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 Travel Writers' Resources 
The Truth About Travel Writing
Lan Sluder
| | Contact us at Writers@BanderasNews.com for information about joining the staff and freelance writers of the BanderasNews Team. |
You're on a beach in the South Pacific. The sand is like talcum powder under your toes. The water of the lagoon, ridiculously transparent, looks like the cover of Condé Nast Traveler. Rudolfo has just brought you an ice-cold something-and-tonic. In a moment you'll go back to your thatch cabin a for a siesta. Later, after dinner under the stars of the Southern Cross, you'll type up your day's notes on your color Thinkpad. If this isn't paradise, it's as close as you or Jimmy Buffett will ever get.
Best of all, it's free. Your air fare was comped by the airline, eager to have you write about their new PrimoFirst service. The hotel is picking up the tab for your room and meals, hopeful of getting a plug in your upcoming article. The island's tourism officials have wined and dined you, no less than your due as a - tah-dah! - Travel Writer.
That's the dream. The reality, of course, is different. Much different.
Travel writing, in fact, is one of the most competitive fields in all of journalism. The supply of travel writers and wannabes so outweighs demand that some publications have stopped accepting freelance submissions. The pay is absurdly low: Guidebook authors often end up making minimum wage, or worse. Slick airline magazines offer $50 or $100 for a short piece. Large daily newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune may pay only $200 for a lengthy feature article. The dollar-a-word goal that many serious freelancers strive for is a pipe dream in travel writing. About 10 to 15 cents a word (equivalent in today's dollar to less than the penny-a-word paid by the pulps in the 1930s) is much more common.
Easier it is to get a loan from your stingiest cousin than to get a free night at a resort or a comp meal at a restaurant. And less demeaning to ask for the loan. Which is just as well, because the most prestigious outlets for travel articles, such as Condé Nast Traveler and The New York Times travel section, won't take your article if you accept a single freebie.
It's so difficult to crack the travel market that one veteran travel writer, Harry Pariser, author of numerous guidebooks to the Caribbean and Central America, advises, "Don't bother. The market is oversaturated, and the stuff desired by the larger magazines and newspapers is largely pap." For those lucky enough to get assignments, expenses are seldom paid, and the actual workday of a travel writer is, more often than not, long and absorbed in mundane details, such as double-checking fax and telephone numbers (the leading complaint of travel guide readers is incorrect phone numbers) or writing detailed directions on how to get to an isolated beach long after the writer has forgotten where the beach was.
The glories of travel? How about this reality check from Kit Snedaker, formerly travel editor at the late Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and now a freelance travel and food writer:
"When I was green I took a press trip to Togo. We went up country in three days on a trip that normally took six. The local photog got sick with malaria and vomited out the front window of the bus as the wind blew this in the back. We arrived at government hotels too late to see anything, but the locals would still dance for us - in total darkness. All we could hear was the thump of their feet and the jingle of the bells on their feet. We weren't even sure where they were. Engines failed as the plane home went up the coast. We spent 24 hours on the floor of the Dakar airport, were put in a filthy hotel, fed, but charged for water. I never want to see or hear of Togo again."
Despite all the reasons not to bother with travel writing, chances are you'll try it anyway. After all, who wouldn't rather write about a wonderful little bistro in Paris than about the latest line of faucets for Bathroom World Today? If you're going to travel, why not try to cover at least part of the cost through freelancing? You may just be the next P.J. O'Rourke, Pico Iyer or Paul Theroux. Indubitably, there's a market out there for travel-related materials. Rand McNally claims its travel atlases are, after THE BIBLE, the world's best-selling books, moving some 10 million copies a year.
Here, to help you avoid mistakes and max your chances for success, are suggestions, tips and advice from travel writing pros and semi-pros on markets for travel, on how to break in, on winning strategies for making sales, and on helpful resources for the travel writer.
Paying Markets
The market for travel writing is, at once, shrinking and growing. It is shrinking, because one of the traditional ace markets for travel prose and pictures, the Sunday newspaper travel section, is buying less and less. The news hole for travel in newspapers is getting smaller, and more wire service and syndicated copy is available to newspaper travel editors at low cost. Why should the editor buy your piece on London, when she's got, at little or no incremental charge to her section's budget, a ready-to-go piece from AP or The New York Times, complete with maps, sidebars, and digitized color photos?
The travel market is growing, however, because of the number of new publications and publishing options. More travel guides are being published than ever before, and guides are becoming more segmented. Instead of a single regional guide, for example, publishers now are doing country-by-country guides, city guides, adventure guides, shopping guides, beach guides, and nature guides.
The revolution in personal computing and desktop publishing means that more writers are churning out self-published guides, Internet e-zines and electronic travel articles. The pay may not be much, and the quality sometimes may be slapdash, but there's more travel information being created today than ever before.
Here's how the markets for travel writing look today:
Newspapers: Although the space available for freelance travel articles in daily papers is shrinking, travel section editors still buy. The average metro travel section has about three destination stories, and perhaps 30 to 50 percent of travel features are freelance-written. For a major feature, expect to get anywhere from $50 (in small-city dailies) to around $500 (in The New York Times). The good news is that, with the exception of a few large papers with a national audience, including The Times and The Washington Post, newspapers expect exclusivity only in their local coverage areas. You can market the same story to newspapers all over the country. You'll have to provide photos to sell to most papers.
Guidebooks: If you're willing to work hard, doing a guidebook can be a good way to break in to travel writing. Never in history have there been more guides published or guides of higher quality. Paul Glassman, author of five pioneering guides to Central America who now lives in Montreal, points out: "If you can find a guidebook in the library from 20 years back, you'll find it woefully inadequate by today's standards - basic maps, a quick once-over on food, recommendations that you take a tour rather than giving instructions for doing it on your own."
Today's market, dominated by the Fodor's and Frommer's imprints but with dozens of small press titles, is saturated with city guides, and guides to heavily traveled countries such as France and England or to currently hot destinations such as Costa Rica and Thailand. Country guides to less well known destinations in Africa, Asia and South America may interest a publisher. Also, state and local guides to destinations in the United States, or special-interest guides such as those targeting divers, hikers, climbers, kayakers, or antique shoppers, may sell. For example, CIVIL WAR SOURCEBOOK, a guide to Civil War destinations by Chuck Lawliss published by Harmony Books, sold almost 35,000 copies in less than three years.
The typical guide takes at least one year of work to complete, and the amount of detail involved - touring hundreds of hotels, for example - can be staggering. Although compensation and royalty arrangements vary tremendously, guidebook writers may get a small advance, a few thousand dollars, against future royalties. Royalties might range from 5 to 12 percent of the cover price of the book, so a $15 book that eventually sells 15,000 copies at an 8 percent royalty would gross the author $18,000, although in practice the royalties actually paid may well be lower, the world of publishing accounting being what it is. Writers typically do not get travel expenses paid, or at most get $1,000 to $3,000 to defray costs.
Moon Publications, publishers of the highly regarded MOON HANDBOOK, for example, pays advances of up to $10,000 against royalties but pays no expenses. It accepts detailed queries from freelancers (not a finished manuscript) and expects delivery of the manuscript chapter-by-chapter over one to two years. The trend in guidebook publishing, increasingly being penetrated by "book packagers" who contract at a fixed price with a publisher to supply a series of completed, ready-to-print guides, is towards the purchase of all rights from the author. The writer gets a flat fee, usually paid in two or three installments as work is completed, but gets no royalties. In any case, most guides sell less than 15,000 copies, so you won't get rich as a guidebook writer, but if you enjoy the destination you're writing about, the project may be a labor of love, and your credentials as a published expert may help you sell spin-off articles.
Travel Magazines: When trying to sell their travel stuff, many would-be travel writers immediately think of the slick national travel magazines such as Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, and National Geographic Traveler. These pubs pay well - in the range of $1 a word, or $500 to $3,000 an article, or more, and sometimes with expenses paid - but they get dozens if not hundreds of submissions and queries for each piece they accept. Most assignments are made to established writers known to the editors. The top mags don't accept articles where the writer's trip was subsidized.
You'll have a better shot at getting published in the smaller circulation magazines, such as Caribbean Travel and Life, Islands or one of the newer publications such as Escape. It's easier to break into the columns and short features rather than with a destination piece. International Travel News, a monthly printed on newsprint, is a reader-written magazine that's easy to break into - it's open to all submissions on travel anywhere except the U.S. and the Caribbean, as long as you're an ITN subscriber. The pay, however, is lousy - under $25 for most pieces.
Other Consumer Magazines: The best magazine market for travel articles isn't in the travel mags, but in general interest or specialty pubs which may buy one or two travel-related features for each issue. Women's magazines, men's magazines, outdoor pubs and golf magazines are among the literally hundreds of outlets for good travel writing. And there's more good news: Many of these magazines pay more than travel pubs.
Travel Trade Magazines: Pros who write for money know that while the glory may be in the slick consumer magazines, the cash usually is in the trade publications. The same holds true for trade pubs in the travel industry. Trade books put more emphasis on solid reporting and industry knowledge than on flashy writing. If you prove yourself as a dependable writer who can deliver on time, you may be able to sell regularly to Travel Weekly, Tour & Travel News and other trade magazines.
Internet and Electronic Publishing: No one can be sure exactly what the future of electronic publishing is, but almost everyone agrees it is the future. Travel CD-ROMs were hot for a couple of years, but publishers found most CD-ROM titles sold poorly. The Internet, of course, is today's megatrend. Most of the leading travel guide publishers have Web sites. In late 1995, Lonely Planet won a "Best of the Net" award for its online travel center at the second annual Internet awards sponsored by GNN, an Internet service provider. ROUGH GUIDES, a highly acclaimed series of travel guides, launched a Web site which offers the entire contents of its 1,000-page United States guide free to Net surfers. American Express' ExpressNet site on America Online offers the entire text of 15 Frommer's city guides. Increasingly, publishers view offering their guides on the Internet and on-line services as comparable to having their books in public libraries - free distribution boosts awareness for the guides and ultimately results in bookstore sales.
Publishers, mostly of the shoestring variety, have launched a number of travel e-zines on the Web. Most offer nothing for contributions, except the promise of seeing your story on the screen and hot links to your own home page. A few, such as European Visits say they pay writers.
Electronic rights are a touchy issue for both publishers and writers. Many publishers, claiming they are at present making no money in electronic channels, may offer nothing extra for e-rights. Writers, and in particular organized groups such as American Society of Journalists and Authors, say they're unwilling to give away future income from what may become the dominant form of publishing.
Foreign Publications: Magazines and newspapers outside the United States can be good secondary sources for travel articles. Many cities outside North America have English-language newspapers and magazines.
Broadcast: Television, especially cable with programming such as the Travel Channel, increasingly offers opportunities for freelance contributions.
Self Publishing: Whether on the Web on in traditional books, self-publishing is a viable option. Even narrowly focused local guidebooks, if well-marketed, can have considerable sales. For example, two recreational map guides to Santa Barbara, SANTA BARBARA MOUNTAIN BIKE ROUTES and A HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE SANTA BARBARA FRONT COUNTRY, together sold about 12,000 copies in a recent year. Central America guidebook writer Paul Glassman says his best-paying jobs in travel writing were self-assigned ones. "My guides to Belize and Costa Rica quietly sold very nicely, before these countries were discovered." Almost without exception, self-publishers recommend Dan Poynter's THE SELF PUBLISHING MANUAL as the bible for do-it-yourselfers.
Pros Tell How to Break In
Successfully breaking in to travel writing requires the usual blend of moderate ability, immoderate persistence and a certain amount of luck. "It helps to be good, it helps to be pushy, it helps to be reliable, but I'm not saying that you have to be all three, or that you absolutely must be tops in numerous other traits, " says Glassman. "There's a lot of plain, workaday, undistinguished prose that gets published, because the writers kept flinging their stuff at editors, or turned the stuff in on time. Keep at it, and find a niche where you can squeeze through, but don't count on anything, and don't let your happiness depend on it."
Teresa Mears, a former editor with The Miami Herald and The Los Angeles Times and now associate publisher of Freelance Success newsletter and a freelancer based in Miami, offers this advice for newbies: "Look for stories other people aren't doing, especially from areas you know well. Learn to take good photos. If you're not from a journalism background, learn something about basic journalism and ethics. I would advise novices to start with newspapers and small magazines where what you write carries more weight than whom you know and what clips you have."
Kit Snedaker, former newspaper travel editor who now freelances and teaches a class on travel writing, advises: "As a novice, you should ... read every travel writer you can get your hands on. Then, start writing sample pieces and submitting them on spec with art. But keep your day job." Novices need to be published, says Snedaker, so try the smaller markets, the weeklies and the smaller magazines. "But never let your stuff be published free! Always charge something for it and do stories about your own backyard if necessary."
It's always tough to sell mediocre stories, according to veteran Australian travel writer and editor Gareth Powell, but professional writing shows through. "When I was a newspaper travel editor I would get 30 or 40 submissions a day. Most were rubbish. In the end, as a means of self-defense, I had a list of 20 or 30 professional writers I knew I could depend on. They were paid reasonable money and delivered good stories."
Brad Martin is the self-published author of HONDURAS TRAVEL GUIDE. He says that, contrary to what many say, he believes travel editors are open to new writers. "For the most part I have found editors quite receptive. New writers should not be afraid to present their work. If they are fortunate, the editor may come back with helpful suggestions. Don't be defensive, try and see the editor's viewpoint."
Lan Sluder edits and publishes Belize First quarterly magazine on travel, life and retirement in Belize and elsewhere on the Caribbean Coast of Central America, and leads the Travel Writing and Mexico/Central America sections in CompuServe's Travel Forum. |
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