Category — The easy Guide

My co-author Josh has a post here on how to get 30% off the best reviewed Disney World guide book!

Josh (of easyWDW.com) and I will be doing a meet-up, book signing, and giveaway at the Magic Kingdom tomorrow at the Tomorrowland Terrace at 5.30p.

The  location is circled in red on the map:

This time allows us to meet both those in the park for a regular day and also those who have come early for the first Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party later that evening.

We’ll sign any edition of the Disney World guide book we co-author, The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit–oh, honestly, we’ll sign anything. Plus we’ll have a few copies of The easy Guide to give away!!

The easy Guide is now also available in PDF format!

Come on by!

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Pinterest!!

As you may know, along with Josh Humphrey of easyWDW.com I co-author the best-reviewed Disney World guide book series ever published, The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit.

The 2016 edition of The easy Guide has been available as a paperback and a Kindle book for a few weeks now, and I’m delighted to announce that for the first time The easy Guide is available in PDF format!

WHY WOULD YOU EVEN WANT A PDF?

For guide books, I’m a real fan of printed books. It’s easier to flip back and forth to make comparisons; you can easily scribble notes to yourself on page or on the inside covers; and the images are easy to read. So for most, a copy of our paperback is going to be the best choice.

The main issues with a paperback are portability and access, and that’s why we’ve always made The easy Guide available as a Kindle Book as well. If you have one of Amazon’s apps, you can read a Kindle book on almost any device with a screen. Kindle books are also by tradition the least expensive way to get a book.

However, if you like to keep some material handy—like the step-by-step park touring plans in Chapter 6 of The easy Guide–you can’t print anything from a Kindle book. Images don’t come across as well in Kindles, and you can’t resize images (like our park maps and charts of the best times to go) to be able to see more of their details in Kindles or Kindle Fires.

Enter the PDF, which, while not perfect, combines a lot of the best of the above while avoiding most of their negatives.

• PDFs are the most ubiquitously readable document format in computing, so you can read our or refer to our book from almost any device with a screen, usually without having to take the extra step of downloading an app or a reader.
• You can zoom the view on a PDF, so you can see our images at any level of detail you wish to.
• And probably most handy, you can print anything from a PDF you want—from the entire book to a page or anything in between.

(Above is a screenshot of a zoomed page from our PDF edition.)

Do you mostly want to see our book on your devices, but also want to print the Disney World restaurant reviews in Chapter 6 to scribble all over them, or print the park touring plans in Chapter 5 to stick in your back pocket, or print the To-Do Lists, or FastPass+ step by step guides, in Chapter 8 so you can cross each step off when you’ve completed it? A PDF lets you do all that.

To get a copy of the PDF edition of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, click here!

(And to join our new affiliate program, see this.)

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Pinterest!!

Josh and I have set up a mechanism whereby all the people who so kindly share news about The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit can actually get a little pixie dust if anyone buys the paperback, Kindle edition, or PDF edition via specialized links that this page tells you how to set up.

THE KINDLE OR PAPERBACK EDITIONS

If you don’t already have an Amazon Associates account, set one up and use it to create links to the paperback and Kindle editions of The easy Guide.  It’s free, and requires only that you have an Amazon account.

The fee that Amazon pays you per sale will vary, but something like a dollar for each paperback or seventy cents for each Kindle edition is typical.

More on Amazon Associates accounts begins here.

THE PDF EDITION

To get credit for sales from you of our brand-new PDF edition (because we don’t share with Amazon, you get $4.99 per PDF sold via your links) you have to do a couple of things:

1. Set up a Gumroad account, if you don’t already have one (most don’t), and confirm it by clicking the link Gumroad will send you
2. After you’ve confirmed your email, then email me the email address that you used for your Gumroad account at davidhobartyfv@gmail.com
3. I will then use that email address to add you as an affiliate, and then Gumroad will email you the link to use to get credit for your sales

Once you are in, Gumroad is very easy to use, but the first minute or too is a little odd, so I’m gonna take you through the steps with some screenshots below.

Step 1: Go to Gumroad.com. You’ll note in the first couple of steps that all the copy implies that you are the seller/creator, not an affiliate.  No worries–it’s just that there’s only one account type. Click “Start Selling” in the top menu bar to get started.

Step 2: A window will open inviting you to sign up.  Fill in the right side stuff and click “Create Account.”

Step 3: A Welcome page opens, and asks for more info–if you’ve done anything like this before, your country, and, at the bottom, “What are you working on”–another feature aimed more at authors/creators than affiliates.

Answer the first two queries, and for the third, click the star at the far right “Nothing yet.”

Step 4: The “Get Started” page will open.  Ignore it, and instead click on, at the top right “My Account,” and from the drop-down menu, click “Settings.”

Step 5:  The Settings page will open. On its menu click “Payout” (circled in red)

Step 6: A page asking for details about how to pay you will open. Fill it in!

Step 7: Gumroad will send you an email asking you to confirm your email address. Click the link in the email to confirm it

Step 8:  Send me the email address you used to open your Gumroad account, to davidhobartyfv@gmail.com

Step 9: I will add you as an affiliate, and then Gumroad will send you your own link to use.  The email will look like the above–be sure to use the first link!!! Sales that occur from this link will earn you $4.99 per copy!

RECAP OF THE AFFILIATE OPPORTUNITIES

So to recap:

1. Set up an Amazon Associates account if you don’t already have one, and get from it a link for The easy Guide in Kindle and paperback
2. Set up a Gumroad account, confirm it by clicking the link Gumroad will send you, then email me at davidhobartyfv@gmail.com the email address you used for the account
3. Gumroad will send you a link after I enter you in; use that link for your PDF edition link.

WANT SOME PICTURES?

None of these links will do anything for you if you don’t post them somewhere–on your blog, your website, your Facebook page, twitter, a Disney World forum, Trip Advisor, etc.  If you want to add a photo to your material, I’ve got some you can right-click and save below!

QUESTIONS??

If you have a question, probably others will be wondering about the same thing. Just use the comment form below!!

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Pinterest!!

Josh (of easyWDW.com) and I will be doing a meet-up, book signing, and giveaway at the Magic Kingdom on Sunday, November 8.

We’ll be at the Tomorrowland Terrace at 5.30p.  This location is circled in red on the map:

This time allows us to meet both those in the park for a regular day and also those who have come early for the first Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party later that evening.

We’ll sign any edition of the Disney World guide book we co-author, The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit–oh, honestly, we’ll sign anything. Plus we’ll have a few copies of The easy Guide to give away!!

Come on by–and no, I won’t mind that you are really there to meet Josh, or my wife, the lovely Amy Girl.  I’ve gotten used to that!!

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Pinterest!!

THE BEST-REVIEWED DISNEY WORLD GUIDE BOOK SERIES PUBLISHES 2016 EDITION

The 2016 edition of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, published by Theme Park Press, came out at the end of September, and we’ve already published a minor update—on Wednesday—incorporating changes like the increase in theme park parking fees to $20. (Details on the update are here.)

The latest entry in the best-reviewed Disney World guide book series ever (94% of its almost 200 reviews on Amazon have 5 stars; reviews of the 2014 edition are here, 2015 here, and 2016 here), the 2016 easy Guide is the most accurate and up-to-date Disney World guide book ever published. It’s also the shortest major guide book, has the largest print of any major guide book, and is, by far, the easiest one to use.

And it’s co-written by the world’s leading expert on touring the parks—my co-author, Josh Humphrey of easyWDW—and the world’s leading expert on the Disney World hotels—me.

Everything is updated for 2016—

• All new material on when to go, in Chapter 4
• Chapter 5 offers updated resort reviews—now including Shades of Green, the Swan and Dolphin, and the Four Seasons, plus more detail on camping at Fort Wilderness, and key info on renovations at the Polynesian and the Wilderness Lodge
• Chapter 6 has fully reconfigured material on how to tour the parks, based on updates to Josh’s famous Cheat Sheets, including previews of the new Star Wars Season of the Force and Star Wars Launch Bay at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the new Frozen Ever After and Frozen Meet and Greet at Epcot, and the new Rivers of Light evening show at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
• Chapter 7 includes updated dining material including reviews or previews of new or soon to open venues such as the Skipper Canteen in the Magic Kingdom and The BOATHOUSE in Disney Springs

Co-author Josh has an even more detailed overview here of just what you can expect to find in The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2016.

It’s available as a paperback and Kindle book on Amazon here. Those who buy the paperback version can also get a free version of the Kindle edition through Amazon’s MatchBook program.

WHY BUY A GUIDEBOOK AT ALL?

With tens of thousands of pages of Disney World websites, blogs, and community forums out there, perhaps you don’t really need a book, too.

But you deserve one.

First, the material out there for free is only as reliable as its authors. Most of these authors have much more limited Disney World experience than would at first seem—typically, the website writers at best have been on most of the rides, dined at some of the restaurants, and stayed at a few of the hotels. As a result, they either ignore vast sets of possible choices, or, even worse, just copy other people’s work about what they have not themselves experienced. Since the work they copy may also have been copied, this becomes like a game of telephone, where bad information propagates into really bad advice.

I’ll get more into this later, but there is no better guide in the world to all the parks than Josh, no better guide in the world to all the hotels than me, and no two people in the world that can bring you more complementary experience and sound judgment to all the other choices of a Disney World visit—when to go, where to eat, how old and tall your kids should be, how to set up and navigate My Disney Experience and FastPass+–than the two of us.

Fine, you say—just read our sites! But here’s the thing. A book is shorter. It’s better organized—a book has just one flow of topics, whereas a website, by definition, is a network of topics, and the findability of the next key bit of info on a website is partly a factor of luck and where you enter it. There’s nothing like being able to flip among a book’s pages to directly compare short, consistent, and highly relevant treatments of the attractions, the restaurants, and the hotels to help you make the choices you have to make.

I can’t really do better than what Josh said on this topic

“Overall, and if I do say so myself, “The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit” is essential reading for anybody planning a trip, whether you’ve read every word Dave and I have ever written or not. You can’t beat the organization, layout, and easily-consumable advice found in the book. Spend a few dollars on the book and save a lot of time, money, and frustration on your next Walt Disney World visit.”

WHY THIS GUIDEBOOK?

There a lot of reasons why our book is the best choice for first time visitors to Disney World—and, because of the completeness of its coverage and the expertise of its authors, for returning visitors too.

But first, let me highlight two other books that will in fact be better for some visitors:

• Military families should start with Steve Bell’s Walt Disney World for Military Families 2016, and
• Those who are staying outside of Disney World, and/or who are devoting substantial time to the non-Disney SeaWorld or Universal Orlando theme parks should use The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2016.

(Frankly you should buy these and our book too—getting several complementary guide books is still gonna cost less than 1% of your total visit costs…)

Everyone else should buy our book.

There’s a reason why Josh is now the most influential (and copied) Disney World writer out there…

…and there’s a reason why I’m in the acknowledgements of three major Disney World guidebooks.

(I should be in the acknowledgments of a fourth, based on emails from its co-author like this:

…but the co-authors of it don’t have seem to have enough room.)

Josh is in the parks multiple times a week, and is the best guide you can find today on how to manage a park visit—from when to go, to which park to visit each day, to how to arrange your visit over the course of the day.

Between us, Josh and I have dined in every Disney World dining venue that we write about, most many times.

No one has more deep and relevant experience with the Disney World hotels. By the end of 2015, I will have stayed in 120 different Disney World-owned hotel rooms—including

• 25 value resort rooms—including all the standard rooms and all four types of family suites
• 31 moderate rooms and cabins (including all the special variants like five person rooms, Royal Rooms, Pirate Rooms, etc.)
• 29 deluxe rooms
• 31 Disney Vacation Club Studios, One Bedroom Villas, and Two Bedroom Villas (no Grand Villas or Bungalows, sadly…but those aren’t relevant to most first-time visitors)
• 4 Campsites at Fort Wilderness (my soon-to-be four stays in the Cabins at Fort Wilderness are counted above among the moderates).

I’ve also stayed in dozens of non-Disney owned rooms at Shades of Green, the Swan and Dolphin, the Hilton, the Four Seasons, the Universal resorts and many others.

As a result, The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2016 is the most accurate, and the most up-to-date, Disney World guide book ever published.

Here’s an example of how it’s different.

One otherwise very good guide book is not as good as it should be on the Disney World resorts. For example, for Fort Wilderness, it asserts that “Tent/Pop-Up campsites provide water, electricity and cable TV…Full Hook-Up Campsites have all the previous amenities…Preferred Hook-Up campsites…add sewer connections.”

Well, above is a photo of a sewer connection at a Full Hook-Up campsite in Loop 1600. Sewer connections at Fort Wilderness are in all campsite types except Tent/Pop-Up sites—not just Preferred and Premium sites.

Later on the same page, the “other” guide book asserts that “access…from Fort Wilderness…to Epcot [is] by bus, with a transfer at the Transportation and Ticket Center to the Epcot monorail.”

This is another error—Epcot is served from Fort Wilderness by bus. The bus from Fort Wilderness to Epcot is above, and the bus from Epcot to Fort Wilderness is below.

Other resort hotel issues with this guidebook include missing 5 person Caribbean Beach rooms in its floor plans, and getting the description of Alligator Bayou rooms wrong on the same page (the trundle bed has been gone for a while, replaced with a Murphy bed).

Nobody’s perfect, and I’m sure we have errors too. But our book is based on personal, recent, deep, complete, direct experience with Disney World, and thus has many fewer errors.

Moreover, as news emerges we publish updated versions of the book every three months or so (see this for the first update), so that it continues to be the most accurate and up-to-date Disney World guidebook available.

Another distinctive advantage of The easy Guide is how short it is. By design, it is the shortest Disney World guide book available. We have 297 pages of material, which is almost two thirds fewer than some alternative guide books. We focus on including just the essential information for most visitors, and no more.

Our shorter guide book also has a bigger font size, also making it easier to read. In the image above, The easy Guide is on the left, and an alternative is to the right.

Finally, the overall structure of our book also makes it very easy to use. Chapter One is inspired by the home page of this website in that it gives all of our core recommendations in one easy to find spot. Follow the guidance in Chapter One, and add the touring plans and FastPass+ bookings advised in Chapter 6, and you will have a great visit!

The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2016 is available as a paperback and Kindle book on Amazon here.

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Pinterest!!