Innovations in media: Yampa Yearnings

Longtime Steamboat Springs journalist Eugene Buchanan is a hustler, and that’s allowed him to freely follow his passions for decades.

Buchanan, a fellow employee at Steamboat Pilot & Today with me, is an experienced explorer, magazine editor and writer, and writer of a half-dozen books. 

His latest, “Yampa Yearnings: An Ode to One of the Last Wild Rivers in the West,” is a 412-page, self-published love letter to the Yampa River, which runs through Steamboat Springs on its way to Dinosaur National Monument near the Colorado-Utah border. 

The book, Buchanan writes, “heralds northwest Colorado’s Yampa River, the last remaining free-flowing tributary to the Colorado River Basin. From its headwaters a fly cast from the birthplace of the country’s wilderness movement to its confluence with the Green 250 miles later in Dinosaur National Monument, the Yampa River supports agriculture, municipalities, a word-class ski resort, industry, endangered fish, unique riparian zones, water rights, recreation and more. “

In addition to being a fun and informative read, the book highlights Buchanan’s entrepreneurial spirit. It’s self-published, and Buchanan has adopted this approach after working with publishers on his early books. He’s a good promoter, which helps word-of-mouth sales that earn self-publishes more money. 

But Buchanan has also tapped another revenue stream with “Yampa Yearnings” and 2019’s “Tales From a Mountain Town: Musings From Living 25 Years in the Colorado Rockies”: He sells sponsorships.  

Near the front of the book is one page of logos for six non-profit sponsors and a facing page of logos for 17 commercial sponsors. Smartly, each sponsor has relevance to the Yampa or the region. On eight pages at the back of the book, each of those sponsors is given more space to display mission statements and urls. By taking this approach, the “advertising” isn’t jarring but complementary

Each sponsor either provided cash or donated incentive items to support a related Kickstarter campaign. That Kickstarter campaign generated more than $10,000 from 100-plus backers. 

By taking these dual funding approaches, Buchanan has minimized the risk authors take when self-publishing their work.