As a high school senior trying to pick a college eight years ago, Luke Skurman needed to know more. "There just wasn't enough good, honest information for me to feel confident about where I was going to spend the next four years of my life. I didn't really know whom to talk to. The whole process felt like a giant crapshoot." He eventually enrolled at Carnegie Mellon, but the issue continued to rankle into his junior year, when a class project with fellow business major Joey Rahimi led to a prospectus for a company that would collate information from students at colleges across the country and publish it online.

Their online aspirations morphed to print, but the basic premise for the guides stayed the same—instead of cramming in information about hundreds of colleges, each book would deliver an in-depth profile of a single school. And they would be based on information provided by editors and writers recruited from campus newspapers, not by outsiders.

In 2002, with freshly minted bachelor's degrees, Skurman and Rahimi took their business plan and, with the help of two other former classmates, founded College Prowler in Pittsburgh. With 210 titles in print so far, the company reached a milestone this spring, receiving its first national order from Barnes & Noble. College Prowler already does business with Follett and B&N College, and discussions are under way with Borders, Books-A-Million and Hastings, according to Chris Mason, director of product development.

College Prowler's "by students, for students" approach exemplifies a trend in college guidebooks, as publishers more and more look to undergrads for first-hand accounts of campus life. "One of the reasons Zagat guides are so popular is that people want to read about other people's experiences at restaurants," says Tom Russell, publisher of the Princeton Review. "It's no different in this category. Students want to hear from other students." To that end, the Review surveys more than 110,000 students every year about everything from dorm life to campus diversity issues for guides like Best 361 Colleges (Aug.).

Other publishers give students even more creative input. The first edition of 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays (St. Martin's) was produced by reporters and editors at the school paper, the Harvard Crimson, back in 1999; it's joined this year by How They Got into Harvard (Sept.), which looks past the essay to show how 50 Harvard students packaged their academics, extracurriculars and personal backgrounds into a successful application. This summer, recent Wesleyan graduates Jordan Goldman and Colleen Buyers publish the first edition of Students' Guide to Colleges: The Definitive Guide to America's Top 100 Schools (Penguin, Aug.), in which detailed survey responses from three current students anchor the chapters on each of the selected schools. Wesleyan was also the breeding ground for Students Helping Students, which has taken advantage of a distribution deal with Prentice Hall Press to relaunch formerly self-published titles such as Fishing for a Major: What You Need to Know Before You Declare and Tackling the College Paper: Tips on Getting It Done—and Getting the A (both Aug.).

As these last two titles show, college guide publishers don't stop paying attention to students after they've made their enrollment choices. Harlan Cohen's The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run into in College is one of this year's bestsellers in the category. Published by Sourcebooks in March, by the end of May it was selling more than 1,200 copies a week. Peter Lynch, an editor at Sourcebooks, attributes the success in part to Cohen's experience writing "Help Me, Harlan!" (a nationally syndicated teen advice column). "Writing for high school students is much more difficult than it can seem at first," Lynch says, "but Harlan had that voice down pat." Speaking engagements at colleges and high schools also raised his visibility among guidance counselors and orientation directors, who can wield significant influence over what books students buy.

In determining which proposals for new guides to accept, Lynch reports, he asks himself, "Does this book bring something unique to the category that has either not been done or not been done well?" Gen Tanabe, the codirector of SuperCollege, applies a similar approach. He founded the company with his wife, Kelly, after they graduated from Harvard in the 1990s to self-publish their handbooks on dealing with admissions and scholarships, but came to believe that "our industry has gotten into a rut. We've focused on elite schools and elite students," he explains, "but we're neglecting a much larger percentage of students who need the same kind of guidance." In order to reach that audience, SuperCollege will publish two new titles this September, America's Best Colleges for B Students and Creative Colleges: A Guide for Student Actors, Artists, Dancers, Musicians and Writers.

The larger publishers who traditionally dominated the college guide market eye College Prowler's rise warily. "Students can use those books for information about the two or three schools they're really interested in," says Del Franz, the editor-in-chief at Thomson Peterson's, "but they'll still need to search to narrow their list down to the schools they want to focus on." Still, he concedes, the 3,000-page bulk of their flagship title, Peterson's Four-Year Colleges, can be intimidating. "It's the most comprehensive book, but it's really become hard to use," he says. "It's difficult to carry around, and it's difficult to find the information you need and refer back to it." The company hopes it has found a solution in Peterson's College Admissions Planner, which will be introduced in March 2006. It's not another book, but a three-ring binder packaged with 200 pages of basic information about college admissions, which students and their families can then supplement with their own notes and application forms or school profiles printed off the Peterson's Web site.

Other publishers are also integrating a Web presence into their traditional product lines. "We have to consider the Internet as a major competitor to our book publishing program," Princeton Review's Russell concedes. "Before publishing any book, we have to consider, what is this book going to offer students that they can't get for free online?" But for all the ease of electronic access, the professor who told the College Prowler founders they needed to sell a solid product was right. "So much material is online now that I would have anticipated a greater drop-off than I've actually seen," says Gloria Abramoff, co-owner of the Tatnuck Bookstore in Worcester, Mass. "But people still like to have that encyclopedia they can leaf through and compare one college to another, page by page."

That penchant for comparison shopping might appear to work against College Prowler's core mission to focus on one school at a time, but any disadvantage is offset by the unexpected acquisition of a strong secondary audience. Originally intended to help high schoolers decide where to apply, the guides are now doubling as unofficial freshman orientation handbooks. "Our first impression was that this was too rudimentary for our campus, that it was really intended for a younger audience," says Kathy Anderson, the trade book buyer for the Stanford Bookstore. But after the first order of CP's Stanford title went on the shelves three months ago, the store has been selling an average of five copies a week and expects to do even better when new students arrive soon. The Harvard Book Store, an independent bookstore located across the street from the Ivy League campus, also began stocking College Prowler titles earlier this year. Not only has the guidebook for Harvard sold "quite nicely," reports store manager Carol Horne, but guides to other Boston-area schools have also sold "reasonably well."

"We didn't expect that to happen," says College Prowler's Rahimi, but now the company eagerly pursues relationships with campus bookstores. He estimates that CP guides can be found at 80% of the schools they cover, and he's working on closing the gap, even as the company plans to roll out even more guidebooks, as well as regional compendiums that will offer condensed profiles of colleges in the South, California and New England. Coming next month is another compendium, Untangling the Ivy League. "We're always talking to guidance counselors and high school students and parents, constantly adding the schools they want," says CEO Skurman. "The last two years have been spent building our foundation, making sure we had the basis for a solid company. We're feeling pretty good about where we're at right now. This is the year we're starting to feel like we're making a pretty big dent."



Test Prep Preps for Change Last year, a score of 1600 on the SAT, heretofore a sign of extreme braininess, was nothing special, thanks to the addition of an essay section to the standard math and verbal parts. Now, a score of 2400 is the goal for the Harvard-bound. The big test for publishers was to adapt to the new format. The College Board—which develops the test—may have had an insider's advantage when it came to revising its Official SAT Study Guide. Other publishers in this category, however, remained competitive during the test's transformation and expect to continue to do so. "It was an exciting year," says Thomson Peterson's editor-in-chief, Del Franz. "Until the last minute, we weren't sure how many questions would be in each section, what the time requirements would be for each part of the test and exactly what order they would be offered in." Barbara Gilson, the publisher of McGraw-Hill's Test Prep division, notes, "By the time the test was issued, publishers who had issued their new guides last fall saw the order and the structure was changed, so we're already bringing out a second edition of McGraw-Hill's SAT I to conform completely to the new tests."
As the SAT, long the nation's dominant college admissions test, faces greater competition, publishers race to keep up. During the 2003—2004 academic year, 1.2 million students took an alternate test, the ACT; only 200,000 more registered for the SAT. But Mark Miele, the editorial director of Barron's, warns it would be a mistake to count the SAT out. "Students usually don't just take one or the other," he says. "Most students who take the ACT are also going to take the SAT." The ACT historically has enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Midwest and South, but as the number of accredited four-year colleges accepting ACT scores grows, the test is making inroads on both coasts.
That's one of the reasons Barron's continues to promote books for both tests with equal vigor throughout the country, says marketing director Lonny Stein. Other publishers, though, acknowledge the need to adjust their plans to accommodate the test-taking patterns. "We've long trained and encouraged booksellers to base their promotions and merchandising not only on seasonality but on regionality," says Princeton Review publisher Tom Russell, "but that is changing very quickly this year. We're trying to get some of the stores in the Northeast to stock ACT guides like they never have before." Thomson Peterson's, however, wields a special advantage in this category, contracting with ACT administrators to publish The Real ACT Prep Guide.
As each publisher scrambles to reassert its books as the go-to guides for revised or newly popular exams, fundamental principles continue to apply. "The book covers have to do a lot," Maureen McMahon, the publisher of Kaplan's, notes. "Titles in the test prep section are probably read more closely than those in any other part of the store." The Princeton Review revamped all its covers this year for what Russell describes as a "more dynamic and energetic" look, featuring students deep in concentration. But while the cover is "your foot in the door," he cautions that consumers still inspect the materials inside closely before making their final decisions. "It's the guts that sell the book at the end of the day."