by Don George
Agencies often indicate that they don’t pay any attention to the manuscripts that are sent to them on an unsolicited basis, but my experience is that good writing stands out a mile and will be read.
Make sure your submissions are well presented, professional (no long chatty letters) and always enclose a two- to three-page book outline, the first few chapters and a self-addressed envelope. Work hard at getting yourself published in other ways. If you’ve had articles printed in papers, magazines or on websites, enclose those with your manuscript.
Take care when choosing an agent. Trust your instincts. Go with the one who seems passionate about your writing. Make sure the agency has a good reputation within the industry by reading up on them in the various writers’ handbooks available.
If you have written something wonderful, the power is in your hands. I take on new clients when two things fall into place – when I love their writing and when I think I can sell the ideas they have. Apart from that I just have to get a sense we would work well together.
A good agent will work with you on your book proposal or manuscript prior to making submissions if she feels it could benefit from some editorial attention. Then she will draw up a list of editors she believes will enjoy your work and will want to publish you. Hopefully she will communicate with you effectively – letting you know who she is sending your work to, why she has chosen those people and what you can expect to happen next. She will encourage swift responses from the publishers and perhaps arrange for you to meet them, so that you have an opportunity to sell yourself in person and in order for you to gain a better understanding of the publishing team you might be working with.
She will negotiate the best possible deal for you. That deal might be the result of an auction between editors competing to become your publisher. Or it might simply be a nice deal with the one editor or publishing house who you and your agent believe will do the best possible job of editing and promoting your work.
Your agent will negotiate your contract, using all the precedents available to her from the other contracts she has negotiated with your publisher in the past. An agent might retain certain rights, such as translation rights or newspaper serialization rights, in order to make those further deals herself. Once your contract has been signed, the agent will continue to act as a middle person on certain aspects of your relationship with your publishers, from encouraging their publicity or marketing efforts to chasing moneys due.
Don’t try too hard. Write from the heart. Don’t list everything you did and saw. Remember the book has to have a dramatic arc just as a novel does. Once you think you have finished the book, go back to the start and review the first few chapters. Writers often ‘write their way in’ to a book, using the first few chapters to find their feet.
Books that offer a personal journey as well as a physical one have great appeal. When I pick up a book I want to be moved by it, I want it to change my life. I don’t see why I should lower these expectations, even if sometimes it is enough to be entertained. I want to find out about a place but also something about life at the same time.
Getting an agent
Only a very few publishers will consider book proposals and unsolicited manuscripts sent directly from an author. Most book publishers, particularly the larger ones, will only deal with an agent.
Initially, if an agent likes your book and agrees to represent you, they may work with you to strengthen your book editorially, identifying any narrative weaknesses or suggesting ways to smooth out rough spots in your story and prose. Once your manuscript is finished, your agent will target appropriate publishers. Agents know what interests different publishing houses, and also what different editors within those houses are hoping to find, since they develop relationships with editors over time. Rather than blindly sending your proposal into the vast editorial slush pile, an agent will send your book directly to the person who is most likely to be receptive to it.
If a publisher is interested in publishing your book, your agent’s next task is to represent you and make sure the publisher’s contractual terms are as fair and favorable as possible. If your book attracts interest among multiple publishers, your agent will oversee an auction, with a number of publishers bidding for the right to publish your work. They will also advise you as to which publisher is likely to promote your book the most robustly and generally treat you well. As any published writer knows, getting your book published is only half the battle. If the publisher doesn’t allocate any resources to promote it, your beloved tome can quickly sink into literary oblivion.
An important part of negotiating your contractual terms concerns the split of foreign-language publication or screen and other media rights. If you’re lucky enough to attract the attention of a film production company, for example, an agent will help navigate you through the tricky waters of rights and fees negotiations.
If you do enter into an agreement with an agent, you will sign a contract. The agent will agree to represent you and your work and you will agree not to seek representation with any other agent and to pay the agent a commission (anything up to 15 per cent) if they find a publisher for your work. Usually, the contract will also spell out circumstances under which one or both parties may terminate the agreement and may include the time period of the mutual commitment.
Travel literature payments work on the royalty model. If your proposal is accepted by a publisher, they should pay you an advance, which will be deducted from your subsequent royalties. The advance will go some way toward keeping you financially afloat while you’re working on your book, but as discussed earlier, this might not amount to much: roughly up to £10,000 in the UK, $15,000 in the USA or AU$20,000 in Australia. For listings of publishers who produce travel literature, see chapter 7.
If your book is accepted by a publisher, either as a completed manuscript or as a substantially fleshed-out proposal, your authorial job from that point on is to give the company what they want – just as with a commissioned magazine article, only on a bigger scale. Your agent will stay in touch with you to monitor your progress, but in effect, once the contract is signed, they will hand you and your book over to the publisher’s commissioning editor. This editor is your bridge to the publishing house, the internal champion for your work, as well as the person charged with making sure you deliver a publishable and marketable manuscript on time. Deal with your editor judiciously. Fight for what you believe in, but be as professional and easy to deal with as possible. In the long run, you both share the same goal of bringing out the best – and most successful – book possible.
Writer’s tip: Do you need an agent?
Or do you have the skills and knowledge to do all of this yourself? The answer is up to you, of course, but you will most likely save yourself a great deal of hassle and heartache if you can find a sympathetic and enthusiastic agent.
Publishing in travel anthologies
Another print outlet that deserves mention is travel anthologies, compilations of a mix of previously published and original stories by a variety of writers. San Francisco–based Travelers’ Tales specializes in anthologies that are focused either geographically or thematically (women’s travel tales, food, humor etc.). Seattle-based Seal Press publishes themed travel anthologies that feature women contributors. Lonely Planet also produces anthologies that draw on a wide range of contributors, from best-selling travel writers to never-before-published writers.
Most publishers of anthologies announce their upcoming projects on their websites, and post guidelines on the theme and length of the stories they require. While the monetary prospects are underwhelming, they do offer good publishing opportunities, especially for narrative pieces. It’s good practice to periodically check the websites of the aforementioned companies – and other websites dedicated to writing opportunities – for updated information on forthcoming anthologies.
How books are published
Depending upon their location and culture, publishing houses are apt to call their p
roduction processes and personnel by different names, but the following is a general overview of the book production process.
Once you have delivered your manuscript, meeting contractual obligations such as length, format and delivery date, your work will be assessed, usually by the commissioning editor or publisher. They will either return the manuscript for further work, discussing any problems in detail and setting a later delivery date, or they’ll accept it for publication. On acceptance, you will be assigned an editor, who in some situations will be the commissioning editor you’ve already been dealing with, and it is part of your contractual obligation to work cooperatively with them, responding to suggestions and criticisms in an open and understanding manner. As Bill Bryson has said, ‘Even the most experienced writers need an editor.’ Your book may be your baby, but the editor is the midwife, delivering it to your readers.
The editing process includes a structural edit, which reviews your book’s themes and narrative, chapter by chapter. The editor will work directly with you to fix any major editorial issues. Copy editing is sometimes handled by a different editor, who will ensure that all grammar, punctuation and spelling are consistent and correct.
Once the book has been edited, you will be sent a copy of the revised manuscript. This version will usually be submitted as draft ‘page proofs’, meaning that the book has been laid out by a designer: fonts and heading weights will have been imposed, and each page of the printout will contain a double-page spread (emulating the final printed book). Any major alterations, queries or problems should already have been discussed with you, and any remaining issues will be indicated for your attention in the edited text. At this point you will have a last chance to make corrections and changes, in consultation with your editor. Once this is done, the work will be proofread by a second editor.
You may be able to review the manuscript one more time at final proof stage, shortly before the book heads off to the printer, but any changes made at this stage are expensive and strictly limited. You should also be involved in the cover design process and be shown the back-cover text, summarizing your book for the reader – but do not expect that you will have final approval; that usually lies with the publisher.
In the digital age, there’s a world of possibility for budding writers. Anyone – no matter your level of experience or talent – can relatively easily knock together a web presence and get their words out there.
But of course, there’s more to starting your own travel blog than that. There are some technological hurdles to clear (although that just keeps getting easier and easier) but more importantly, and more difficult – what do you want to do, when you get there? What is your blog or website going to be, and who’s going to read it?
There are lots of things to consider before you start – from your subject matter to your domain name to what blogging platform you use to the question of whether you want to earn money from your blog. This chapter will give you an overview of what it takes to conjure a travel blog from thin air, and then what it takes to get it out there – read, followed, and maybe even profitable. It’s a broad overview of all the things you need to consider.
There’s a lot more to say – and luckily, there are plenty of veteran bloggers prepared to share their hard-won experience. See chapter 7 for a list of our favorite blogging resources.
Why do you want to blog?
Blogging has boomed in the last 10 years, and travel is one of the blogosphere’s most popular topics. Just type ‘travel blog’ into Google – you’ll get a number well into the millions, and that number will be bigger than the one we got when we did it yesterday. There are new travel blogs starting up every day.
It’s not surprising. The allure of finding a way to make money while traveling means that many, many people are prepared to give it a shot, even if it’s a long one. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try. But be under no illusions – when you start a travel blog, you are entering a market that’s beyond saturated.
It’s important that you’re honest with yourself about why you want to start a blog and what you want to get out of it, because that starting point is the basis on which you’ll make lots of decisions as you go. Think about which of the following categories you fall into:
1. I’m starting a blog to keep in touch with family and friends.
If that sounds like you, it makes things nice and simple. There are great, free options for building and hosting your site so you won’t have any expenses, you can get your site up and running quickly, and you can write about exactly what you please. Do note though, that most bloggers say this is how their blog started, even if it went on to become a super-popular, branded travel blog…
2. I want to be a freelance travel writer, and my blog will act as a portfolio to showcase my writing.
If this is you, you might want to invest some time and effort in a more professional-looking site, and spend some money on your own domain name. If your site will be primarily a portfolio site, you might want to look at other options too, like publishing your work on other online platforms (either paid or unpaid).
3. I want to travel the world and be paid for it.
If you want a travel blog that ultimately becomes your full-time job (or at least a source of some income), think about it that way from the start – as a business, and not just a blog. It will influence your decisions about platform, domain name and hosting, but more importantly, it means that you’ll have to be strategic before you start – about who your blog is for, and the kind of content you’ll need to create for it.
It also means you’ll need to develop a broader skillset beyond writing. Creating a successful blogging business means being entrepreneurial and multi-skilled – marketer, project manager, finance person, strategic lead… Are you ready for the challenge? Read on. Much of the information in this chapter is here to help you.
Finding your niche
In the old days (let’s say, 2009 – this is a fast-moving world!), when there weren’t hundreds of thousands of travel blogs around, it was enough to choose a broad subject area – family travel, for example, or adventure travel – and start a blog, and you could discover an audience who found that theme relatable. Over the years, many blogs have filled those broad niches to bursting point, meaning that the level of competition for readers is extremely high.
If, like Nomadic Matt (see here), you were there early, building an audience and creating a brand, now you’re at the top of the search results for ‘budget travel’. Because of the way Google search ranking works (we’ll cover this in more detail later, see here–here), if there are already many popular blogs with the same search terms as yours, it will be very difficult for your blog to be discovered by an audience who may absolutely love it – if only they could find it.
You can respond to this by narrowing your appeal to a more specific audience – you’ll appeal to fewer people, but they’ll be ones who want to read specifically what you’re writing about. Some bloggers narrow their niche further by going sub-niche. For example, you’ll now find blogs on luxury family travel, ecologically sustainable budget travel, adventure travel for women.
You might decide to focus on just one region or country, so you’re more likely to get results from people searching specifically for (for example) ‘budget travel Greece’. Maybe the ‘hook’ of your blog is its humor. Maybe its super-chic design will appeal to an audience with a high design aesthetic. Maybe it’s a particular, idiosyncratic story that you tell through your blog. The important thing is that you’ve thought about this and you have an idea of the audience you want to attract – so you can write the type of content that will appeal to them.
When you think you’ve come up with your niche, it’s a good idea to brainstorm topics for blog posts – if you can’t come up with 20 pretty easily, your niche may be too narrow.
A blogger’s view: Geraldine DeRuiter
Geraldine DeRuiter started her blog, The Everywhereist (www.everywhereist.com) in 2009. It made T
ime magazine’s list of the top 25 blogs of the year in 2011. Her first book, All Over the Place, was published in May 2017.
For the first few years of my site, I put up a post every day Monday to Friday (sometimes publishing more than once a day). That became how I distinguished myself – I was the lady who blogged every single day. And when you do that, you have the chance to test a lot of things out.
I started narrowing it down to what felt most natural and most comfortable to me stylistically (if something feels natural to the author, it will resonate better with an audience. People like authenticity).
Oddly, the more personal the content of the blog became, the more it resonated with people. I think we all inherently latch on to personal stories. We want to read about what people are passionate about. For me, that wasn’t exactly travel – but it was travel with my husband. Also, the acquisition and consumption of baked goods.
The big turning point was when I was listed on Time magazine’s Top 25 Blogs of the Year in 2011. Everything sort of changed overnight. My blog traffic increased 20-fold, and people were actually reading my work. At the time that the article came out, I’d been blogging nearly every weekday for two years. There were a lot of posts out there, and some of them were getting attention.
I was creating content as though I had an audience. And that’s one piece of advice I’d give bloggers – persistence is key. Keep writing. Write, even if no one is reading it. Write, even if it feels like you are screaming into the ether. Pretend that you have a dedicated audience, and one day you’ll find that you actually do.
I’m going to be brutally honest: it is incredibly difficult to monetize a blog in a way that will make you enough money to live on. You should blog because you enjoy writing. Not because you want to make money. I have a really healthy audience, but I’d have to inundate the site with ads in order to make money.
