How to be a Travel Writer

by Don George

  While there are arguments to be made about how this kind of marketing affects the trustworthiness of information in general – hello, post-truth world! – bloggers are not journalists and the wheels of the internet are greased with this kind of arrangement.

  As a blogger, you need to be sure you maintain your integrity by being honest in what you report about your travel experiences no matter how you come by them, and upfront with your audience about how you travel. Remember, you primary value is the trust that your readers place in you – don’t do anything to damage it.

  • Tell the company in question that you will be writing the truth about your experience.

  • Make it clear on any posts associated with the trip that it was sponsored, and by which company or organization.

  • Don’t accept trips that don’t fit with your niche.

  • Never accept any form of payment for positive tweets, posts or other coverage.

  Syndication in the UK

  It is normal for a freelance writer to offer an article to a UK newspaper with First British Serial Rights; this is also true for UK magazine submissions. This means that the writer is giving the publication the right to be first to publish their article in the UK. In theory this allows the writer to resell the piece later to someone else, either in the UK or abroad, in which case they might be selling Second British Serial Rights or Second EU Serial Rights.

  In reality, however, if a newspaper or magazine publishes your piece, it will usually expect to retain syndication rights to your article for a specified period. Some publications will ask writers to sign a contract; others will either verbally, or merely on their website, say that you are bound by their conditions of acceptance. This means that they reserve the right to sell your article on to other publications in Britain or overseas and keep a percentage of the fee (typically 50 per cent). The prospect of earning more cash for no extra work in this way sounds attractive – but the arrangement is unlikely to be as lucrative as it sounds. Very often your article isn’t resold by the original publication, and you are powerless to sell it yourself.

  It is very rare for writers to resell their own travel articles in the UK. This is not only because of the rights situation described above but also for the following reasons:

  • Most UK newspapers and magazines are national, and so their readership overlaps. You would not be able to sell a travel piece to more than one of them.

  • Since most freelance travel writers tailor an article for a specific slot in a specific publication and its readership, the article simply wouldn’t be appropriate for another newspaper, magazine or journal.

  • In reality it is only regional newspapers that might be interested in a syndicated travel piece. However, this will only be worth your while in terms of payment if you have a regular, non-regionally focused column to sell. Reselling individual pieces just won’t be worth the time it takes to do so. Moreover, there’d be few takers because international travel isn’t usually a topic of interest to a regional newspaper, and local travel would be written by a staffer.

  Writing books

  Travel guidebooks

  The two fundamental truths about writing for guidebooks seem contradictory. The first is that the pay you’ll receive as a guidebook author, especially when you’re starting out, will be dauntingly and even depressingly incommensurate with the energies and hours you put into your work. The second truth is that every year a number of people make a decent living as full-time guidebook writers. The bridge between these two seemingly conflicting truths is built out of experience. The more you hone your craft as a guidebook researcher and writer, the higher the fees you’ll receive and the more efficient you’ll become. At some point, the ascending graph-line of your payments received will intersect the descending line of your hours expended – and you’ll be making money! Of course, that’s assuming you persevere through the early years of little pay for lots of work.

  What qualities do you need to be a good guidebook writer? First of all, you have to love to travel and, in particular, you should have a passion for exhaustive exploration of the logistical minutiae of travel – where to stay, where (and what) to eat, how to get there, what to see and do. You should be obsessed with accuracy. And you should be able to write with poetic precision and concision.

  Guidebook writing is probably the most demanding branch of the travel writing tree. To make it work, you have to investigate multiple attractions, restaurants and hotels every day. You have to juggle your budget, your assignment and your deadline – making sure that you cover everything you need to cover as economically as possible (so that you maximize your earnings) but also as efficiently as possible (so that you have enough time to write up all your findings).

  But if you’re fascinated with a particular country and culture – or even better, if you’re already living in a fascinating country and culture – guidebook writing can be just the ticket for you.

  Writing for brochures and newsletters

  Travel-related print materials are not restricted to newspapers, magazines and books. Virtually every travel-related company promotes its products in some kind of printed format. Travel agencies and tour operators, airlines and cruise lines, global hotel chains and family-run guesthouses, urban museums and rural galleries, government tourism organizations and regional visitor information offices – all of these organizations produce brochures, catalogues and newsletters, and all of these products need at least one writer and/or editor. It may not be The Sunday Times or Travel + Leisure, but it’s an excellent way to put baguettes and Brie on the table while you’re waiting for the big editors to discover you.

  You may want to work as a freelancer with one of these companies to maximize your free time and flexibility, or try for a staff job to give yourself some financial stability and security. If you discover a travel company of any kind that intrigues you, contact them and see if they need anyone with your experience and abilities. Whatever your professional goal, stay alive to the possibilities all around you, and think outside the box.

  Getting started

  The vast majority of work for guidebook writers involves updating already existing guides. A much slimmer slice of the guidebook pie is devoted to writing first editions – guides to an area or on a theme that the publisher hasn’t covered before.

  Whichever kind of work you’re hoping for, the way to get started is the same as when writing for print and the web: study the markets. In this case, that means study all the different guidebook publishers’ products closely. What areas do they cover? What audiences are they targeting? Examine where the publications intersect your passions. Do you hike in the Himalayas every year? See if there’s a Himalayan hiking guide that you can update, or a publisher who has covered hiking in Europe but hasn’t yet expanded to Asia.

  Have you honed the fine art of surviving on 5 rupees a day? Perhaps there’s a bare-bones guidebook line perfectly synched to your practice.

  When you’ve determined the subject you want to pitch and the publisher you want to pitch it to, do further research to discover how that publisher works with first-time contributors. Follow their guidelines, and briefly but evocatively describe your writing and travel background, being sure to cover any particularly relevant experience and expertise you have. The unasked question you need to answer: what can you (the writer) bring to me (the publisher) that I don’t already have? The answer may be your deep personal knowledge, your fresh perspective, your extraordinary writing skills or some combination of all these. Your job is to show the publisher that you understand their books intimately and that you can provide exactly what they need.

  If you’re pitching an entirely new idea, you’ll need to sell the publisher on the value of the idea itself as well as your unique ability to realize it. In this case, you can bolster your argument with figures on the number of visitors to the area you propose to cover, or the growing popularity of the theme you’re presenting. You need to make the business case that the book is wor
th publishing, that a sufficient audience exists to make the publication profitable.

  What happens next? You may receive a rejection – in which case, move on to the next publisher and the next project. You may not receive any reply at all; in this case, after a couple of months, contact the publisher to inquire about the status of your application, noting the date of your original inquiry. If you still don’t hear from them, it’s time to move on.

  A happier scenario is that you receive a response asking for more detailed information. In the case of Lonely Planet, you’ll be asked to create a writing sample that shows your ability to write lively prose in the Lonely Planet style, and to pass a mapping test. If your submissions are accepted, you’ll be made part of Lonely Planet’s writer pool, from which virtually all the company’s guidebook contributors are drawn. Typically, your first assignment will be small – covering a section of a city for a city guide, for example, or a second-tier city for a regional guide. If that’s successful, you’ll be given a larger assignment – more areas of the city you originally covered, or a major city for that regional guide. If all goes well with this assignment, you’ll be given more responsibility with your next assignment, and in this way both your area of coverage and your remuneration will grow. Most other major guidebook publishers work in this same way.

  Some smaller, more specialized publishers offer greater opportunities for beginning contributors. Depending on your experience and expertise, you may be asked to cover an entire city or region. The downside is that because sales tend to be lower with smaller publishers, your remuneration will probably be lower as well. As always, you must try to balance the opportunity for valuable experience with financial reality.

  Whether you’re employed by large or smaller publishers, your work should be based on an assignment or commission that clearly details the scope and content (including tone, style, audience and number of words) of your coverage, the deadline, and the pay and payment schedule. It is absolutely essential that you have a contract before you begin your work (unless you have so much money that you don’t mind spending a few months and thousands of dollars researching a destination with no firm commitment that your efforts will be published).

  Your assignment – or ‘brief’, as it’s often called – is your roadmap. Make sure that you cover all the content requested, write it up in the required style, and submit it on time and to the commissioned word count. After this, you’ll likely work through a number of drafts with your editor; the editor’s goal is to make the book as lively and useful as possible, but also to make sure it conforms to the company’s or the series’ style. Making this as smooth a process as possible will help ensure that you continue to move toward the front of the author pool.

  What the experts say: Paul Clammer

  Since 2003, Paul Clammer has written nearly 30 Lonely Planet guides, as well as guidebooks to Haiti and Sudan for Bradt Travel Guides. In a previous life he may have been a molecular biologist. He currently divides his time between England and Morocco. Find him online at www.paulclammer.com or on Twitter as @paulclammer.

  I’d travelled in Taliban-era Afghanistan and written a website about it. After their ouster I added more travel information, so it evolved into a guide. In 2003, Lonely Planet was looking to send an author to Afghanistan for the first time since the 1970s, saw my site, and got in touch.

  Develop an area of expertise, so you can really sell your skill set to editors. My foot in the door was Afghanistan, but it could equally be something like trekking or regional food. You need something on your résumé to help you stand out against the competition.

  As a guidebook writer you’re primarily an information provider, often writing in a very structured way – first the introductions, then the sights, then the hotel listings and so on.

  It doesn’t matter how beautiful your prose is, no reader will forgive you if you put the train station on the opposite side of town. Everything else flows from the accuracy of those facts that you collect in the field.

  It’s like being a journalist – you’re going out there to get the story, and that’s fantastic fun. And of course, all authors get a big kick out of seeing people reading their books. What’s not to love about that?

  No one gets into travel writing to make it rich. A lot depends on the type of guide and publisher. If your fees cover the research costs on top of actual income, fantastic. In some cases you can defray costs by arranging freebies, but that’s dependent on the publisher – some encourage it, for others it’s forbidden.

  Work–life balance takes on a new meaning when you’re away for months on the road. Throw in the financial uncertainty of never knowing where your money is coming from in a few months’ time, and it’s not always a bed of roses.

  It’s rewarding in so many ways, but it’s not a job that really has a career ladder. You’re always hustling, so if you get in, make sure you enjoy it. Oh, and never try to buy a house when you’re in the middle of a research trip in the Indian Himalaya.

  Travel literature

  If you want to publish a book-length work of travel literature, in the vein of Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux, there are two possible scenarios to follow: you can write the entire manuscript and send it to an agent or publisher, or you can pitch the idea for your book to an agent or publisher and, if you’re among the lucky few with just the right proposal, get a publishing house on board from the start. (The third option that has opened up in recent years is that of self-publishing; see here.)

  The first option is full of uncertainties: you don’t know if a publisher (approached directly or through an agent) will be interested in what you’ve written and you’ll have to fund all the research and writing yourself. Pitching an idea seems a better choice, but it is extremely rare for a writer, especially a beginning writer, to pitch a book idea directly to a publisher and have it accepted. The most common – and desirable – path is to pitch your book idea to an agent, who will then aim to rouse the interest of a publisher.

  A proposal for a book-length travel narrative is a much more ambitious package than a simple proposal letter to a newspaper or magazine. You will need to send a short covering letter and include a two- to three-page synopsis summarizing your book’s themes and structure, a table of contents, a sample chapter or two (usually of around 5000 words) and a little biographical information. Your covering letter will need to establish why you believe your topic and perspective are compelling, why they should publish your book, and why you think your book will sell.

  An analysis of any recently published books on a similar theme or covering a similar area is also essential, as is your own best indication of the potential audience for your book. You’ll also need to send an SASE if you want to have your work returned. Your whole package should look as professional as possible.

  Should you self-publish?

  You’ve written a travel memoir that you’re convinced is a potential bestseller, but you can’t find a publisher for it. Or maybe you’d just prefer to go it alone. Happily, there are now alterative ways you can relatively easily get your words into the impatiently waiting hands of your audience.

  With the rise of ebooks (which account for around 30 per cent of all book sales in the USA) and Amazon, non-traditional authors can self-publish, self-market and self-distribute their books without spilling a drop of ink. And for anyone who doubts that it can work, there’s an easy four-word answer: Fifty Shades of Grey.

  So what do you need to consider before launching your own (perhaps less raunchy) travel blockbuster?

  When you use a publishing service like Kindle Direct Publishing for Amazon, it’s not like publishing with a traditional publisher. They take no responsibility for the quality of your work or for trying to achieve sales, but nor do they claim any rights to it. You’re free to sell your work to another publisher without any obligation to the service you’ve used.

  You don’t need much technical know-how. Most services offer automated tools and free tutorials to get you
through the process. And there are many companies offering layout, cover design and other services.

  You’re free to price your book as you wish, though in the case of Amazon (which accounts for around 70 per cent of ebook sales in the USA), your royalties will be 70 per cent of the list price only if the book is priced between $2.99 and $7.99.

  Be prepared to become a one-person marketing machine. There’s no high-powered marketing team doing the job for you. Self-published authors estimate they spend 90 per cent of their time promoting their books and 10 per cent writing them.

  If you become a travel blogger, you can create a ready-made audience for your book – bypass Amazon, and take your product directly to your own market. Bloggers like Nomadic Matt (www.nomadicmatt.com/books) and ProBlogger (www.problogger.net/learn/) have successfully created their own book distribution networks online.

  There are plenty of resources online to help you on the path to being a self-published author. Take a look at www.thecreativepenn.com for a step-by-step guide.

  An agent’s view: Lizzy Kremer

  Lizzy Kremer is Head of the Books Department at David Higham Associates in London, British Book Industry Awards 2016 Agent of the Year, and Vice-President of the Association of Authors’ Agents. Lizzy blogs at publishingforhumans.postagon.com and tweets at @lizzykremer.

  Publishers usually prefer to commission agented authors because they know that agents provide invaluable advice and support to writers.