years useful and enjoyable. Despite all those lost summers, we really enjoyed producing them. With best wishes – enjoy the coming season, and all the others ahead. Chris Gill, editor, Where to Ski chris.g@wheretoski.co.uk ​