Travel Writers

Touched by a Wild Mountain Gorilla

2011-12-21T16:23:00.001-08:00

An amazing encounter with a family of wild Mountain Gorillas.

Video: Across America in Just Five Minutes

2011-11-09T16:25:00.000-08:00

As Gadling says:Amazing. Freelance photographer Brian DeFrees took a two-month road trip across the United States and wanted to turn the project into something creative at the end. The result? This five-minute video. The project started August 8 in Syracuse, New York and ended October 1 in Syracuse. The original video? Nearly two-hours long. The edited version - five minutes, fourteen seconds. How did he do it? Simple, really - he strapped a camera to the windshield of his Honda and set it to take a photo every five seconds. This is the result. For more information, check out more info on The Huffington Post or DeFrees' website.

Travel Inspiration from an Ad

2011-11-09T16:21:00.000-08:00

Earth from G Adventures on Vimeo.

Today's Video of the Day is an ad for a company called G Adventures that encourages viewers to get out and see "why Earth is the universe's #1 travel destination". The short piece does a beautiful job of illustrating some of the moments that beg us to travel, tailored to pull at the heartstrings of the crowd that doesn't want to be part of the crowd.Thanks Gadling!

It's Lonely on the Road

2011-10-15T14:24:00.000-07:00

Jeremy is a travel writer with an excellent blog called Travel Blather, a sure sign the guy has a sense of humor. You really should bookmark his blog and put it in your Google Reader, which is where I generally stumble across his writings. He is at www.travelblather.comHis most recent column discusses the near impossibility of making a decent income from travel blogging, and the loinliness of extended solo travel. I feel the pain. My one year solo backpacking adventure around Asia left me feeling great a times, but also confused about what the hell I had learned or grown during that time. The comments at his blog are really, really brilliant and his responses are just as revealing.Here's a bit of the text, but do please read the entire post including the comments.

I've watched with interest as the travel blogosphere has filled with people 'living the dream' of funding an existence of non-stop travel by blogging about it. Good luck to everyone attempting to do this - but as an ex freelance travel writer I take this whole 'digital travel nomad' business with a large pinch of salt.Something I learned during that decade of jumping on and off planes and writing about the last trip as I planned the next trip during the current trip - is that travel for travel's sake is tedious after a while.Travel friendships are shallow Before I got into travel writing - like most people bitten by the bug - I travelled quite a lot on my own. And I loved the way it freed me to make friends with anyone. At first I felt self conscious. Almost like I had a sign on my back saying "He has no friends!". But after I'd plucked up courage to talk to strangers it was fantastic fun. (A few beers helped to begin with but now I will talk to anyone!). For a while this ability to just meet interesting people totally rocked. Problem was a lot of these 'friendships' were transient and ultimately a bit meaningless. We bonded over a shared need for info about the next place we wanted to visit or whatever - but we talked the same old stuff most of the time. After a while I grew tired of this.It's hard to observe and to participate Once you realise these 'pseudo friendships' aren't that sustaining you tend to withdraw a bit. You sit back and observe. I kept a diary (blogs didn't exist!). Sometimes I realised I was watching with a degree of cynicism. There's a dumb pecking order to backpacking. The deeper the tan, the more battered the rucksack - the cooler the traveller. (Maybe now it's also about how many twitter followers you have?). I got tired of it all. But there were still amazing temples to see, incredible food to eat, local people with totally different lifestyles to learn from. I found though that the more I observed, the harder it became to click back into participation mode. Once I started writing full time as a travel writer this observation/participation partition seemed more pronounced still. I wasn't doing a trip just to experience it. I was there to get a story, take pictures, make notes. The first few trips were fine. I lived in the moment and just scribbled a few notes and took some pictures, but increasingly the pressure to nail the story took away from the delight of exploration. If you're serious about monetization for your travel blog I reckon you'll feel the same way. Nomadic Matt's comment in his post about how he makes money sums this up well:"I spend more time trying to put bread on my table than I do anything else, and often it really takes away from being able to just travel and enjoy where I am."It's lonely on the road I've been thinking about writing a post on this topic for a while but a post by Nomadic Chick called The Definition of Lonely made me get on and write it. It's a short, oddly wistful post. It begins:“Today, I feel lonely. I wonder what I hunger for? Male companionship? To have my friends surrounding me? … Sometimes it’s intangible, something I can’t quite grasp.”She goes on to say she's learnt after a year on the road that she's "discovering a drawback to long-term travel and that’s the reflex to be reserved... it leaves me somewhat alone, even when I’m surrounded by human contact."She nails that feeling I described above perfectly. Is this a new definition of loneliness? For me, no (for her I guess, yes.) I felt that way a lot, particularly after I'd been doing the job a while.It's wonderfully self-indulgent to gorge yourself on new stimulation day in and day out. But after a while - just like any drug - we get hardened to it.Oh yeah. Another camel ride. Great one more temple to tick off the list… Angkor Wat next.So, if you're reading all those blog posts selling the dream about making money just by writing blog posts and doing smart things with ebooks, advertising and sponsored posts... as you wander your way around the big wide world. Pause for a while.

Dance Around the World

2011-10-04T15:06:00.000-07:00

Here's another great Dance Around the World video clip. How many places have you been?

Web Photos and Copyright

2011-02-19T11:59:00.000-08:00

Web Copy Plus has an excellent example of what can go wrong when an innocent copywriter downloads a photo off the internet, then uses that photo in an advertising campaign. The same rules apply to your writing, so if you find your stolen words being used elsewhere, find an appropriate lawyer and sue to protect your rights.

Here's the article:

Why would copywriters at Webcopyplus pay $4,000 for a digital photo that retails for about $10? Well, frankly, we screwed up. It’s an expensive lesson on copyright laws that we wish to share with other marketers, so you don’t make the same mistake.

Our web copywriters were under the impression that images on the Web without any copyright notices were “public domain” and therefore free to use. Naive? Yes. A notion limited to our copywriting firm? Definitely not. It likely has to do with the fact that works no longer need a copyright notice to have copyright protection (you can read about the Berne Convention Implementation Act, which the US adopted in 1988).

Designers, writers, developers, marketers, business owners, and ironically even photographers, use photos from the Web without permission. Sites like Google make it so convenient. Enter your keywords, do an image search, and you’ve got an endless photo library ripe for the picking. Woman laughing delivers 5.2 million photos. Business man offers 423 million photos. And the keyword kids brings up a whopping 778 million images. You can find pretty well anything, too, from ABBA to zombies.

The Copyright Crime

While we maintained an active stock photo account for our blog with access to an array of suitable photos, one of our copywriters grabbed a photo from the Web. The image: a colour 400 x 300 pixel beach shot with some greenery in the foreground. A nice shot, but nothing spectacular.

We posted it on a client’s tourism blog to add zest to a promotional article — done. Sip some caffeine, get a little Twitter action, and then dive into the next copywriting project. Photo forgotten. That was in May, 2010.

The Lawyer’s Letter

Fast forward a few months, we got a call from the client a couple of days before Christmas, and he wasn’t feeling overly festive. He received a formal letter from a lawyer with the following introduction: “Cease and desist demand and offer to settle copyright infringement claim, and digital millennium copyright act claim, subject to Rule 408, Federal Rules of Evidence.”

Apparently copyright infringement involving images that are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office allows for statutory damages of up to $30,000, or $150,000 if it can be demonstrated it was a willful act.

The Lawyer’s Demands:
1. Immediately cease and desist all unlicensed uses of the image, and delete all copies from computers and digital storage devices.
2. Remit almost $4,000 to his trust account.

The image was removed within minutes. Lengthy discussions ensued. Two days later, a letter of apology was emailed to the lawyer to advise the photo had been immediately removed, and to express regret for the “unintentional errant use” of the image.

The lawyer responded that while they appreciated our commitment to remove the image from the blog, “removal of the image from the website will not relieve you from liability for damages arising from your past infringing use of the image on your commercial website.” The letter also stated that any further attorneys’ fees and costs incurred to resolve the matter would be added to the settlement demand.

The Defendant’s Response

With some pro bono legal advice, a copy of the Certificate of Registration and the date that the image was first published was requested. While the letter contained all sorts of legal jargon, it failed to verify the image was copyright registered and that the lawyer’s client, a photographer, owned the rights to the image.

A few notes were exchanged, and by entering a registration number at the U.S. Copyright Office’s website (www.copyright.gov), we were able to confirm the image was copyright registered and the lawyer’s client was the rightful owner. Shortly after, we provided a counter offer of $1,925, which we figured would provide the photographer about $100 per month, and the lawyer three-hours’ pay at a lofty $400 per hour. We felt that was generous and more than fair to make this problem go away.

They declined, and due to the exchange of letters (while respectful in nature and completely reasonable, considering we were merely asking for registration and ownership proof), the lawyer slapped on an extra $2,500 in attorney fees, which he subsequently agreed to remove.

The Dilemma

Had the lawyer engaged Webcopyplus, in which case our client wouldn’t be caught in the middle, we would have had options: ignore the letter; say, “Go ahead, sue us”; or respond, “$1,925 is our final offer,” which there’s a chance they’d accept. We felt — and photographers we spoke to agreed — the proposed settlement amount was excessive.

In fact, you can find articles and discussions online on how lawyers around the globe are capitalizing in technologies and laws to bring in piles of claims for copyright infringement damages. For example, check out Copyright Lawsuits as a Business Model.

The Decision

While we considered the lawyer’s demands abusive, the fact remained that our client was trapped in the ordeal, and it was costing him time and causing him grief. Plus, he’d be the one to get subpoenaed. So we opted to settle for $4,000.

It was a tough pill to swallow, but we were the ones who messed up, and salvaging the client relationship was priority. Moreover, settling the matter would allow us to focus on writing copy to market and sell products and services, and build productive relationships, rather than deal with an aggressive lawyer.

Lesson Learned

As web copywriters, we work with dozens of web designers around the globe. Based on recent discussions, even after we shared our story, some continue to suggest copyright laws are blurry, and insist if you ever run into conflict and get a threatening letter, you can simply delete the image and toss the document in the trash (one designer even labeled it “delete and toss”).

While this might work with some individuals and organizations, particularly if they’re in a different province, state or country, which might make legal costs prohibitive, be aware: you could end up in a lengthy and costly court battle. For those who insist, “It won’t happen to me,” mind the fact that this beach photo was the only one we’ve ever grabbed from the Web for a client’s website. And it cost us almost $4,000. Consequently, we urge others to recognize and yield to a simple fact: If it’s on the Internet and others wrote or created it, do not use it without their permission.

As copywriters, we work with and rely on a range of creative types and specialists, including photographers. We didn’t mean any disregard for this profession and now have a greater awareness and appreciation for the fact that freely using photos from the Web diminishes a photographer’s income and livelihood. We apologize, and it won’t happen again.

Copyright Resources

We’re copywriters — not copyrighters — so this is meant to share
our experience, not to provide formal legal advice. However, there’s a lot of useful copyright information on the Internet, which you can check out.

Fair Use — If you’re using copyrighted work for teaching or research, criticism or comment, or news reporting, it may be considered fair use.

Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 — The US adopted the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international agreement governing copyright that was initially established in Berne, Switzerland in 1886.

10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained — Techie and photographer Brad Templeton touches on common copyright myths.

Free and Commercial Stock Photography Sources

As part of our updated policies, our copywriters are required to only use stock photo websites in a bid to play by the rules, be fair to photographers, and keep lawyers out of the equation. Here’s a list of stock photo sources you might want to consider, where you can get photos starting at $1 per image:

GettyImages
iStock
Pixmac*
Stock.XCHNG
*For the record, the Pixmac link is an affiliate link (so we can recoup some of the settlement costs and support our caffeine addictions). It’s a relatively new company with 11 million images to choose from, at affordable prices.

Creative Commons

Some photographers let people share and use photographs under Creative Commons licenses, which is an alternative to full copyright (special thanks to Vancouver photographer Kris Krug, who brought this to our attention). You can find millions of Creative Commons photos at Flickr.

Update: Another good information source is the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.

Responses to FT Article: Death of Travel Guidebooks

2010-08-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

The Financial Times article about new technology and the future of printed travel guidebooks was picked up on a Google Group called Travel Guide Writers, and brought up an excellent discussion on travel apps. All you budding travel writers should join this group to keep track on what's happening and new in the fast changing world of travel writing.

Here's the original post from the app vendor at Sutro:

Some thoughts and questions from the "other side" of this conversation

- I'm an App vendor that focuses on publishers with trusted content.

Promotion - There are 225,000+ applications in the Apple store, with the travel section growing by the day. We believe that creating the application is only a small part of the problem. Unless people purchase your application then you make no money regardless of how cheap it was to create it in the first place.
For people to find your application you either rely on luck, or you have to promote through other means such as web site or blog traffic. This is where the big name brands have the leg up - they built their brands when travel guides were physically printed books because they were big enough to bear the printing and distribution costs, and now they can leverage their brands to enable people to find their applications. Think about a LP book - how many people really recognize the author's name compared to LP's name? Yes, it is the author's (and editor's) work that created the book, but the brand is, in this example, LP.

Volume - Our applications are often in the top 12 "what's hot" list of the travel section on iTunes but the volume isn't where we want it to be. When we're the #1 travel application for a few days and still want to see increased volume, what does that say about the volumes of all of the other applications? This is a direct impact of the promotion piece above (we still need to help our publishing partners with their promotional pieces), but also raises the question of whether the market is yet ready for this new approach to delivering travel content. See below on this question.

Price - There is definitely a race to the bottom for application prices. Even LP has reduced their prices (across the board?) to less that $10; many travel applications are even lower than $5. We have heard that a $0.99 application is the sweet spot for Apple's developer iAd advertising as the conversion rate for a higher cost application will be too low to warrant the cost of the "pay per click" model that iAd offers - although we're not sure if that is general across all application types or specific to value add products such as mobile travel guides. A low volume at a low price is not a lot of money,whatever the revenue share split.

Shelf life- Newer applications covering the same destination are preferred by buying customers to older applications. This is human nature (magazines are always published a month ahead of time) but is also encouraged by Apple's store that by default lists applications
newest to oldest. A typical print guide book has a 24 month edition
life before being revamped for the subsequent print run. We find a one
or two monthly refresh of our applications helps to keep them higher
in the various lists. But refreshes have to be meaningful; you can't
just republish the same application with a new version number as
existing users will start to moan in the reviews, and a bad review is
hard to overcome. In our model we roll out new platform features every
few months to have a meaningful refresh. But in a "roll your own"
model" this could be hard to sustain, especially if a large number of
titles are published to have enough volume to put food on the table
and the only real means of improving the product is to add more
content.

Questions that we have at the moment are:

Is the market ready? Yes, there is a great deal of buzz around mobile
applications (it's why we're playing in his arena) but is the buzz
substantiated by people actually buying content? Big brands are able
to dump their books into a mobile application but is that just their
brand momentum carrying over into the mobile space for now? Given the
race to the price bottom how is the value of the content promoted so
that it bucks the pricing trend?

Travel books are likely to disappear, or have significantly less
volume - see the figures that started this thread. What replaces them?
Clearly the smartphone is the new "in" device with projected 10 times
growth in the next three years. So travel guide users are likely to
have a smartphone, but how is travel content delivered to this
platform in a way to make it appealing enough to make people pay money
for the content? Will we have to wait out a period where users have
tried the free Wikipedia content before realizing that there is a
reason to pay for content from an author that knows his/her stuff?

Is there a minimum size of publisher that can survive? Is the "anyone
can build a cheap application" belief even true? Yes anyone *can*
build a cheap application, but can they earn a living from it? Is the
traditional "big organization with lots of dependent authors" model
still true today and will be tomorrow? I wonder if some of the bigger
publishers are working towards maintaining this status quo - I would
if I was them. But does the technology enable newer author led
consortiums to build their "big enough organizations" to publish
electronically, and do authors want to even do this?

Are mobile applications just the "loss leader" to bring eyeballs and
wallets to other products? Is this true now, and if so will this be
true forever?

Even if money cannot currently be made from mobile applications, do
authors still need to produce applications to stake a claim?

If we could wave a magic wand and have the perfect mobile application
distribution solution tomorrow, what would it look it?

We have our own hypotheses and answers to these questions that we're
actively testing out and discussing with our publishers. But I'm very
interested in hearing the "author's viewpoint" to these questions,
whether publicly here on this forum or via a private message.

Regards,
Colin

Death of the Printed Travel Guidebook?

2010-08-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Financial Times recently looked at new technology and how new gizmos may eventually replace printed travel guidebooks. While it seems inevitable, I'd say printed guidebooks will remain dominant for the near future until the technology is sorted out and ebook readers and IPad clones bring down the cost significantly.

A few notable comments here, but do read the entire article and be prepared for some technology headaches.

“The publishing world has been talking for years about how we are going to follow the music industry down the pan,” says Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides series, which has sold more than 30m books worldwide.“I don’t think that is going to happen tremendously quickly for publishing in general, but travel guidebooks are absolutely the front line. In travel it makes much more sense to have digital rather than traditional paper books.”

And the latest news from the front line is not good. In fact, over the past two and a half years, guidebook sales in Britain have fallen off a cliff. Sales for 2009 were down 18 per cent on 2007, and if the second half of this year follows the first, 2010 will be down 27 per cent on 2007, according to data from Nielsen BookScan. If the current rate of decline continues, the final guidebook will be sold in less than seven years’ time.

Lonely Planet’s Australia guide sold 20,015 copies in 2008, and just 13,530 in 2009 – a drop of a third (again, the figures are from Nielsen BookScan, covering sales from British retailers). The Rough Guide to France, which sold 11,943 in 2008, fell 45 per cent to 6,561 the following year. Worse is that these are considered bestsellers.

Of course, the fortunes of individual titles fluctuate with the launch of new editions and the fashionability of destinations, but average sales across the whole range paint an equally bleak picture. Last year, the average UK sale of each title from the leading five publishers was around 1,500 copies.

The reasons behind this sales collapse are all too apparent – a combination of new technology and recession. Fewer people are travelling so buy fewer guidebooks, while those that do still go away are more likely to download free information online rather than spending money on a book.

Sales figures may be dire, the challenges mounting, but this summer there’s a buzz in the world of travel publishing, a sense of being on the verge of a totally new era. The internet allowed people to research their trips themselves before setting out, but smartphone apps and iPads travel with them. Suddenly the guidebook publishers, who for years seemed to be looking on from the sidelines, unsure of how to make websites work for them, have found themselves with a medium that makes sense.

“I could see that if you got in early and created the most compelling products then it could be fantastically lucrative as well,” says Douglas Schatz, who last year gave up his job as boss of Stanfords, the venerable London travel book shop, to become Lonely Planet’s managing director for Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Remember those guidebook sales figures? The average title selling just 1,500 copies a year? Compare that with the fact that during the volcanic ash crisis, 4.2m Lonely Planet apps covering 13 destinations were downloaded within four days. Admittedly they were being given away as a free promotion to help stranded passengers, but it hints at the potential.

Selling apps online also lets publishers cut out conventional retailers, who have been squeezing margins aggressively and often dictated at what price a book will be sold.

Of course, over the past couple of years have seen many travel-related apps, some from airlines, hotels and others in the travel industry; others as extensions of travel websites, and lots of them free. But this summer publishers are piling into the app market, hoping to persuade customers that it’s worth paying for an app that comes with the guidebook brand’s trusted tone and voice.

Last month Ellingham, who sold Rough Guides in 2008, launched Cool Places, a series of 30 slick apps to UK destinations, including St Ives, Brighton and Whitby. In June, Footprint Travel Guides released its first apps, with 50 being rolled out by the end of this month. Rough Guides’ new apps debut later this year, and last week Lonely Planet launched its new Compass app – the first augmented reality app from a mainstream guidebook publisher. Their jostling for position is given extra impetus by the assumption that the market will explode as mobile roaming charges fall.

So will the printed guidebook disappear altogether? One scenario sees print becoming the preserve of photo-led “inspiration” books, for armchair reading before you go away. But even that market could be squeezed by the iPad. Lonely Planet, for example, recently released 1,000 Ultimate Experiences, an innovative iPad book for pre-travel inspiration that mixes photos, text and video.

Another theory is that books will become niche products covering special interests or remote, developing destinations without mobile coverage or the visitor numbers to merit an app. Bradt – known for its guides to almost comically uncommercial destinations, including North Korea and Iraq – actually saw sales rise by 2.25 per cent in 2009. And one of the few real success stories of recent years has been Punk Publishing, which produces the Cool Camping and Wild Swimming series, and saw sales double in the last four years.

Freelance Writing Income Plunges to New Lows

2010-01-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

It pains my heart, but freelance travel writing has been devastated by the internet. LA Times has the article.

Freelance writing's unfortunate new model

Freelance writing fees -- beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and magazines -- have been spiraling downward for a couple of years and reached what appears to be bottom in 2009. (Marc Russell)

James Rainey

With many outlets slashing pay scales, the well-written story is in danger of becoming scarce. The hustle is just beginning for new and seasoned freelancers.
By James Rainey

January 6, 2010
The list of freelance writing gigs on Craigslist goes on and on.

Trails.com will pay $15 for articles about the outdoors. Livestrong.com wants 500-word pieces on health for $30, or less. In this mix, the 16 cents a word offered by Green Business Quarterly ends up sounding almost bounteous, amounting to more than $100 per submission.

Other publishers pitch the grand opportunities they provide to "extend your personal brand" or to "showcase your work, influence others." That means working for nothing, just like the sailing magazine that offers its next editor-writer not a single doubloon but, instead, the opportunity to "participate in regattas all over the country."

What's sailing away, a decade into the 21st century, is the common conception that writing is a profession -- or at least a skilled craft that should come not only with psychic rewards but with something resembling a living wage.

Freelance writing fees -- beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and magazines -- have been spiraling downward for a couple of years and reached what appears to be bottom in 2009.

The trend has gotten scant attention outside the trade. Maybe that's because we live in a culture that holds journalists in low esteem. Or it could be because so much focus has been put on the massive cutbacks in full-time journalism jobs. An estimated 31,000 writers, editors and others have been jettisoned by newspapers in just the last two years.

Today's reality is that much of freelancing has become all too free. Seasoned professionals have seen their income drop by 50% or more as publishers fill the Web's seemingly limitless news hole, drawing on the ever-expanding rank of under-employed writers.

Low compensation

The crumbling pay scales have not only hollowed out household budgets but accompanied a pervasive shift in journalism toward shorter stories, frothier subjects and an increasing emphasis on fast, rather than thorough.

"There are a lot of stories that are being missed, not just at legacy newspapers and TV stations but in the freelance world," said Nick Martin, 27, laid off a year ago by the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., and now a freelancer. "A lot of publications used to be able to pay freelancers to do really solid investigations. There's just not much of that going on anymore."

Another writer, based in Los Angeles, said she has been troubled by the lighter fare that many websites prefer to drive up traffic. A new take on any youth obsessions ("Put 'Twilight' in the headline, get paid") has much more chance of winning editorial approval than more complex or substantive material.

The rank of stories unwritten -- like most errors of omission -- is hard to conceive. Even those inside journalism can only guess at what stories they might have paid for, if they had more money.

Media analyst and former newspaper editor Alan Mutter worried last month about the ongoing "journicide" -- the loss of much of a generation of professional journalists who turn to other professions.

Writers say they see stories getting shorter and the reporting that goes into some of them getting thinner.

A former staff writer for a national magazine told me that she has been disturbed not only by low fees (one site offered her $100 for an 800-word essay) but by the way some website editors accept "reporting" that really amounts to reworking previously published material. That's known in the trade as a "clip job" and on the Web as a "write around."

"The definition of reportage has become really loose," said the writer, also a book author, who didn't want to be named for fear of alienating employers. "In this economy, everyone is afraid to turn down any work and it has created this march to the bottom."

One Los Angeles woman who also requested anonymity writes frequently for women's magazines and fondly recalls the days when freelance pieces fetched $2, or even $3, a word. Though some publications still pay those rates, many have cut them at least in half. And story lengths have been reduced even more drastically.

The writer, who once could make $70,000 a year or more, said she is now working harder to bring in half that much. "It's just not a living wage anymore," she said.

Los Angeles freelancer Tina Dupuy gained acclaim last year when she posted a YouTube video to shame editors at the Tampa Tribune into paying her $75 for a humor column on the "birthers" -- the political activists who contest President Obama's U.S. citizenship.

Up for a challenge

She said many other papers have stopped paying for opinion columns altogether --narrowing op-ed contributions at some papers to those already in syndication or those with day jobs at chambers of commerce, corporations, think tanks and the like.

"These corporate-sponsored pieces threaten to push people like me out," Dupuy said.

That's not to say that she is getting out of the business. After an earlier career in stand-up comedy, Dupuy has learned to hustle and to be "psychologically very adept at rejection."

It can be challenging, but Dupuy makes a living. "For someone who had to drive for hours to get to a gig -- to get $100 and a beer bottle thrown at them -- this is heaven," she said.

Indeed, relative newcomers like Dupuy or those who have spent their careers as freelancers -- like Matt Villano of Healdsburg, Calif. -- sound much more resilient about the revolutionary changes in publishing than the former staff writers and longtime freelancers.

The 34-year-old Villano -- whose outlets include the San Francisco Chronicle, Fodor's travel guides, Casino Player and Oceanus magazines -- said some writers struggle because they have fuzzy, arty notions about their work. They need to act more like small business people, Villano said, diversifying their skills and the outlets they write for.

Despite the endless hustle, Villano said he would not give up a career that has taken him from whale watching in Maui to the baccarat tables of Las Vegas. "I like the diversity," he said. "I like doing it on my own terms."

Villano strikes me as considerably more resilient, and sunny, than most people who write for a living. To make a go of it, the majority will require not only his flexibility, but a return of a more stable financial base for journalism.

With the advertising-driven income in a state of disarray, the source of future freelance dollars remains in doubt.

Philanthropic, nonprofit sites (ProPublica) will take up some of the slack, while other new models (Spot.Us) ask consumers to make micro-payments to put writers on specific local stories. Other websites (True/Slant) pay bonuses for stories and commentary, with writers getting paid more as they deliver bigger audiences.

It's hard to say if any, or all, will succeed. But the sooner they can take the free out of freelance, the better. Until they do, we can only imagine what we'll be missing.

james.rainey@latimes.com

Guest Editorial

2009-04-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

And here's an editorial from a former Moon travel guidebook writer:

OUTSOURCING MOON
by X-Moon, Delhi bureau

Bill Newlin has announced that he is outsourcing all guidebook writing to a company based in Bangalore, India. Further questioning reveals that this company is in fact a plantation where monkeys have been trained to climb trees and twist off coconuts. With the recent rapid decline in world coconut production, unemployed monkeys have been ingeniously retrained by the Bangalore plantation owners to modify content for Moon guidebooks.

There are estimated to be 2,000 monkeys typing away on 2,000 typewriters.

They are divided into huts by continent: North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe.

"The maps have proved problematic," said Bill, "but otherwise, the gibberish is adequate for most travel needs. It's an ideal match for Moon because we pay them peanuts." Bill also mentioned that he is pleased that the monkeys will not dispute the format of the material. They apparently do not go berserk if print-size is drastically reduced, or the work is printed on paper so thin you can see through it. They tend to go berserk, however, if the peanut supply dwindles.

Bill spoke further: "The disconnect we were having with the human writers was causing a lot of aggravation in our editorial offices. What the chimps do is take older editions and change one word on each page, which then passes for the new edition. That's all we need really. Most of our readers don't give a fig about content anyway. What they need is the security blanket of some sort of guidebook to hold. And that's what we give them."

Next on the horizon, Newlin is thinking seriously about outsourcing cover designs to elephants in northern Thailand. "I have heard that they are quite capable artists and very adept with their trunks. Of course, the cost of feeding them is far higher than the monkeys, but still well below human designer rates, even those of starving artists in garrets." Newlin is currently looking into cheaper sources of feed for the mammoth designers, in order to cut costs.

The Art of Travel Writing

2009-03-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure of the connection between getting an online graduate degree, and the superb list of resources for prospective travel writers listed below, but somebody did a helluva job collecting links to all kids of useful sites. Great job, Kelly!

If the idea of travel writing leaves you with visions of luxurious vacations in exotic locations completely free of charge and all you have to do is write down your experiences in return, then you need to read the information below. Travel writing is a highly competitive profession, one that doesn’t pay especially well unless you make it to the top, and free travel is usually reserved for the very best writers. However, if you love to travel as much as you love to write and are sure you have something to offer to readers, then you will find the following information incredibly helpful as you pursue a career in travel writing. Below, you will find advice from professionals, tips, opportunities to get to know other travel writers, organizations for travel writers, places to find writing jobs, and resources for traveling.

Graduate Degree Blog

Hard Times at Lonely Planet (slight return)

2009-02-27T18:06:00.000-08:00

Another report about the recent layoffs at Lonely Planet.

Melbourne-based guidebook behemoth Lonely Planet will announce the sacking of 50 staff tonight -- around 10% of its global workforce -- as the global economic downturn continues to gut the tourism industry and guidebook sales.

Staff at Lonely Planet’s Footscray office were informed of the layoffs this morning with management calling a meeting this afternoon to discuss the changes and tap shoulders. A formal announcement is due at 9pm tonight to tie in with owner BBC Worldwide's London-centric media strategy.

A spokesman for Acting CEO Stephen Palmer confirmed the cuts to Crikey this morning and said they will impact all areas of the business. Affected staff were still in the process of being informed that they were out of a job when Crikey called.

In an emailed statement, Palmer said the situation was a "difficult" one but that the company had no choice in the context of the economic downturn.

"I recognise that this is a terribly difficult time, particularly for those whose jobs will be made redundant. I would like to reiterate that I would not have taken this action if there was any way I could have avoided it."

Palmer said the cuts were spread across the Lonely Planet's US, UK and Australian offices and did not comment on the specific divisions affected. But sources have told Crikey that the entire online content production division has been dismantled with extra cuts to be made in support roles. The book production section is said to be immune while images staff and commissioning editors appear to have also escaped the axe.

The cuts were foreshadowed on Monday when BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons gave a speech in Cardiff indicating BBC Worldwide’s operations will be scaled back to focus on its core commercial business of repackaging the Beeb's archive for DVD sales. UK MPs have savaged the company for the $250 million Lonely Planet purchase, claiming it has no links to its core business. The BBC is also under pressure from the UK government to use its licence fees to bail out Channel 4. BBC Worldwide made 112 million pounds last year.

Louise Connor of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance said she wasn't surprised at the decision in the context of the global tourism meltdown.

"It’s sad to see decisions made in England affecting so many jobs in Australia," she added.

Lonely Planet staff tell of a sense of foreboding that has gripped the Footscray office over the past few months. Palmer has regularly used company-wide meetings to give frank assessments about revenue problems and website cost blowouts. Sources say that once the new website was completed, the heat was on middle management to justify ongoing staffing levels.

In October 2007, original owners Tony and Maureen Wheeler sold Lonely Planet to BBC Worldwide for around $250 million. The Wheelers retained a 25% stake and are still swimming in the proceeds of the deal, reportedly mulling plans to spend $12 million on a lavish production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

The latest lay-offs mirror a move taken by the Wheelers in 2004 when 40 staff were sacked and those remaining told to forgo a 3% pay rise in the midst of the SARS outbreak.

It is not known whether the 120 staff at Lonely Planet’s Oakland and London offices have been informed of the sackings

Crikey

Hard Times at Lonely Planet

2009-02-27T17:57:00.001-08:00

The worldwide economic collapse has hit almost everyone, including publishers of travel guidebooks, as shown by this recent announcement from Lonely Planet. Actually, I'm surprised that they only cut 10% of their labor force, but I do expect more retreachment as the year progresses. I've also heard that Avalon Travel Publishing and Moon Publications are in deep shit, cancelling several of their planned Europe guides, and getting lousy reviews at Amazon on some of their replacement guides to SE Asia. They saved some money with lower royalty rates, but cut off their noses.

Lonely Planet tells staff to pack their bags
Chris Zappone
February 25, 2009 - 2:53PM

Travel guide book publisher Lonely Planet has cut up to 50 positions as the demand for guidebooks shrivels in the face of global financial crisis.The cuts will affect staff in Australia, the US and Britain where most of the company's sales and offices are.

Before the cuts the company said it had 500 people on its payroll.The retrenchments are "directly related to the economic downturn because we're a global company,'' spokesman Adam Bennett said."It represents the decline of the guidebook market in tough times.'' Mr Bennett said the US and Britain, both of which are struggling with recession, represented a combined total of 60% of guide book sales.Lonely Planet, which is 75%-owned by the BBC's commercial enterprise BBC Worldwide, said it was consulting with employees, some of whom were not having their contracts renewed, while others were having their positions eliminated.

Acting chief exectuve Stephen Palmer said in a statement that the global market for travel was not expected to pick up soon."Even the most optimistic forecasts do not predict any sustained recovery until 2010 at the earliest, and even then it is likely to be slow and patchy,'' Mr Palmer said."The US, UK and Europe are all in recession, and these territories account for over 80% of our business.''Mr Palmer cited a UN World Travel Organisation forecast for total outbound travel to dip 2% this year.

But he predicted Lonely Planet's core markets would erode further with a 10% fall in the US, 5% in Britain and 2% in Australia."It has become clear that this economic situation is unprecedented, it will not just be a blip and we need to adjust our costs so we can manage through these tough times.''czappone@fairfax.com.au

On Lonely Planet and the BBC

2009-02-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

Another interesting argument against the merger of Lonely Planet and the BBC, with some even more interesting comments on the issue.

I've blogged quite recently about the new Lonely Planet travel magazine which I think is an unfair competitor to Wanderlust (an excellent independent travel magazine which I write for quite a bit).

Why is this unfair? Because LP is now majority-owned by the BBC.

Following on from the new LP Travel magazine (which is written almost 100% by BBC writers and presenters) here's another example of how that playing field just isn't level anymore. Any brand would kill for a tie-up with the BBC on the BBC's homepage. The value in brand terms is huge. And this will translate to more hits for the LP website, more ad revenue and more book sales for LP.

You can't blame LP for wanting to make the most of the fact that its now owned by the BBC (or to be more accurate the commerical arm of the Beeb - BBC Worldwide) and with the clout of one of the world's most influential and wealthy media brands behind it the future for LP looks rosy.

I hadn't thought too much when the deal was announced about the impact on the LP brand of being owned by the BBC, but selling out to a big corporation says heaps about a brand and its future. I can see that Tony Wheeler (LP's founder) quite possibly felt that selling to a cultural corporation like the BBC rather than to a full-on multi-national commercial publisher was a good compromise... and smart too - moving the brand on from being a traditional paper and print publisher to a forward looking media organisation.

But I think it's all wrong. He'd have been better off selling to a fully commercial publisher (or media organisation) rather than one that's subsidised by the UK taxpayer. (Non UK readers - every tax payer in the UK pays an annual TV licence that costs around £130). Whilst some would argue that BBC Worldwide is a separate entity, the reality is that you can't work out where the taxpayer funded elements of the BBC start and where the commerically funded ones take over. And the benefits of association with the BBC brand are - whilst difficult to measure - most probably huge

I'm worried that LP is going to turn into some awful travel publishing megabrand that's everywhere. (take Jamie bleedin Oliver - lovely guy but do we REALLY need a Jamie magazine? For heaven's sake!) Watch this space for LP branded TV shows, LP branded clothes and gear, LP branded areas in tour operators and a plethora or LP branded websites, blog hosting services ane more... not to mention LP guide content being sold to third party tour operators, airlines and so on to use as destination content on their websites

Jeremy Head's Travel Blather

Thomas Kohnstamm: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

2008-04-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

Right on, Thomas. I'll join you in Hell. You sound like my kinda guy. Southeast Asia is my beat, so guess what: been there, done that. And your comments about the miserable pay of travel writers, and the need to cut corners, is entirely correct.

Right on, Thomas.

Best Article: Away on Business. Read it.

Thomas Kohnstamm Website

Thomas Kohnstamm MySpace

Thomas Kohnstamm Wikipedia

Lonely Planet Forum on Thomas Kohnstamm

Amazon Title: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

Amazon Books by Thomas Kohnstamm

The Age Australia April 13

Gadling April 13

Lonely Planet Profile April 14

Times Online April 14

WorldHum April 14

MediaBistro Profile

Brave New Traveler April 14

Away on Business April 15

Brave New Traveler April 18

Random House April 22

LA Times April 22

Jaunted April 22

New York Times Moment April 22

Vagabondish April 23

2008-04-23T00:06:00.000-07:00

Simon Sellars: Lonely Planet Writer

2008-04-22T23:30:00.000-07:00

No matter whether you are a freelance travel writer under contract with Lonely Planet or Rough Guides, you will be give strict guidelines on the places you must go, the research you must do, and the correct copy you must turn in on a determined date. And then you get the second payment.

Another report from a new LP travel guidebook contract author.

I feel one of the biggest misconceptions about Lonely Planet is that the company pays its authors to swan around on holiday and then do a bit of writing as an afterthought. The reality is that you are on your feet for twelve hours a day, during torrential rain or baking heat or whatever testing conditions you’ve parachuted into: coups; insurgencies; dealing with the horror of warm beer in Britain. There’s very little time for actual sightseeing. It’s actually hard work.

As I mentioned before, reviewing chain hotels is a special form of torture and definitely a grind. But, also, I must stress again that time is always at a premium when doing guidebook work. Although I say I like to listen and observe, in reality financial constraints make it almost impossible to linger at leisure for days on end like some kind of bohemian flaneur, so you are really just crunching as much as possible into your day: visiting 10 hotels, dropping into 10 bars and restaurants (and not necessarily eating or drinking in them, either), visiting the tourist office, the bus station etc. If there’s a moment for quiet reflection then that’s a bonus and you seize on it and make the most of it.

Well, I’ve already spoken about the fact checking. Guidebooks have become a very streamlined business and there’s less and less chance to ’stretch your wings’ as a writer these days. Again, this is also a consequence of the fact that there are far fewer untouristed places on the globe today compared to say 15-20 years ago, when the content of an individual guidebook could still be groundbreaking. I mentioned boxed texts earlier — these are a chance to write as much as 800-1000 words on a topic — but for the most part it is very much templated work, there’s no getting around that. As for the pay, agreed: it’s not an especially well-paid job, and as that NY Times article highlights, there will always be a pool of eager young writers who will do it for next to nothing — a highly attractive prospect for any employer with a tight budget and a year-round schedule.

Travel Happy

Chuck Thompson: Smile While You're Lying

2008-04-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

The travel writing community rarely has hot issues to discuss among themselves, but the recent issue of a book called "Smile While You're Lying" by travel writer Chuck Thompson has them up in arms.

Not sure why. He claims he was encouraged by his magazine publishers to write positive or at least not totally negative mentions of the tourist infrastructure (hotels, restaurants, airlines) when he went on assignment.

Yeah, so what. I'm a travel writer, but very few writers sculpt their verbiage; the bad shit is sometimes dropped and you find something interesting to write about your cookie cutter place. I only slam famous places that have gone bad and need a warning, and that's very unusual....I'd say less than five percent. And I have reviewed several hundred, perhaps thousands, of hotel properties in SE Asia.

Chuck Thompson came to San Francisco a few weeks ago and I had a chance to meet him at an Irish pub of the Tenderloin, and Chuck was a friendly guy with no pretensions about his book, which is mostly about his travel adventures and not his existential philosophy about the great good of humankind, but he does resent reviews of his book from journalists who have betrayed his trust, such as Rolf Potts.

New York Times

Brave New Traveler Interview with Chuck

World Hum Opinion by Rolf Potts

Gadling Interview

Robert Reid Talks about the Future of Travel Guidebooks

2008-03-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

Robert Reid is a Lonely Planet writer who publishes an amazing internet guide to Vietnam, and doesn't mince words in his recent interview with WorldHum. He laments the demise of experienced travel guidebook writers for novices who will work for peanuts under the illusion it will lead to fame and riches, and thinks internet travel guides will someday replace traditional published guides, when technology advances and handhelds can display the chief advantage printed guides continue to have over internet sources: maps.

Robert Reid: I used to think the most important thing we guidebook authors did for travelers was hotel reviews. People like to have some sense of security that the $5 or $300 place they’re staying in won’t be a brothel or rat-infested dump. But the Internet has already completely changed this. Previously if I had a new budget hotel in a town center, or a mid-ranger with pool, travelers would have to wait nine or 12 months from the time I “discovered” it until it appeared in a guide.

Now Internet booking sites often get them immediately. When I went to China a couple years ago, I stayed at a brand new hostel in Beijing that the Trans-Siberian author had just found, but that hadn’t yet appeared in the guide. It was already full! I was amazed at how nearly all the people there had found it online, and were booking their full China trip’s accommodations online.

At a Lonely Planet workshop a couple years ago, I asked a high-up at LP who they saw as their biggest competitor, and they immediately answered “Google.” I was impressed. So publishers like LP definitely see the Internet as a growing competitor, and have for a while. When the BBC bought LP a couple months ago, one of the key things they cited for future development was online content.

Another thing is that many sites with travel content online don’t have maps. And maps are HUGE. I sometimes think seasoned travelers need only a map, with barebones details of few places to stay, and barebones details of what to see and where to eat. If they trust the author—and that’s a big if, of course—not as much needs to be said as some people think. This, again, is for seasoned travelers only.

The only other thing I fear regarding online guidebooks is if they follow the “I stayed here and it was great” TripAdvisor or Amazon.com model. Those are useful, no doubt, but they’re only based on isolated experiences. If publishers turn things over at some point to reader-generated content, you won’t have the authoritative overviews that guidebook writers can offer, and it’ll end up with deeper beaten tracks, with more travelers doing the same thing.

But I do want to say David Stanley is right, it’s sad and reckless if an old author who did good work on several editions is cut for a new author. In my opinion, in-house editors don’t completely understand what goes into researching these guides—I was an editor for years, and only figured it out once I started writing full time. The best experience for writing a guidebook to X is not living in X but actually having written a guidebook to X. Sometimes publishers forget that a bit.

Sometimes I think we’re living a doomed profession, and that we’ll look back on the wacky wild period from the 1970s to the 2000s when scores of notebook-toting travelers went and sought out the mysteries of places that are no longer mysterious. People will look back on the era like reading Graham Greene books about far-flung places at wilder times.

Will guidebooks in book form die? Probably so. But to be honest, I think there will always be room for the perspective of the “guidebook author,” at least online. Once hand-held devices get even more sophisticated, so that maps and reviews are more easily referred to—or we old folks die out and the younger generations who are not so soft on books take over—things will probably go online completely.

But I sometimes think people like holding those books. So far, though, the TripAdvisor-type sites are excellent resources, but don’t account for perspective. One person goes to Y hotel and says “it’s super!” But they don’t realize A, B, C are similar and $40 less. Who goes to all 15 museums in Bucharest but a guidebook author? So only they can tell you that something like the Romanian National Museum of the Peasant is about the best museum in the world?

WorldHum Interview with Robert Reid

How to be a Travel Writer in Five Easy Pieces

2008-03-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

Robert Haru Fisher is a New York based travel writer and author of the guidebook pictured above, available at Amazon at London Off-Season And On : A Guide To Special Pleasures, Better Rater And Shorter Lines. He also wrote the Crown Insiders Guide to Japan, which is from his own publishing company. Fisher also contributes to the Frommer website and has, over the last few months, published a series of "so you wanna be a travel writer" articles with enough positive spin to keep the dreamers happy, and enough reality to discourage all but the most brave. It comes in five parts.

I haven't mentioned money yet, so will say only that you should have resources of your own, or a spouse/partner with a regular job, so someone can pay the bills. The travel writers who have good incomes are either on the staff of some publication and drawing a salary, or have honed the art of freelancing well, usually after many years of hard practice. Newspapers pay chicken feed (e.g. $75 for a column of print), magazines maybe $1 a word at best for writers without a famous following, websites little, and books smallish advances (if any, maybe $5,000) or flat fees not much more than that for a small book.

Part One

Part Two is a short history of travel writing, with a well deserved plug for Arthur Frommer, a man I have great admiration for and was once interviewed by on The Travel Channel.

"You have a dream job!" Half the people I meet for the first time tell me that, and I agree. It's heaven for me because I am intensely curious, always wanting to know what's around the next corner. When you travel, there's always a new next corner, a new surprise. It's no way to get rich, and it can be hell on family and other relationships because you seem never to be home, from their point of view, anyhow. You can't be a new parent, for instance, or taking care of an ailing family member. The most prolific travel writers are away at least a quarter of the time, I believe, sometimes half the time.

Part Two

Part Three tries to define what is travel writing.

Anyone can be a travel writer. You can write your blog, your memoir, your diary of a trip, and the only difference between you and, say, Pico Iyer, is that he writes more beautifully than almost anyone, and he may publish in Harper's and The New York Times while you are just broadcasting your thoughts on your own website, perhaps.

Part Three

Fisher in Part Four espouses the advantages of having a travel blog, and claims he is not trying to sell anything to anyone these days, including his travel writing seminars in Key West as advertised at the bottom of each of these posts.

(Full disclosure here: I don't have a site or a blog myself, as I am not trying to sell anything to anybody these days.)

If you are freelancing, you should also be working on a book, as having a book under your belt makes you an expert, ipso facto.

Part Four

Fisher in Part Five finishes with his analysis of the history of travel writing to reveal a few facts about the income side of the average travel writer. Finally.

"Get paid to travel" reads one headline. "How to Make a Six-Figure Income Traveling the World" is another. In the last few years, several websites have popped up urging you to learn how to become rich while writing about travel. For fees of several hundred dollars, they promise to teach you how to lead the good life.

It's a life I don't recognize as being anywhere near the reality of those led by many friends of mine who are freelance travel writers. To me, the freelancer is a knight errant, the leaderless samurai, a solo gun-slinger, and my hero much of the time.

My first advice to aspiring freelance writers is to marry rich, or otherwise obtain a partner who has, at least, a steady income. Markets are hard to break into, payment is often laughably cheap. One young writer for a major series of guidebooks approached me on a press trip a few years ago and asked me if I had worked for the series and what they paid. I mentioned some figures, and he said, "Good, I'm working for nothing right now, but they told me if I did a good job, they would pay me next time." The figures I mentioned then were a range from $75 for updating a small chapter of a book through a few thousand to revise the entire book up to about $15,000 for the original writing of a new, fairly small title (under 300 pages of print).

Your writing in a newspaper can pay as little as $75, in a magazine $250, though there are higher and lower figures, depending on the publication. When you are successful, you can command a figure of $1 a word or even higher, however. Traditional print outlets (general purpose newspapers) are down, but niche print publications (birding, ballooning, kayaking, etc.) are up. The Internet is fraught with possibilities, very few of them paying much, if anything, though. You may have to self-publish, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Moreover, one site has its sample author writing "In fact, my own editor is crying out for correspondents to report on destinations throughout the world ... and she's not the only editor seeking fresh talent. To be honest, I have to turn work down -- there simply aren't' enough hours in the day to take up all the writing commissions I'm offered." Not bloody likely, as many of my freelancer friends would say.

Part Five

South Pacific Handbook R.I.P.

2007-12-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

One of Moon's original authors has parted ways with Avalon Travel Publishing after 28 years but will continue to post South Pacific content on his website. The list of authors cut from Moon Publications now ranges from yours truly to David Stanley, Bill Weir, and even the founder, Bill Dalton. And it's all about money, or lack of, due to declining sales, poor marketing and distribution, and the relatively high royalty rates granted to early authors such as myself and David.

South Pacific Handbook RIP

I regret to inform you that a 9th edition of Moon Handbooks South Pacific will not be published. After 28 years and eight editions, Avalon Travel Publishing and I have decided that it will not be practical to produce a new edition.

There are a number of reasons for this, beginning with the numbers. Over the past 10 years, sales of Moon Handbooks South Pacific have dropped. The 7th edition (2000) sold a third less copies than the 6th edition (1996), and the current 8th edition (2004) has thus far sold just over half as many copies as the 7th.

Why are sales going down? Competition from other guidebooks and the internet is the obvious answer. Many people believe they can find enough free information online to make a printed guidebook unnecessary. What they don’t realize is that much of what is found on websites is dubious and incomplete, or just one-sided advertising. A majority of travel websites are run by companies which want to sell you their products or individuals eager to share travelers tips with their peers. The discipline and quality control exercised by a professional book editor is usually missing.

Since 2000 my book has faced strong competition from Lonely Planet South Pacific and Micronesia. It would be inappropriate for me to criticize that book here, but suffice it to say that the coverage there is far less consistent and detailed than that in Moon Handbooks South Pacific. Lonely Planet is a monopolistic corporation which has pushed Moon titles off the bookshelves in Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe. Doubtless they’ll be pleased to learn of Moon Handbooks South Pacific’s demise because with no remaining competition other than Frommers South Pacific, they’ll be able to space new editions of South Pacific and Micronesia further apart and cut back on the cost of researching off-the-beaten-track locations.

South Pacific Handbook RIP by David Stanley

Tim Leffel on the Seven Myths of Travel Writing

2007-11-09T14:24:00.001-08:00

Tim Leffel, the author of The World's Cheapest Destinations, has written a hard-hitting and eye-opening account of the truths about being a travel writer, and it's a winner.

A few weeks ago I received an interesting piece of mail. It said, “Launch your dream career as a travel writer today and get paid to travel the world.” All I had to do was sign up for an expensive correspondence course on travel writing. After that I could expect such rewards as “a complimentary week on an exotic Asian island” or a luxury vacation in Cancun “with airfare and all expenses paid.” The breathless come-on letter asked, “Why not live on permanent vacation?”

Why not indeed? Get paid to travel the world and live a life of leisure. What could be more glamorous?

Before you fall for it, remember that it is also glamorous to be a rock star, a best-selling novelist, or a starter for the Lakers. It’s not so glamorous, however, to be an aspiring actor (waiter) in Los Angeles, an aspiring songwriter (waiter) in Nashville, or an aspiring novelist (waiter) in New York. It may sound silly to compare travel writers like Tim Cahill or Jeff Greenwald to celebrities such as Tom Cruise and Stephen King, but the odds of getting to that level of success are just as daunting. The big difference is that when you do get to that upper echelon of travel writers, you’re still not making nearly as much money as the lowest-paid bench warmer in the NBA.

Just as plugging in a Stratocaster doesn’t make you a rock star, writing tales about your travels is not going to make you a travel writer. Like any position where supply far exceeds demand, you’ll need to follow the right steps and then pay your dues. It’s not going to happen overnight.

As a service to any beginning travel writers out there who are ready for the real story, here are the seven biggest myths of travel writing and the dirt on what to it will take to defy the odds.

Myth #1: Travel writers make enough money to live on

Transitions Abroad

Avalon Travel Publishing Purchased by Blackwater?

2007-10-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

It's just a parody by Jeff, but still a good laugh at the corporate insensitivity and ruthless impersonal actions of Bill Newlin in recent years.

Reuters Newswire

Blackwater USA, the private security firm hired by the Department of Defense and the State Department to provide support in Baghdad, announced today that it has urchased Avalon Travel Publishing. The sale was announced after the close of trading on the Dow Jones Stock Exchange.

"I've long admired the management style of Avalon, particularly the Moon component," said Col. (Retired) Mike Hammer, CEO of the controversial security firm. "I thought we ran a tough outfit, but after seeing how Bill Newlin and his people deal with authors, we knew we had to have his team on board with us. The best way to get talent, I always say, is to go out and buy it."

Hammer elaborated on the management style at Moon. "I admire a kick-ass company with absolutely no heart. That's what it takes to succeed today. If someone's been with you for more than four years, throw them out! They're useless. Cut the wages and hire some dumb bastards who don't know any better. That's how we try to operate at
Blackwater, but we're pikers compared to these guys at Moon. I expect to learn a lot from from them in the coming months."

Hammer and Newlin announced the titles to be released in the spring of 2008:

--Road Trip Iraq: Jamie Jenson dodges IEDs for a humorous romp through Fallujah, Tikrit, and Mossel.

--Rick Steve's Green Zone Through the Back Door (Quickly! Quickly!)

--The Practically Dead Nomad, by Edward Hasbrouck

--The Run Over Dog Lover's Guide to Iran, by Margaret Littman

Newlin announced that the few authors being retained by Moon will be asked to input more typesetting codes and, beginning in January of 2008, to glue the covers on their books. "We call these Moon 'Handbooks,'" he noted, "so we think that authors ought to have a hand in the production."

Hammer and Newlin also announced a new website that will focus on management. "We've had a lot of success with www.travelmatters.com," said Newlin, "so our new site, which we will roll out when we hire a new web crew to replace the one we just fired, will be called loyaltydoesntmatter.com."

Media inquiries should be sent to Hannah Cox.

# # #

With love and happiness to all,

Jeff

Harper Collins Editor Phil Friedman Won't Mention Tiananmen Square Massacre

2007-10-13T21:22:00.001-07:00

Way to go Harper Collins and editor Paul Friedman who will soon produce a book that ignores the civil and military atrocities of the Tiananman Square massacre, and so intend their book to gain favor with the Chinese authorities.

The politics of guidebooks
By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine

A new book for travellers to China plans to make no mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Should travel guides tell the whole history of a place, or bow to local sensitivities?

Hotels are a must. So are tips on the local cuisine. A few key phrases. Some maps. A list of the best tourist sites and their opening hours. Perhaps some cultural do and don'ts.

...and this is another

All are key ingredients of a typical guide book. And yet many also feel the need to offer something more - a grounding in the history of the place that can help flesh out its culture, architecture and art.

Take Nuremberg. You could describe the city's medieval architecture, its beautiful perch on the River Pegnitz and its role in the German Renaissance.

But many travellers might find it strange if you didn't mention the Nazis' Nuremberg rallies. At least once.

And one might find it a little surprising that HarperCollins is to publish a guide entitled Travel Around China to coincide with 2008's Beijing Olympics that will make no mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I don't think talk about the killings is appropriate for a travel guide

Phil Friedman, HarperCollins

The 1989 protest that culminated in demonstrators being fired on by soldiers, and the death of hundreds, is a taboo subject in China. Internet searches that would throw up results relating to the episode are censored. Newspapers do not mention it.

HarperCollins are yet to confirm the content of the book - compiled from contributions from native Chinese writers - but the prospects do not seem to favour a mention.

Years of history

Editor Phil Friedman - who is working on the book - says people want different things from a travel guide.

"I don't think talk about the killings is appropriate for a travel guide... Tiananmen Square had thousands of years of history before that occurred. Tiananmen is a feudal site, hugely important historic site. I'm not sure people travelling there would go there because there were shootings."

You could praise Nuremberg's architecture...
But to Independent travel editor Simon Calder, this attitude is problematic.

"Travel guides are not just about telling you where to get a cheap bed and meet the locals in civil circumstances. They are helping you to understand a place," he says.

"The notion you could get a proper idea of a country as complex, fascinating and in many ways alarming as China without knowing about the history and politics is preposterous."

BBC Link

Lonely Planet Responds

2007-10-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

Tony Wheeler has taken some heat recently from fans of Lonely Planet who accuse him of selling out to a British government media monopoly which will only exploit his vast storage of travel information and use it for the exploitation of the masses. But most readers seem to think this is an OK match and that LP-BBC Worldwide will be a comfortable merger that will someday send travel information to travelers on the road along with upscale tourists who still want to know the dance schedule at Nana. Time will tell.

Here's what Tony has to say to the readers of Thorn Tree:

A Message from Tony & Maureen Wheeler
Posted at 05:02PM Oct 02, 2007 by CarolB
A message to the Thorn Tree community from Tony & Maureen Wheeler:

It's time.

Yes, it's finally happened, after 34 years almost to the month, we’re moving on from Lonely Planet. We could say it's so we have more time for travel, but the reality is we've known for some time that Lonely Planet has to make a big step into the future.

But guidebooks are only part of Lonely Planet, the non-print part of our activities from websites to Lonely Planet Images, LPTV to B2B projects, may be a smaller part in turnover terms, but it’s the area which we believe is going to become increasingly important. Since 1994 we have spent a lot of time and money trying to find ways to help travellers access the immense amount of information we have on just about everywhere, as, how, when and where they want it.

We have developed useful tools online for travellers and instigated the mighty Thorn Tree, but to really develop this medium to its fullest extent, to be as innovative and as powerful a resource online as we are in print, we need help. The books subsidise everything else and are the basis of everything we do. We need to continue to invest in researching and collating information, but as technology develops we also need expertise and financial muscle to really exploit our full potential as the travel information authority of the future.

Enter BBC Worldwide. It's the side of the BBC which produces and markets BBC projects for the outside world, not just the British radio and television programs but also magazines, international TV channels, websites and mobile services. It's global, it has a wonderful reputation and as of today it's the new majority owner of Lonely Planet.

Why did we choose them? We had many offers from digital companies to international publishing houses to private entrepreneurs, and many were interesting, however BBCW got our attention because on so many important levels they 'got' Lonely Planet. Innovative and quirky, authoritative and trustworthy, ethical and principled are all words that we use within Lonely Planet to describe our company. All these words can also be applied to BBCW. We have spent several months getting to know BBCW and we are confident they are the right partner to help us take Lonely Planet into the future.

What changes is this going to mean? Only positive ones we believe. Their view is the book side of the operation ain't broke so they don’t have to fix it. That side will continue with new projects and new ideas just as it is doing today. The other side of Lonely Planet – that non-print side – is going to get a lot more energy and push.

And what will we do? Well we’re still going to have a substantial stake in Lonely Planet – 25% ownership – and BBCW have asked us to stay on board and work with them. We think we're going to be involved in some exciting new projects. And we might get more time to travel.

Lonely Planet Thorn Tree Message from Tony Wheeler

Lonely Planet Sold to BBC Worldwide

2007-10-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

This momentous event in travel publishing history took place a few weeks ago, but it seems that the word hasn't really gotten out that Tony Wheeler has sold his legendary Lonely Planet to BBC Worldwide for an estimated $200M, plus he's keeping 25% in his back pocket....just in case.

BBC Worldwide buys Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet publishes guides to 500 destinations

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has bought the travel guide publisher, Lonely Planet. Lonely Planet, founded by husband and wife team Tony and Maureen Wheeler in 1972, publishes around 500 titles that are widely used by backpackers.

The purchase fits in with BBC plans to grow online revenues and expand operations in America and Australia. Lonely Planet also produces travel programmes and its web site receives 4.3 million visitors a month. The Wheelers, who owned the business along with John Singleton, will retain a 25% shareholding in the company.

"We felt that BBC Worldwide would provide a platform true to our vision and values, while allowing us to take the business to the next level," they said.

The amount paid was not disclosed. The BBC said that the deal would strengthen Lonely Planet's visibility and growth potential. It would also allow Lonely Planet users to access BBC content - such as Michael Palin's New Europe.

After travelling overland from Europe to Australia, the Wheelers produced their first book, Across Asia on the Cheap, from their kitchen table. Today, Lonely Planet has offices in Melbourne, Oakland and London, with more than 500 office employees and more than 300 on-the-road authors.

BBC Link

And another report with more information and terms and price.

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corp., bought Lonely Planet in a deal that values the travel publisher at about 100 million pounds ($203 million), a person familiar with the talks said.
Lonely Planet founders Maureen and Tony Wheeler will keep a 25 percent stake, the BBC said Monday.

The couple, who met on a bench in The Regent's Park of London, started the publisher in 1972 after a honeymoon trip across Asia with "a beat-up old car, a few dollars in the pocket and a sense of adventure," Lonely Planet's Web site says.

More than 30 years after Across Asia on the Cheap, the couple have made about 70 million pounds ($142 million) on the sale, figures from the source suggest, since they owned about 90 percent of the business.

"Joining BBC Worldwide allows us to secure the long-term future of our company within a globally recognized media group," the Wheelers said in a statement.

Lonely Planet, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, publishes about 500 travel guides, including language, cycling and walking titles. The company, which employs 500 staff and as many as 300 on-the-road authors, has recently targeted a mature traveling audience after focusing on campers and backpackers for decades.

The deal will help the BBC become "one of the world's leading content businesses," BBC Worldwide Chief Executive John Smith said.

The broadcaster also aims to grow online brands, and to increase its operations in Australia and North America, Smith said.

"The association will strengthen Lonely Planet's visibility and growth potential, particularly in the digital arena, as well as providing their users access to the wide range of BBC content (that) connects with their interests," said Etienne de Villiers, nonexecutive chairman of BBC Worldwide.

Deloitte Touche Tohumatsu's Corporate Finance Advisory arm, as well as Australian law firm Blake Dawson Waldron, advised the BBC on the purchase, the broadcaster said.

ZD Net Link

And the best coverage with the best links comes from the Los Angeles Times.

Lonely Planet founders ’sell out’ to BBC Worldwide

The British Broadcasting Trust and Lonely Planet Publications announced today that Lonely Planet’s founders, Tony Wheeler and Maureen Wheeler, have sold their majority stake in Lonely Planet to British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Worldwide for an undisclosed sum.

Here’s a link to an upbeat video of Tony and Maureen’s official ‘adieu’ announcement on lonelyplanet.tv [after the 15-second ad].

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is reporting a sale price of $250 million [in Australian dollars, or roughly US$220mil]. Reuters pegs the price at 100 million pounds (or US$203mil). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has is at CA$221 million.

Here’s an ABC mp3 audio of Tony Wheeler explaining the deal (and the decision to keep publishing a Burma/Myanmar guidebook), in which he uses the phrase “sell out.”

The BBC and Lonely Planet are both reporting that the Wheelers will retain a 25% share of Lonely Planet and seats on the company’s board. As of Oct. 1, Lonely Planet is still hiring in Melbourne and London, from an Executive Assistant to the CFO to a Business Development Manager for Lonely Planet Images.

Here’s a link to a recent Q&A with Tony and Maureen Wheeler, with the Travel editors at our sister publication, the Chicago Tribune. As of the time of the sale announcement, here’s what the BBC had to say about Lonely Planet:

“BBC recommends: Lonely Planet

Select your destination and find indispensable, money-saving local information, including practical details like whether it’s acceptable to haggle.”

Here’s what Lonely Planet had to say about the BBC:

“BBC World Service - 648AM: Internationally known for its news coverage; also current affairs from around the world with a British accent.”

Finally, here’s what user ‘odecar10,’ a self-described “Economic migrant to the UK from the Emerald isle in the bad old days of the 1980’s and still there” had to say, on Lonely Planet’s Thorntree bulletin board:

“Unfortunately its true. LP now owned by the propoganda [sic] arm of the British Government.”

Watch this space for updates on how these developments might affect the guidebook and “independent” travel publisher’s future publishing, multimedia and broadcasting plans.

Does this move bode well for LP, its vibrant online community and tradition of ‘independent’ travel advice? Chime in below in the Comments section.

LA Times Link

Lonely Planet Job

2007-04-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

Have you ever dreamed of being a commissioning editor for Lonely Planet at their office in Oakland. Uh, they have a few qualifications for the job........

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/wri/318190785.html

Cruise Ship Lecturer Wanted

2007-04-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to lecture on a cruise ship? Here's the latest update.

Attention Destination Speakers... Tremendous Deals on April & May Cruise Assignments

If you are the kind of person who always has bags packed for the next adventure, then Sixth Star has some tremendous cruising opportunities for you.

From the tropics of the Caribbean to the glaciers of Alaska... from the antiquities of the Med to the pink sands of Bermuda, entertaining speakers are needed on a number of fantastic cruises. And due to the short notice of these assignments, Sixth Star is offering the voyages below at special reduced placement fees.

Qualified Destination Speakers and Destination-Related Special Interest Speakers who are interested and available for these specific assignments below should contact Sixth Star as soon as possible at (954) 462-6760 to learn more and reserve your spot.

April 20 - 27, 2007
Ship: Regent Seven Seas Mariner
Itinerary: Caribbean & Mexico (roundtrip Ft. Lauderdale)
Special Offer: Free (no placement fees)

April 21 - 28, 2007
Ship: Diamond Princess
Itinerary: Mexican Riviera (rountrip Los Angeles)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

April 26 - May 9, 2007
Ship: Celebrity Century
Itinerary: Miami - Amsterdam (via Azores, Spain & France)
Special Offer: Free (no placement fees) with one roundtrip airfare and gratuities for one

April 27 - May 12, 2007
Ship: Regent Seven Seas Mariner
Itinerary: Panama Canal (Ft. Lauderdale to San Francisco)
Special Offer: Free (no placement fees)
April 28 - May 5, 2007
Ship: Grandeur of the Seas
Itinerary: Caribbean (New Orleans to San Juan)
Special Offer: Free (no placement fees)

May 1 - 14, 2007
Ship: Celebrity Galaxy
Itinerary: San Juan to Rome (via Morocco, Spain & France)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees with one roundtrip airfare and gratuities for one

May 5 - 12, 2007
Empress of the Seas
Itinerary: Bermuda (roundtrip Norfolk, VA)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 8 - 20, 2007
Royal Princess (NEW SHIP)
Itinerary: Mediterranean (Athens to Barcelona)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees with one roundtrip airfare and gratuities for two

May 12 - 19, 2007
Splendor of the Seas
Itinerary: Greek Isles & Turkey (roundtrip Venice)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 18 - 25, 2007
Radiance of the Seas
Itinerary: Alaska (Vancouver to Seward)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 19 - 26, 2007
Empress of the Seas
Itinerary: Bermuda (roundtrip Norfolk, VA)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 20 - June 1, 2007
Royal Princess (NEW SHIP)
Itinerary: Mediterranean (Barcelona to Athens)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees with one roundtrip airfare and gratuities for two

May 20 - 27, 2007
Marco Polo
Itinerary: Mediteranean (Rome to Barcelona)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 25 - June 1, 2007
Radiance of the Seas
Itinerary: Alaska (Seward to Vancouver)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 26 - June 2, 2007
Celebrity Journey (NEW SHIP)
Itinerary: Bermuda (roundtrip Cape Liberty, NJ)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 26 - June 2, 2007
Empress of the Seas
Itinerary: Bermuda (roundtrip Norfolk, VA)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

May 29 - June 10, 2007
Emerald Princess (NEW SHIP)
Itinerary: Mediterranean (Barcelona to Venice)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees with one roundtrip airfare and gratuities for two

May 31 - June 12, 2007
Legend of the Seas
Itinerary: Italy and Croatia (roundtrip Rome)
Special Offer: 50% discount on placement fees

Go Sailing with Sixth Star's Newest Cruise Line Partner - Lindblad Expeditions

We are thrilled to tell you about a very special lecturing opportunity with our newest cruise line client - Lindblad Expeditions and it's magnificent sailing vessel, the Sea Cloud II.

Limited to only 82 guests, the spacious three-masted barque is 384 feet long with over 29,000 square feet of sails all set by hand. Like no other ship, she combines the timeless elegance of windjammers of the past with the highest safety standards and luxurious comfort of modern cruise ships.

We are seeking a Destination Lecturer or Destination-Related Special Interest to sail from Cadiz, Spain to St. John's Antigua via Funchal, Madeira. The dates of this once in a lifetime crossing are November 7 - 25, 2007. Adding to this special opportunity, gratuities, airfare and grand transportation for the lecturer and his/her guest will be provided.

Lindblad Expeditions' website features a wonderful video of the Sea Cloud II on the home page. If you are interested in this assignment, we encourage you to visit www.expeditions.com to learn more. For more information about booking this assignment, contact Iain Jamieson at (954) 462-6760 ext. 225.

Cruise One of the World's Most Spectacular Destinations - French Polynesia

This summer and fall, Sixth Star has several opportunities to cruise one of the world's most beautiful destinations - Tahiti and French Polynesia.

With its crystal clear water in countless hues of blue, framed by lush and rugged mountain ranges, French Polynesia's spectacular beauty is enjoyed on a regular basis by only two intimate cruising vessels - the Paul Gauguin and the Tahitian Princess.

Sixth Star is pleased to offer lecturing assignments on both vessels to qualified speakers in our rosters. The following cruises are available:

June 5 - 17, 2007
Ship: Tahitian Princess
Itinerary: Tahiti & Hawaii - (Papeete to Honolulu)
Contact: Pat McPherson at pat@sixthstar.com

June 17 - 29, 2007
Ship: Tahitian Princess
Itinerary: Hawaii & Tahiti - (Honolulu to Papeete)
Contact: Pat McPherson at pat@sixthstar.com

June 30 - July 11, 2007
Ship: Paul Gauguin
Itinerary: French Polynesia (roundtrip Papeete)
Special Note: Lecturer on this voyage is requested to speak exclusively on the life and art of Paul Gauguin.
Contact: Iain Jamieson at iain@sixthstar.com

July 19 - 31, 2007
Ship: Tahitian Princess
Itinerary: Tahiti & Hawaii - (Papeete to Honolulu)
Contact: Pat McPherson at pat@sixthstar.com

September 19 - October 1, 2007
Ship: Tahitian Princess
Itinerary: Hawaii & Tahiti - (Honolulu to Papeete)
Contact: Pat McPherson at pat@sixthstar.com

November 3 - December 1, 2007
Ship: Paul Gauguin
Itinerary:French Polynesia, Cook Islands & Fiji (sailing roundtrip Papeete)
Special Note: Lecturer on this voyage is requested to speak exclusively on the Cook Islands and Fiji.
Contact: Iain Jamieson at iain@sixthstar.com

Travel Writing Subsidies

2007-04-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

There's been a long running discussion about the ethics of travel writers accepting "freebies" and it's an issue most professional travel writers consider a non-issue. Most travel writers accept free or subsidized travel since the industry does not pay enough to first pay all travel expenses and then write and sell the stories. A free or partially free trip or hotel room does not necessarily mean that the travel writer will give a positive review, but in most cases only means that the service will not be mentioned. It's all covered, once again, in a recent post by a travel writer in Texas.

Subsidized travel is controversial and lots of very ethical and pious journalists look down on me as tainted and corrupt because I do it. Fuck 'em. It's a debate I don't bother getting into anymore. Suffice to say that I can't be bought. I accept only trips I think I can sell. If something isn't worth writing about, I don't write about it. I include negative impressions in larger stories when appropriate but rarely write completely negative stories not because I am beholden to anyone, but because they don't sell. Editors with limited space don't want to squander it telling readers where not to go.

I'm an ethical person doing my best in a squirrely field. A lot of newspapers pay peanuts but don't accept stories from subsidized trips. A lot of newspapers have a don't ask-don't tell policy about subsidies but if you get "caught" you're in trouble, not the editor. Many magazines are less stringent in their policies, although Conde Nast Traveler and Travel & Leisure are among those with strict no-subsidies policies. They pay for their reporters' travel. I cracked T&L once a long time ago but got tired of the effort it took to get back in and haven't tried again in many years.

By stating here that I sometimes travel on subsidies I have ensured that I will never write for The New York Times, which claims never to accept stories from writers who have ever accepted a subsidy. I have heard differently from many publicists, who claim to frequently spot stories in the Times by freelancers they have hosted. Nobody will ever go on the record with that, though, because nobody wants to piss off the Times.

Sophie's Blog

Travel Writing Not All Fun and Sun

2007-04-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

The average person may regard travel writing as among the world's most blessed professions, but the reality is often quite different, as once again pointed out in this eye-opening article by Susan McKee.

Travel writing not all fun and sun
Strong ethics, research keys to success

By Susan McKee

As a professional travel writer, I occupy a place in the journalistic hierarchy somewhere just above pond scum. It’s tricky territory for a freelancer for two major reasons: press trips and poseurs.

Almost all newspapers and magazines still buying freelance will not pick up a writer’s expenses, and the rates they pay don’t come close to making up that shortfall. Freelancers are responsible for their own health insurance and other costs that are typically part of the benefits package for an employed journalist. Add in travel time and, as one writer put it, the profit margin shrivels like salted leeches in the sun.

If you don’t have a trust fund to underwrite your travel writing specialty, two solutions beckon: write only about your own hometown (yawn!) or take press trips.

SPJ Link

Carla King Motorcyle Adventures

2007-04-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

Carla and Ural with Sidecar

Sorry about the gap in posts, but I've been indisposed. It's always great when a local acquaintance publishes a book, especially when it's about one of my favorite subjects: hitting the road with your motorcycle. I'm known Carla for many years and see her at local travel writing events here in the Bay Area, and followed her motorcycle adventures many Moons ago when she left to explore some of the back roads of the American West. And now, the book.

I'll be going to her booksigning at Get Lost on Market Street later this month, but she's also making appearances elsewhere in the Bay Area and has even lined up a few gigs in Europe. And to think her secret occupation is ....... computer geek.

A journey to explore the borders between the United States, Canada, and Mexico becomes a comedy of breakdowns in small towns all around America in this new travelogue by Carla King, author of the Motorcycle Misadventures series of Internet dispatches. Mechanical, social, and natural disasters punctuate the four-month, ten-thousand mile solo test ride of the newly-imported Russian Ural sidecar motorcycle: cracked welds and electrical gremlins, evil tow truck drivers, roadside romances, even tornadoes and hurricanes.

Carla King Motorcycle Misadventures

Tripso Answers (mostly) Travel Problems

2006-07-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

My Dad flew this Plane

My Dad (George Bigler Parkes) flew the plane above many times during his times in the United States Air Force, until the plane finally caught fire, all engines, and crashed into the Irish Sea in the mid-1950s. Everyone died except for my Dad and three other guys. He was deemed a survival expert and moved over to the USAF survival unit where he traveled and lectured for years about survival techniques from the Arctic to Panama.

In other news, always happy to recommend the sage advise coming from Tripso, where a small collection of travel writers and others in the industry continue to answer questions about the trials and tribulations of being a traveler. Not necessarily a travel writer, but it's close enough, and this site always rings true, plus there's an RSS feed for easy daily access.

Question: Recently, I booked airline tickets from Chicago to the Greek island of Crete online through Sam's Club. When I called to confirm my reservation, I was told that my flight had been canceled. A representative asked me to mail the old tickets back and we agreed to pick a new flight.

Although I was led to believe that we had made another reservation, something apparently went wrong with the transaction, and the booking didn't go through. I called Sam's later, when the tickets didn't arrive, and it turned out that my credit card number had been typed into the system incorrectly by one of its agents.

In the meantime, the price of the tickets had gone up $500 each. Sam's agreed to pay the difference and we settled on a new flight.

Problem solved? Not quite.

On my return flight on Aegean Airlines, I was told my tickets were "no good." If I wanted to catch a flight home, they said, I would have to stand in line and buy another ticket for about $300. The reason the tickets weren't valid? Sam's had printed the Aegean tickets on the wrong ticket stock, which made them unacceptable.

I'm trying to get my money back from Sam's for the extra ticket I had to buy, but so far, no luck. Can you help me?

Kathy Winters, Cottage Grove, Wis.

Answer: Wow, talk about the vacation from hell. It looks like almost everything related to your airline tickets went wrong: a cancellation, a booking that didn't go through and then a worthless ticket.

Although Sam's tried to make things right, it ultimately left you with a bill for $300. Then it stonewalled you when you asked for a refund.

Tripso Link

Times Links to Travel Sites

2006-07-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

Canned Heat in SF

I don't know who collects or checks these links from the Sunday Times (London), but they really don't have a clue about decent and useful websites for the traveler. This is just another knock against having some junior, young, newly hired editor given the assignment to survey the travel world via blogs and websites, when it really takes a great deal of time to understand what is going on.

The 108 best travel websites
From bookings to blogs, Gareth Scurlock picks the essential sites

NOT SO LONG ago, finding what you wanted on the internet was hard, and buying online was beset with worries. Now search engines are better at finding the site that you need, and reliable, top-quality travel websites have emerged.

But the joy of the web is its sheer size and variety; there are hundreds of independent travel specialists offering something quirky, different and fascinating.

Our choice of the Top 100 Travel Websites has been based on quality of information, design, value for money and ease of use. In the freewheeling spirit of the internet, we have aimed to make our selection new and surprising, so we have excluded many bigger sites.

Instead, our list leans towards “indie” websites run by enthusiasts, bloggers telling of their adventures, round-ups of handy tips, and any free and useful service.

Times Online Link

Funny Stuff Mistakes from a PR Hack

2006-07-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Whine, Whine

I would assume that many of you travel writers know the missives of Durant, who actively participates in many of the travel writers forums on the web, and so he posts a short but very humorous missive from some PR person (unnamed) with all the guffs. Not really earth shaking news, but always fun, so thanks Durant.

Shit, I can't find it. Problems with Blogger. Perhaps later.

Found it!

AN APOLOGY FOR ERRONEOUS AD

To all our readers,

With all sense of responsibility, the staff, management and editors of
eTurboNews apologizes for the error in yesterday's Rail Europe ad featuring
France Wine Tour.

We are sorry that the subject for the eTurboNews Travel-Telegram broadcast
read "France Whine Tour" instead of "France Wine Tour"....

Here's his link to all things Europe:

Durant Link to Europe for Visitors

New York Times on Travel Guidebook Work

2006-07-11T09:45:00.000-07:00

A Happy Travel Writer

That's Brad running through the water in some warm, sunny place. Since it seems that most readers of this blog can't be bothered to click the links, I'll go ahead and give you a heads up about the recent story in the New York Times about the "trials and tribulations of being a travel writer." See, it fits right into my theme.

It's summer now, and countless travelers are fumbling their way around the globe, heads buried in guides published by Let's Go, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and Frommer's among others. Probably few stop to consider what goes into producing travel guides or even who wrote them. And as it turns out, many of the intrepid young writers scouring the planet doing research for next year's crop of guidebooks never stopped to consider what those jobs would entail, other than the romantic — and often overstated — prospect of being paid to travel.

While the phrase "travel writing" may invoke thoughts of steamer trunks, trains, Isak Dinesen and Graham Greene, or at the very least, well-financed junkets to spas in Rangoon for some glossy magazine or other, writing budget travel guides is most decidedly yeoman's work. Most who do it quickly learn the one hard and fast rule of the trade: travel-guide writing is no vacation.

"Many underestimate exactly how much work goes into making a guide book," said Jay Cooke, an editor for Lonely Planet. "Some potential authors think it would be fun to travel and get paid for it. But they're expected to write tens of thousands of words. It's a big, big job, and it goes far beyond journal keeping on a beach somewhere."

Indeed a day in the life of a guide writer can be wearying. Amelia Atlas, a recent Harvard graduate who is now in Berlin researching a guide to that city for Let's Go, said that last Wednesday she set out early to case a new neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, for her Berlin guide. She visited three hostels and three restaurants before collecting the shopping and eating options around a particular square. She visited a section of the Berlin Wall that still stands, made notes about the historical displays there, and set about walking the neighborhood block by block to see what she might find. After a quick dinner, Ms. Atlas went to her apartment to write about the day's findings. Then she planned to go out to sample the night life. "Manic is a good word," she said.

New York Times Link

Travel Happy on Travel Guidebook Work

2006-07-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

Airline Seating Configuration

When it rains, it pours. After the post below by Erik at Gadling, Travel Happy from Southeast Asia follows up with some more discouraging advice for prospective travel guidebook writers, including a link to the recent controversial article published last Sunday in the New York Times.

Becoming a travel writer for one of the major guidebook companies like Lonely Planet or Let's Go is not the romantic idyll many imagine before they hit the road.

The New York Times has a pretty dispiriting piece on the state of the travel guidebook industry, where young, eager writers are paid a pittance to spend thousands of hours on the road collating info about hotels and restaurants for the next guidebook edition. Pay rates have spiralled downwards because there are so many people willing to take on the job and whose words can be hacked into readable prose by editors at the mothership office. It's essentially become a McJob, which one guidebook writer likens to "data entry". There's a lot of travelling in terms of logistics but precious little in terms of travel experience per se, and a huge amount of ongoing stress to submit all that information on time.

You'd have to be incredibly well organised and efficient to leave some time over for you to actually enjoy the places you're travelling and stay within your advance budget. I'm not saying it can't be done - but I am saying you should think, think and think again before getting involved with this sort of gig. Personally, I think saving up a few thousand dollars and then going travelling without any ties in South East Asia would be much more preferable, even if it doesn't have the kudos of being a guidebook writer - kudos which isn't much use because you can't tell anyone you work for one of the major guidebooks anyway for fear of favouritism.

It's definitely worth checking Josh Berman's advice on how to be a travel guidebook writer and Friskodude's TravelWriters blog - he's a veteran travel journalist who's resolutely unsentimental about travel writing for a living.

Travel Happy Link

Gadling on Travel Guidebook Work

2006-07-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Travel Truths?

Blogger seems to somewhat screwy this morning, so I'm not sure if these posts are going through. Readers sometimes ask me why I don't add more content to this blog, but do please remember that I have a theme here: the trials and tribulations of being a travel writer. It's always somewhat difficult to find new, appropriate content, but I do want to follow this theme. If you want to know where to give away your travel writing content for free, or next to nothing, you'll need to go elsewhere. And if you want to read fine travel literature, the usual suspects are listed over to the right.

In other news, Erik at Gadling has graciously put up a new post today about "the trails and tribulations of travel writing," so it fits right into the theme of this blog. Do check the link for some additional hot links. The link to the blog of Lief Pettersen is just outstanding......

For those who have ever entertained dreams of gallivanting off to exotic lands to pen travel guides, hold on just a moment. The travel-guide writing life ain't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, when you are a guidebook writer, you are more likely to find yourself checking under toilet seats or sniffing mattresses than hanging on the beach or sipping tropical drinks with the locals. The job is work, not vacation. There was an interesting article about this in a particular paper about which I cannot write. But as a secondary source, I point you to two places. Both of these sites actually do a fine job conveying what life as a travel writer is like. In this site by the travel writer Leif Pettersen, who happens to be in right now, we learn a lot about guide writing in Eastern Europe. Here in this post he coaches you along to help you nurture your skills of asking for free carp...um, I mean crap.

And then in one of my old stand-bys, I urge you to pay a visit to FriskoDude, aka Carl Parkes, who often ruminates on this very subject. And even if you can't find a post to your liking (unlikely), you can at least admire his wonderful sense of humor in the photos he posts.

Gadling Link

Leif Pettersen on Free Crap for Travel Writers

2006-07-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

World Map

I wasn't going to post this link, but just let you folks follow the link provided by Gadling, but it's such a great piece of work that I just had to pass it along. In fact, do take the time to explore the entire blog of Leif Pettersen, who's an enormously talented travel writer with plenty of useful messages and advice for prospective travel guidebook writers. I don't necessarily agree with his opinions about accepting free crap while researching guidebooks, but it's still an hilarious piece of writing.

The delicate art of asking for free crap

You may be surprised to hear that travel writing has a seedy underside. Quite often, almost routinely in fact (when you’re not working for Lonely Planet), travel writers are given a free room, meal or service, with an accompanying wink, on the condition that they compose glowing praise for whatever the free thing was, no matter how much ass it sucked.

The nadir of this ritual is called a ‘press trip’. This is where some tourism bureau organizes an all-expenses paid trip for a pack of travel writers (with assignment letters in hand, obviously, we gotta keep out the riffraff), arranging for flights, hotel rooms, meals and tours, hands held for every waking second, and then the travel writer is sent home to write an article, or more preferably articles, about how great the destination was, even if it was Miami.

Mostly this is just underhanded advertising under the guise of what lay-people assume is an objective travel article. However, tourism bureaus aren’t completely to blame for the popularity of this tactic. In the defense of what may seem like greed on the part of the travel writers, the reality is that newspapers can’t find it in their hearts to pay more than $100-200 per article. So, if a professional travel writer were to pay their own way on a one week trip, even to some relatively cheap destination like Duluth, then came back and spent two days diligently writing the article for an average newspaper fee, the travel writer’s net earnings for that assignment (nine days of time, plus expenses) would be about -$500. Over the course of a calendar year, that travel writer would net between -$25,000 and -$50,000, depending on trips and expenses. The upshot is all these negative earnings would be tax free. In your face IRS!!!

Clearly, this isn’t a feasible arrangement. Tourism bureaus saw a slick, promotional opportunity that helped both them and the travel writers and press trips were born.

As if to cement their positions as blood-sucking wankers, now many newspapers won’t accept articles that were written on the strength of a press trip, meaning unless their field of hopeful travel writers is independently wealthy, none of them can afford to take a newspaper assignment that ranges further than local zoo. Since no one is beating down their doors to work for negative money, the newspapers usually end up printing some soulless shite they bought off a syndicate that was probably written by someone who themselves wrote the piece off a press trip, or worse, wrote the piece from Internet research and thinly veiled plagiarizing off other travel articles. While the newspapers fancy this approach as being honorable and legit, in actuality everyone loses, particularly the readers.

Leif Pettersen Killing Batteries Link

Travel Guidebook Agent Warnings

2006-07-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

The Road to Mandalay by Carl Parkes

Kipling wrote that famous phrase about the Road to Mandalay (up the river from Rangoon) but did you know that Kipling never visited Mandalay? Reading this blog, you get all kinds of trivia that might come in useful in your next game of Trivial Pursuit.

In other news, it's bad enough that freelance travel writers must navigate around terrible contracts, but those suckers who actually resort to using the services of an "agent" must keep their radar on high alert.

Also, I've had a few questions about why I don't update this blog very often. The answer if simple. I'm trying to keep this blog focused on the Trials and Tribulations of being a Travel Writer. If you want leads to writing gigs for no money, you can check other blogs. If you want fine travel writing, see WorldHum. If you want to know the dirt on the real world of travel writing, see this blog. I don't get much information that fits in this blog, and rather than just fill blank space, I let this blog lay dormant until I find something relevant to the subject matter. Of course, if you find something of interest, do please send it along and I'll repost it here.

Victoria Strauss -- Top Ten Signs Your Agent is a Scammer

Because we can't be serious all the time.

10. Your offer of representation comes via form letter (somehow, you never do get his phone number).

9. Whoever typed his contract didn't use spel chek and can't rite real gud neither.

8. You first heard of him when [pick one: you found his ad in the back of Writer's Digest/you saw his ad on Google/he solicited you].

7. When you asked if he'd worked for another agency before establishing his own, he said yes--a real estate agency.

6. When you asked for a list of recent sales, he told you the information was confidential, because he didn't want you pestering his clients. And by the way, only a bad, ungrateful writer would ask that kind of question.

5. When you asked what publishers were looking at your manuscript, he told you the information was confidential, because he didn't want you pestering the editors. What is he, anyway, your secretary?

4. When you got his contract, you discovered you had to pay [pick one: $150/$250/$450/more] for [pick one: submission/administration/marketing/circulation/other].

3. He told you your ms. was great, but when you got your contract you discovered you had to [pick one: pay for a critique/pay for line editing/pay for a marketability assessment].

2. He got you an offer from a publisher--but you have to [pick one: pay for publication/pay for editing/pay for publicity/buy 1,000 copies of your book].

And the number one sign your agent is a scammer: You got an email from his assistant telling you he'd been killed in a car crash, but when you called to ask where to send the sympathy card, he answered the phone.

(And in case you're wondering, I didn't make that up.)

A. C. Crispin Blog Link

Another Warning Against Writing for Free

2006-06-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

Japan MPC Five Cents 1960

Writing for free is the single most powerful element destroying all possibilities of survival as a freelance writer, as once again pointed out in the excellent weekly email newsletter. Writers Weekly. A guest columnist provides an introduction and then passes along a few email messages he recently received commenting on his previous column on the same subject. All writers were opposed to giving away their writing skills for free, aside from one surprising exception, Tim Leffel.

In my previous spew concerning sites that offer to place your blog entries in publications to give you more "exposure," I indicated that I was not comfortable with the concept of opportunists feeding off my carcass without benefit of compensation.

But, since this write-for-free debate is such a tired standby, I sighed and said maybe I was becoming the crab on the block. What do you think? I asked. My mailbox overflowed!

One writer, who is a top-rated contributor to one of the sites mentioned, commented: "Although it's very nice to have a star by my name and be recognized for my superior writing prowess (gag, she adds), the articles haven't done a thing for me professionally. The only thing writing for free has done for me is gain me a reputation as a generous spirit - or sucker - depending on your vantage point."

"This ties to my pet peeve, trawling craigslist.org for legitimate writing job links and instead, finding several advertisements looking for writers for 'no pay,' just 'Coverage, Resume building! Exposure!' ad nauseum," writes feng shui expert Katy Allgeyer (www.fengshuibyfishgirl.com). "I actually emailed Craig himself. Much to my surprise, Craig emailed me back 20 minutes later and said they are working on the problem. I suggested they come up with another heading for these types of jobs. 'slave labor' comes to mind."

Betsy Crowfoot, a journalist and screenwriter for 11 years, says this controversy is being fueled by the existence of two camps: Those who are full-time writers and want/need to make a living at this profession, and those who want to be writers, but are making their living in another profession and don't rely on writing gigs to feed their children. (I would add those with working spouses to that list.) "Unfortunately," she says, "this gives editors/businesses the idea they don't have to pay writers or pay them on time."

"I can't tell you the number of times I"ve had these robber barons try to blow smoke up my rump with their lines about how they have helped writers by ripping off their content," writes DeAnn Rossetti. "I just read an ad yesterday on Craigslist that said, 'Do it for the love of writing.' Ha!"

Continues Rossetti: "These same people pay for everything else on their site, the hosting service, the website layout, and I am sure they pay a doctor when he has taken care of them. I doubt they tell him that by taking care of their health concerns, he is getting good publicity!"

Writes Kevin Murphy, author of Degrees of Murder and other books, "The only 'freebies' I ever do are for no-budget community organizations of which I am a member - and I do very few of those."

Writers Weekly Link

Whispers and Warnings from Writers Weekly

2006-06-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Victim of Writer Scams

The always informative Writers Weekly often posts warnings relevant to all writers, whether your thing is fiction or travel, this weekly email site is well worth subscribing to. See the link below for hot links to each article. Thanks, Angela.

Whispers And Warnings For June 21st

EzineArticles.com - Charging $750 to get published?!?! HA HA HA!!!

Writopia Inc. / T-zero Xpandizine / The Writer's E-Zine / thewritersezine.com - Writer not paid until WritersWeekly intervenes

Freelance Work Exchange / freelanceworkexchange.com - Another Complaint.

publishforlesscompany.com - SPAMMER and this guy gives us the creeps!

Long Story Short / lsswritingschool.com - SPAMMERS

AllGoodArticles.com - SPAMMERS

The Village Magazine / Privilege Media Group International - And another complaint!

Writers Weekly Link

Passport News

2006-06-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

My Expired Passport

Last month, I was invited on press trips from Tourism Malaysia and Tourism Authority of Thailand, and so checked my passport, which expired in April 2006. Yep, the long-time world traveler hadn't checked his passport in almost a decade, and it had gone out-of-date just before the 60th coronation of the Thai king and a trip to the northeastern section of peninsular Malaysia......so I was out of luck.

Tripso, the "last honest travel website" (I guess that eliminates this blog) has some reminders and tips about keeping your passport current for future travels.

It’s true: Some countries require that your U.S. passport be valid not only for the duration of your visit, but also for three to six months after your entry or return from their country. This means you have to check your passport expiration date carefully. For example, if your passport expires on March 1, 2007, and you want to travel this coming November, you may need to renew your passport before you go.

Here is a list of some countries that have special passport expiration rules.

Tripso Link

Packing Light

2006-06-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

Travel Journalist on the Road

J. Flynn at the S.F. Chron Sunday travel section recently posted his travel tips about packing light here but I've got my own list culled after over 20 years of travel in Asia, and kept tucked away inside my passport for easy reference before each trip.

* office supplies: rubber bands, tape, stapler, scissors, white-out, only fine-point pens

* misc: swiss army knife (in all plastic version), can opener, superglue

* misc: small umbrella, alarm clock, sunglasses

* misc: zip-lock bags (six), notebooks, briefcase

* pants: 1 pair cotton, 1 pair nice slacks

* shorts: 2 pair (1 wild, 1 conservative)

* shirts: 2 pair wild short-sleeved shirts

* shirts: 2 polo shirts with pockets

* shirts: no long-sleeved shirts!

* socks: 6 dark only

* shoes: 1 pair light and comfortable; good sandals

* maybe: ground coffee beans and melita filters

The Decline of Photo Stock Agencies

2006-05-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

World Map by Population

Think the decline and fall of the professional travel writing industry is a sad, sad thing? Then consider the crisis now facing professional photographers, who have been making a respectable living via photo stock agencies for many decades. Looks like the photo stock agency as business model is almost on it's last legs.

After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. “I discovered a stock photo site called iStockphoto,” she wrote, “which has images at very affordable prices.” That was an understatement. The same day, Menashe licensed 56 pictures through iStockphoto – for about $1 each.

iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. How? By creating a marketplace for the work of amateur photographers – homemakers, students, engineers, dancers. There are now about 22,000 contributors to the site, which charges between $1 and $5 per basic image. (Very large, high-resolution pictures can cost up to $40.) Unlike professionals, iStockers don’t need to clear $130,000 a year from their photos just to break even; an extra $130 does just fine. “I negotiate my rate all the time,” Harmel says. “But how can I compete with a dollar?”

He can’t, of course. For Harmel, the harsh economics lesson was clear: The product Harmel offers is no longer scarce. Professional-grade cameras now cost less than $1,000. With a computer and a copy of Photoshop, even entry-level enthusiasts can create photographs rivaling those by professionals like Harmel. Add the Internet and powerful search technology, and sharing these images with the world becomes simple.

Wired Link

Writing Job Opportunities in the Bay Area

2006-05-24T18:48:00.000-07:00

World Map to Explore

Several intriguing writing job opportunities has recently popped up on Craig's List for those of you living in the Bay Area, or willing to relocate.

********************************

Common Ground Editor (SOMA / south beach)

Reply to: jobs@cenlightenment.com
Date: 2006-05-24, 6:26PM PDT

Common Ground is looking for a new editor and writers for our revised publication. Common Ground has been covering the spiritual, political, environmental issues of the Bay Area for over 30 years. We are looking for writers/editors who want to make a difference.

Our ideal candidates are spiritual, not religious, love the environment and have an activist vibe, and knows San Francisco. If this is you or if you have articles that you think may be of interest to us please send them along.

************************************

Editor/Content Manager (potrero hill)

Reply to: employment@cca.edu
Date: 2006-05-24, 3:36PM PDT

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT
EDITOR/CONTENT MANAGER
SAN FRANCISCO CAMPUS
FULL TIME (37.5 HOURS/WEEK), EXEMPT
May 2006
Job #1745

THE COLLEGE:
Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts is the largest regionally accredited, independent school of art and design in the western United States. Noted for the interdisciplinary nature and breadth of its programs, the college offers studies in eighteen majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design, and writing. The college confers the bachelor of architecture, bachelor of arts, bachelor of fine arts, master of architecture, master of arts, and master of fine arts degrees. With campuses in San Francisco and Oakland, California College of the Arts currently enrolls fifteen hundred full-time students.

REPORTS TO: Director of Publications

DEPARTMENT: Communications

SUMMARY
Under the direction of the director of publications, the editor/content manager is responsible for managing copy for a variety of college publications.

RESPONSIBILITIES INCLUDE:
* Manage college copy across departments in order to promote a unified image/voice of the college; develop database of copy that can be drawn on for a variety of print and web publications
* Serve as editor of and write feature articles and news items for Glance, the biannual college magazine; work with in-house and freelance writers on other magazine articles
* Maintain CCAÂ¡Â¦s house style guide
* Contract and supervise freelance writers and proofreaders
* Work with clients from various departments of the college to help them develop copy
* Manage new copy and updates for college listings in PetersonÂ¡Â¦s and Princeton guides; also, coordinate copy for college listings in various online guides
* Manage copy for various print publication series, e.g. CCA Wattis Institute catalogs, Architecture Studio Series
* Compile collegewide calendar listings for use in web and print materials
* Work with news team and web manager to write news items and repurpose copy for college website
* Write articles, press releases, brochure copy, and other texts, as needed
* Proofread college publications, as needed
* Work on publications with in-house Sputnik design team, as well as freelance designers

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
* BA and three or more years editing and writing experience, preferably within an educational or cultural setting
* Excellent copyediting, proofreading, and writing skills
* Detail-oriented with a thorough knowledge of and experience using The Chicago Manual of Style and The Associated Press Stylebook
* Ability to work on deadline and manage a number of assignments at once
* Outstanding interpersonal skills; the ability to work well with faculty, staff, and students; and a proven record of working both independently and as part of a team.
* Flexibility and ability to thrive in a fast-paced, creative environment.

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:
Applicants are invited to submit a letter of interest, resume and the names and telephone numbers of three professional references to:

California College of the Arts
Human Resources (Job #1745)
5212 Broadway
Oakland, CA 94618-1487
fax (510) 594-3681
employment@cca.edu

Application Deadline:
Screening begins immediately and will continue until the position is filled.

California College of the Arts is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes
applications from individuals who will contribute to its diversity.

Compensation: Starting salary $43,000 to $46,000, and includes a comprehensive benefits package.

This is at a non-profit organization.

Dead Magazine Reviews

2006-05-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

One Magazine Dead

If you're thinking about sending off your latest travel missive to some suspect magazine, you might check the website below to see if the mag will still be in business in six months, and able to send you that hefty check for your writing skills.

Besides, any website that can quote obscure lyrics from Alice Cooper is completely all right with me. Did I tell you I was in Phoenix last week, and that Cooper has a restaurant/nightclub in that town? He, apparently, hangs out there on a regular basis, when he's not working on his nine-iron shot at the local links.

Bundle: RIP April 2005 - May 2006

Alice Cooper is one of the Grim Reaper's favorite bands from the 70's with their classic 1971album Killer, and the song "Dead Babies." Perhaps you remember the lyrics? Sing along with the Reaper if you know this one: "Dead babies can't take care of themselves/Dead babies can't take things off the shelf."

Well, here's one magazine that can no longer take care of itself. Harris Publishing shut down their baby shopping magazine Bundle today after five issues.

Even the Reaper has to admire this feat from the under-the-radar Harris -- not only did they fail in the much hyped "shopping" category, but the Reaper can't remember the last time a baby magazine went under.

Perhaps like men and Cargo, mommies just don't want baby shopping magazines when they already get inundated with real baby catalogs in the mail, gifts from friends, and oh yes, the other five zillion parenting magazines.

So we are taking this "Bundle" down the dark river, while the Reaper puts on his DiePod for some more Alice Cooper: "No more Mr. Nice Guy/No more Mr. Cle-e-e-ean!"

Magazine Death Pool

Outside Travel Issue

2006-05-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Mt. Abu India by Carl Parkes

I just got back from a two week press trip to Arizona organized by SATW, which featured several travel writers and editors pontificating on the perils of travel writing in the modern age. The travel editor and former freelance travel writer who now oversees Arizona Highways, and Larry at the Dallas Morning News both had the same message for travel writers: get "chunky" and learn to love bullets in 500 words or less. I just wanted to hang myself in the nearest bathroom after hearing the doom and gloom outlook from both of these respected travel editors.

In other news, Outside magazine has posted some travel tidbits in "chunky" version (I think that means "bullets" rather than long, involved discourse) that is worth a gander, but don't expect any critical or meaningful insight. But do expect some clever and quick writing.

You can click the link at the bottom of each page to go to the next travel matter.

With 78 percent of U.S. travelers now using the Internet to plan their trips, you might assume guidebooks are on the wane. You'd be wrong. Sixty-eight percent of American travelers still turn to guidebooks for travel advice. "You can read your guidebook in the bathroom or on a train or on a ferry on the Congo River," notes Simone Andrus, whose Seattle travel store Wide World Books & Maps has seen guidebook sales rise by 10 percent since 2004.

When shopping for a guide, check the copyright page (you want something that's been updated more recently than, say, the tax code) and find one that focuses as narrowly as possible on your destination. Look for a personality that matches yours—but let go of any decade-old stereotypes. Books from Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and Moon are still designed for adventurous travelers but now cater to those who'd rather not rough it at bedtime or mealtime. And guides from Fodor's and Frommer's have hipped up to appeal to a younger crowd, with colorful maps and graphics, plus advice on a broader range of attractions, from classic to quirky. Most important, remember that every guidebook is just that—a guide. Use it for context, consult it for planning, and know when to put it away. The best discoveries are those you make on your own.

Required Reading

"I take Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN everywhere. Whether I'm in Yemen or Saigon or Havana, it's an almost infallible guide to the perils of foreign wisdom, the resilience of native cultures, and the way we fall in love with places precisely because we can't understand or even handle them."—Pico Iyer, Travel Writer

Moving Words // Where Guidebooks Are Going

With Internet competition hot on their heels, guidebook publishers are constantly tweaking format—and focus—to keep up with travelers' needs. Here are the trends to watch. Scratch a Niche: Look for guides that cover themes, not specific regions, including The Traveling Marathoner (Fodor's, $28), Hip Hotels Atlas (Thames & Hudson, $50), and the new Take a Hike series (Moon Outdoors, $17). Undersize It: Mini-guides are hot. Perfect for quick trips, they zoom in on a destination, with fewer pages and a smaller, more packable size.

We like Insight Pocket Guides ($13–$14), 96-page books covering key sights, with handy foldout maps. Get Wired: DK's new e>>guides ($15), covering cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and Barcelona, come with passwords for access to exclusive online information, including hotel and restaurant updates. Radio-Free Planet: To increase their online presence, travel publishers are venturing into Internet radio.

Check out the new podcasts—free travel-related reports narrated by expert globe-trotters—at www.roughguides.com, www.lonelyplanet.com, and www.ricksteves.com. Go Deep: With the basics readily available online, guidebooks are amping up their historical and cultural information. Fodor's Compass American Guides ($21–$22) specialize in putting travel in context, with detailed maps and color photos.

Best of All: Top-ten lists and "best of" roundups, intended as shortcuts to the ultimate travel experiences, are also big this year. See Lonely Planet's Bluelist ($20), a guide to the travel trends of 2006, with 40 best-of categories like "most remote" and "best train trips," and National Geographic's The 10 Best of Everything: An Ultimate Guide for Travelers ($20).

Outside Magazine Link

Laurie King Travel Writer Newsletter

2006-05-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

India by Carl Parkes

Just back from a two week press trip to Arizona, and realized that I haven't done any new posting to this blog is quite some time, so will pass along a very informative website and subscriber blog from Laurie King, based here in the Bay Area. Although many of the postings on her blog are oriented toward those travel writers living in the Bay Area, there's enough general content to make this a useful website for anyone active in the travel writing arena. So bookmark her website and subscribe to her weekly notices and updates.

Nice work, Laurie. See you down at the Monticello!

Laurie King Website

The History of Travel Guidebooks

2006-04-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

Tony and Maureen 1973

I don't quite understand the posting policy of Publisher's Weekly, but it seems that some of their articles are posted on their website, while large parts of their site are off limits, unless you a paid subscriber, and Publisher's Weekly ain't cheap.

And so I was pleasantly surprised to find this PW article today about the history of travel guidebook publishing, with mentions of Bill Dalton and his adventurous days selling his Indonesia Handbook at the freak festival. It's the same orange guide I used on my first trip to Bali in 1979, or perhaps the first formal guide rather than a collection of notes, typed, and stapled.

Travel has changed radically since the days of the Victorian Grand Tour, when the privileged classes would pack their steamer trunks for European journeys that could stretch into years while the common folk contented themselves with a trip to the shore or to a town with a springs. Travel in our time has become much more democratic, global and fast. Two decades ago, says travel writer Rick Steves, Eurailpasses were guarded as carefully as passports. "People would do 17 countries. Now, it's the south of France, or Portugal, or the heel of Italy. People are more focused."

And taking shorter trips, says Avalon Travel publisher Bill Newlin. "They are valuing time over money, looking for ways to make educated decisions. People want to find something new, have stories to tell, but what that means has changed." Newlin and Steves are just the latest in a long line of travel book folk who have tried to keep up with the changing whims of travelers. The much-cherished Baedeker guides of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are collectors' items today, valued for the excellence of the writing and the romance that still clings to a world of empires and hat boxes. But the books themselves are obsolete in a world of cell service and time-shares. "The unknown is harder to find today," says Newlin, "but the craving for adventure survives." As does the determination of travel book publishers to remain relevant.

Indeed, all the major travel lines today—Fodor's, Frommer's, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Moon, Insight, Rick Steves, Michelin—started in response to a perceived need in the marketplace. Even Karl Baedeker felt that there were no books available at the time that filled the traveler's need in the precise way he saw it. Not a single publisher watching over today's once eponymous (for the most part) imprints said that the spirit of the founder had changed, though the scope and breadth of the offerings are far different from what they used to be.

Let's Go has more than 50 titles covering six continents; Rough Guides takes in more than 200 destinations. Fodor's lines encompass more than 14 different series, and Frommer's titles number more than 330. Michelin now offers about 200 different guidebook titles, while Lonely Planet's number exceeds 600.

When Eugene Fodor brought out his first book, in 1936, Baedeker's (published in Germany), Murray's Hand-Books (London), Michelin Guides (France) and Hachette's Blue Guides (also France) were preeminent. Baedeker's had a venerable place in the annals of travel, but Fodor perceived new needs for the tourists of his era: he wanted them to have up-to-date, practical information and to understand what he called "the human side" of the places they visited. He researched his first book, 1936... On the Continent, while working for a steamship line and writing freelance travel articles.

In the introduction Fodor reminded his readers that the rewards of travel derive from the interactions with people in the visited locales. "We have proceeded on the assumption that your thirst for historical knowledge is nothing like so great as your thirst for the beer of Pilsen or the slivovitsa of Belgrade," he wrote. In 1950 Fodor took his guides to the David McKay Company and published books on France, Switzerland and Italy. His guide to Great Britain and Ireland, compiled in a single book, evoked loud protests from the Irish and were subsequently issued as two distinct titles.

In large measure attracted by the Fodor franchise, Random House bought David McKay in 1986 and undertook a major overhaul of the guides. Despite considerable diversification, the books haven't deviated from Fodor's vision, says Fodor's publisher Tim Jarrell. "The experience of travel has changed, but why people travel and the motivation is still the same."

Fodor's dominated the travel market for roughly a decade, until an ex-OSS employee named Temple Fielding entered the arena in 1948 with a hardcover guide to Europe. A bit more high-tone than Fodor's, Fielding's Travel Guide to Europe had become, by the time a profile of the author appeared in Time magazine in 1969, a 1,485-page, 909,000-word primer weighing just over two pounds. The company existed as recently as 1997—Robert Young Pelton, author of Fielding's The World's Most Dangerous Places, bought the company name from Morrow in 1993 and published traditional guides for a while—but Pelton's books are now published by HarperCollins and few Fielding guides are still in print.

In 1957, Arthur Frommer, a young lawyer in the U.S. Army, wrote a slim travel guide for American GIs in Europe, then produced a civilian version that caught the popular imagination of the era: Europe on $5 a Day. The book ranked sights in order of importance and included budget travel suggestions. "Arthur showed that everyone could travel and had the right to travel," says Michael Spring, the publisher of Frommer's Travel Guides, now published by Wiley. "We've gone from one book to over 320 books, but the vision hasn't changed."

Frommer's idea was that by traveling cheap you'd get inside the culture. "You'd stay at a B&B and talk to the owners at the breakfast table and meet the other guests," says Spring. By 2004 Frommer's signature guide to Europe was up to "starting" at $85 a day, while the 2006 Paris guide starts at $90.

Frommer continued to self-publish his guides while practicing law and in 1977 he sold the business to S&S. Through a series of subsequent sales the books ended up at Wiley. By the time Spring came in as publisher, in the early '90s, "the books were safe, geriatric, schoolmarmy, for a generation that hadn't traveled much," he says. "We started from scratch and wrote for the active, curious savvy traveler." Some of these travelers happened to be well-heeled. "It's our feeling that money shouldn't be held against you. The issue in traveling isn't how expensive, but how special," Spring says.

As travel became easier—planes faster, fares cheaper—students started thronging charter flights to get a taste of Europe during summer vacations. The guides on the market, which were aimed at a middle-class crowd, didn't address their needs. Over the next decade, several young entrepreneurs—hippie idealists—wrote guides for this young, curious (and underfinanced) group.

The first to appear was Let's Go Europe, in 1960. The original was a mimeographed pamphlet put together by students at Harvard Student Agencies and handed out gratis to those who booked charter flights to Europe. Two years later the guide had grown to 124 pages and carried a $1 price tag. "The budget advice available at the time was staid," says Tom Mercer, editorial and marketing manager for Let's Go at St. Martin's, which has published the series since 1982. "The authors of Let's Go were the audience themselves, young, adventurous Americans starting to sow their oats."

Publisher's Weekly Link

The Beatles

2006-04-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

The Beatles Hard Day's Night 1964

I was a pretty young kid when I first heard the Beatles on the radio station in Omaha in 1964, but it still stands out. The radio DJ came on and said something "we've got a new rock group from England called the Beatles, and we're now going to play four tunes from them, and invite listerners to call and vote their favorites: "She Loves You," "I Wanna Hold your Hand," "Please Be True" and another.

Anyone remember?

This was the launch of the Beatles. I watched the Beatles the following two weeks on Sunday evenings Ed Sullivan show, and it's true. The Beatles changed everything.

The Future of Airline Travel

2006-04-25T15:38:00.000-07:00

New Airline Strategy for Transporting Bodies

International Airlines have just come up with a new method to pack more bodies into their aluminum coffins: strap bodies into vertical body bags, or perhaps the human horizontal body hotels in Tokyo? I have another suggestion. Six passenger levels based on how much you can afford. Body bags (cheap) to full-beds (pretty penny). Why must the budget-minded suffer while the ultra-rich get unreacheable perks? Let's have some mid-choices.

Some airlines are already doing this, such as ANA, EVA, and a few others to Asia, that offer some great deals on mid-level travel with comfort at mid-level prices. That's the solution.

One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand
Chris Elliott
April 25, 2006

The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

But even short of that option, carriers have been slipping another row or two of seats into coach by exploiting stronger, lighter materials developed by seat manufacturers that allow for slimmer seatbacks. The thinner seats theoretically could be used to give passengers more legroom but, in practice, the airlines have been keeping the amount of space between rows the same, to accommodate additional rows.

The result is an additional 6 seats on a typical Boeing 737, for a total of 156, and as many as 12 new seats on a Boeing 757, for a total of 200.

That such things are even being considered is a result of several factors. High fuel costs, for example, are making it difficult for carriers to turn a profit. The new seat technology alone, when used to add more places for passengers, can add millions in additional annual revenue. The new designs also reduce a seat's weight by up to 15 pounds, helping to hold down fuel consumption. A typical seat in economy class now weighs 74 to 82 pounds.

"There is clearly pressure on carriers to make the total passenger count as efficient as possible," said Howard Guy, a director for Design Q, a seating design consultant in England. "After all, the fewer seats that are put on board, the more expensive the seat price becomes. It's basic math."

Even as the airlines are slimming the seatbacks in coach, they are installing seats as thick and heavy as ever in first and business class — and going to great lengths to promote them. That is because each passenger in such a seat can generate several times the revenue of a coach traveler.

At the front of the cabin, the emphasis is on comfort and amenities like sophisticated entertainment systems. Some of the new seats even feature in-seat electronic massagers. And, of course, the airlines have installed lie-flat seats for their premium passengers on international routes.

Seating specialists say that all the publicity airlines devote to their premium seats diverts attention from what is happening in the back of the plane. In the main cabin, they say, manufacturers are under intense pressure to create more efficient seats.

"We make the seats thinner," said Alexander Pozzi, the director for research and development at Weber Aircraft, a seat manufacturer in Gainesville, Tex. "The airlines keep pitching them closer and closer together. We just try to make them as comfortable as we can."

There is one bit of good news in the thinner seats for coach class: They offer slightly more room between the armrests because the electronics are being moved to the seatbacks.

One of the first to use the thinner seats in coach was American Airlines, which refitted its economy-class section seven years ago with an early version made by the German manufacturer Recaro.

"Those seats were indeed thinner than the ones they replaced, allowing more knee and legroom," Tim Smith, a spokesman for American, said. American actually removed two rows in coach, adding about two inches of legroom, when it installed the new seats. It promoted the change with a campaign called "More Room Throughout Coach."

But two years later, to cut costs, American slid the seats closer together and ended its "More Room" program without fanfare. When the changes were completed last year, American said its "density modification program" had added five more seats to the economy-class section of its MD-80 narrow-body aircraft and brought the total seat count to 120 in the back of the plane. A document on an internal American Airlines Web site, which was briefly accessible to the public last week, estimated that the program would generate an additional $60 million a year for its MD-80 fleet

New York Times

American Travelers Perception

2006-04-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

American Travelers in Patpong

Once again, the old and tired cliche about American travelers abroad has been brought up with several articles in magazines and on the web. The familiar story is that Americans abroad are a boorish lot, given to bad fashion and yelling across the restaurant. Yeah, well, who cares?

I don't. Americans are a very, very friendly group of people who yell and scream at almost anything, and welcome anybody and everybody into their party. It's America, and it's a celebration of life. American tourists are well loved throughout the world, and rank among the favorite nations along with Australia, New Zealand, and some other places on the European continent. And most people around this planet can easily tell the difference between an American tourist and the present political policies of the American government. In other words, nobody blames me for the idiocy of George Bush or his personal vendetta against Iraq.

Erik Olsen at Gadling has more:

Lots of folks are atwitter over the release of the "World Citizens Guide" - which we posted about - that seeks to help reduce the amount of ugliness Americans export within themselves when they head abroad. Only you can know exactly what your "AUE" (American Ugliness Export) quotient is, but my guess, esp. if you like fast food and Hawaiian shirts, is that it's pretty high.

The guide was underwritten/assembled by the Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), a non-profit group funded by big American companies, who are saying the anti-Americanism is bad for business. It features some 16 etiquette tips on how Americans can help the country by not fulfilling stereotypes of themselves as brash, loud, annoying, fat, stupid, bossy philistines. Ed Gomez over at SF Gate examines the subject and finds many of these stereotypes sadly accurate. While, over at the UK Telegraph, Philip Sherwell probably has the best take on the subject, as he makes the point that it's not really American tourists who are the problem, it's more often the perceptions of American policy...although loud fat Americans don't help themselves much either.

So let me put the question out there? Are we fat, loud, bossy, annoying, etc.? Or is it just that people like to pick on the big guy? Or more, are people in general becoming more like us? I mean, have you ever seen German travelers? Let's get the debate started.

Gadling Link

The Forgotten Book Advance

2006-04-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

Alice Dines

Did your publisher somehow miss a scheduled advance payment on your latest book? It happens more often than you might imagine, thanks to poor bookkeeping or selected memory. Writers must keep track of their contracts and payment schedules, and remind their publishers of their obligations, as shown today by an insightful article by Angela Hoy.

Dear Angela:

I think you have a great service, and now, as a fellow writer, I am asking your help.

I have a book contract. However, while I received the first part of my advance, I did not receive the second half. Nevertheless, the book is already for sale. Now, I have another manuscript that I submitted to the publisher, and he said it was too long, but, that he liked the writing and the work, so he broke it up into two works. He has indicated the second will be coming out on his next list. I am gratified to have such a reception, but, the second work has no written contract, I have not been paid the second part of my advance on the first, and there has been no discussion about money on the second. I do not know what to do. I know I need an agent, but, I am in a bind. My work is already sold! However, I need money to live as well! I have no "new" work to present to an agent.

Sincerely, D.

You need to immediately remind the publisher that you're still waiting for the second half of your advance. But, check your contract first to ensure there's not some clause in there you're not aware of.

From your note, it appears you haven't bugged him about the second half yet. Don't be afraid to. He may be unaware it hasn't gone out or he may simply have forgotten.

The fact that he hasn't even given you a contract on the new book, however, is quite troubling. Even if you have a relationship with a publisher, you should never, ever work without a contract. This, coupled with the missing second half of your advance, could either spell ignorance or laziness on behalf of the publisher, or it could mean he's purposely trying to rip you off.

Writers Weekly Link

Stolen Books

2006-04-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

Alice with Question

Something to contemplate. I've seen photocopies of my books on the sidewalks of Saigon and Bangkok, and while not a serious problem, book authors and other travel writers need to be aware of the problem of piracy and how to combat the challenge.

What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content

Having been the target of copyright thieves, and working with writers, authors, and photographers on copyright protection and laws for over 25 years, I thought I’d talk a little about what to do when someone steals your content.

First, you noticed that I didn’t say “if” someone steals your content. That was on purpose. With the glut of information on the Internet, it’s now a matter of “when” not “if”.

The first step in learning about what you can do when someone steals your content is to know that it will happen, so the more prepared and informed you are, the better your chances of prevention and having a plan in place when they steal.

As the number of websites and blogs grow, especially splogs, the demand for content puts more pressure on website administrators, who may resort to stealing content in order to fill space on their sites and attract traffic. Website hijacking, as such an example, is on the rise. This is the blatant use of part or all of your site’s content on another site without permission. This is also a copyright violation and needs to be dealt with accordingly.

Lorelle Link

Still the Freaky Goa

2006-04-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

Puri Sunrise by Carl Parkes

It's been a helluva long time since I visited Goa, but I've been hearing depressing stories for many years, that Goa had gone upscale and was now populated with group tourists who all stayed in five-star hotels. Good news this week from the travel section of the New York Times, which claims that hippie culture is alive and well in the former Portuguese colony. But only the Times could write a three-page article about Goa and never mentioned weed or mushrooms.

There ain't nothing like this in the real world. Come to Goa. Change your mind. Change your way. It's hard to imagine a better jingle for this sandy strip of India's western coast, a venerable Catholic-Hindu enclave where American hippies came to turn on, tune in and drop out in the late 1960's, and where globe-trotting spiritual seekers, party kids, flag-wavers of the counterculture and refugees from the real world have fled ever since.

It's a place where the palm trees bear a strange fruit —fliers for crystal therapy, Ayurvedic healing and rave parties — and every road seems to lead to an organic restaurant or massage clinic. At the yoga centers, postures are manipulated by top Indian and international instructors. In clubs, where trance music is the favored genre, D.J.'s carrying myriad passports provide the mix. Bodies receive needle-inked adornments at skin-art parlors; minds seek enlightenment, or at least expansion, at many meditation clinics.

New York Times Link

Sihanoukville -- The Next Ko Phangan?

2006-04-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Angkor Beer

Can you believe the travel section of this week's New York Times? Two articles about Asia, when they typically only do about one article per month. This story provides a sharp contrast to another story they published a few months ago about Sihanoukville, where the author apparently spent his vacation at some five-star resort and perhaps took a quick drive around the district.

This week's story is almost the complete opposite, though a better comparison would have been Sihanoukville to Ko Phangan.

THE "largest and wildest" full-moon party, promised the yellow flier taped to a phone booth on Khaosan Road in Bangkok. Another installment of Thailand's girls-gone-wild bacchanal on the island of Ko Phangan? Or its bigger brother, Ko Samui? Or maybe it was the newcomer Ko Phi Phi, a remote island that is luring younger partygoers in the post-tsunami boom.

Not quite. This particular moonlight spectacle, in fact, wouldn't even be in Thailand, but across the border, in Cambodia's budding seaside town, Sihanoukville. It is "just nine-and-a-half hours from Bangkok," according to the flier, the work of Cambodian entrepreneurs hoping to turn Sihanoukville into the latest party hot spot.

Like bohemians colonizing a sketchy up-and-coming neighborhood, European and Australian backpackers have been blazing trails through Cambodia steadily since the mid-1990's. Although the last of the Khmer Rouge traded their machetes for plowshares only eight years ago, this nation of 13 million is fast becoming a companion destination to Thailand — that is, another seemingly safe haven of lush landscapes and warm embraces for Westerners.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the low-key but alluring beaches of Sihanoukville, where development is being modeled after Thailand's resorts. Along the touristy strip of sand known as Serendipity, several restaurants brazenly advertise "happy" pizza and "happy" pancakes, seasoned with a certain illicit herb. Nearby, Victory Hill is trying to become Cambodia's version of Soi Cowboy, one of Bangkok's more garish red-light districts.

New York Times Link

Real Job Posting

2006-04-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

Engrish dot com

I think this job posting is real. But I'm not sure, so be careful and cautious. This is a real-world job, and not another travel writing pitch. Most websites looking for travel writing are just collecting fodder for their site, to then sell to advertisers for monthly payments. Don't fall for it-They say they will give away some fabulous cruise to Norway or Tahiti or Bermuda, so do send in your 2000 word travel essay about the most fabulous place you've ever stayed. They want all rights.

To sell more ads.

"do you wanna be a travel writer scam." Skip phonies. Buy a few books about being a travel writer. Write a dozen travel pieces, end them to 100 newspapers. That's all you need to do. A few newspapers will purchase your travel story for $150, and then the editor will remember your name, and that person will buy more of your stories in the future. Yes, it's that simple. Write a good story and mail it out to 100 newspapers.

Director of Internet Sales and Marketing
Publication or Company Chronicle Books
Industry Book Publishing
Salary
Benefits
Job Duration Full Time
Job Location San Francisco, CA USA

Job Requirements

The primary purpose of this position is to set and execute a strategic plan to increase Chronicle Books direct website sales and website outreach to end consumers to promote the website, the Chronicle Books brand and all Chronicle Books’ titles.

This position will also act as the primary strategic thinker and planner for how the company can use the web and other technology to increase sales and brand awareness.

This individual needs a thorough understanding of ecommerce sales, an understanding of the web and the technologies associated with it, and an ability to create and execute plans for growth.

WEB SALES

Oversee the plans and execution of our website sales to increase visitors, increase sales and build brand awareness and loyalty
· Oversee the Web order fulfillment system and the customer service process; make changes when necessary
· Create and implement programs and the calendar for all Web promotions to increase sales and increase visitors to site
· Develop ways to convert existing traffic to buyers.
· Monthly report to the company on site sales, site visitation, promotions and strategic plans
· Create and implement user surveys as needed
· Work with the Direct Sales task force to drive sales through the site

CONTENT

Oversee the overall creative direction of the site
· Work directly with website manager on the editorial calendar for books to be featured, promotions offered and ensure web is updated in a timely manner
· Ensure that content of site aligns properly with promotions and ideas surrounding ecommerce initiatives
· Design mini sites as needed for most important titles.
· Delegate and approve the creation of content for all three site “home pages” (books, kids, gifts)
· When necessary, oversee redesign of entire site or special areas.

ONLINE MARKETING

· Advocate, educate, and implement all online marketing strategies for the company. This person is the resident expert on all online and mobile marketing opportunities. Stay on top of market trends and find ways to implement them into our operations here.
· Work with marketing and publicity to create plans for all key titles, and for online marketing of Chronicle in general.

DEVELOPMENT

· Oversee the technical evolution of the site, add (or commission to have added) new functionality as needed.

DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER

· Partner with direct to consumer team to find ways to use the website as a way to increase sales and outreach to new consumers directly. This includes working on ways to use site for selling to end consumers, corporations, organizations, and through the Metreon retail store
· Oversee all web only promotions through these venues; including marketing collateral which is created
· Find creative ways to use the web to expand our current reach to direct consumers.

OTHER

Work directly with in house staff in operations, production, sales and marketing on how CB can use website as a tool to improve internal processes and communication

MANAGEMENT

· Supervise Website Manager

Prerequisites:

Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and some Flash. Experience managing an ecommerce site. Experience with Web marketing a must (banner ad campaigns, email newsletters, and Web promotions). Knowledge of Google AdWords a plus. Publishing experience a plus.

Must have experience managing a team with various abilities (from creative to technical). While it isn’t necessary for this person to be a programmer per se, it is essential for her/him to be well versed in what different technology can offer and how to manage a programmer to deliver. A keen eye for design is essential to keep in pace with the visual integrity of our books.

Most importantly, must have knowledge of and interest in our eclectic list, and be versatile enough to create Web marketing plans for everything from the kooki
About Our Company Chronicle Books, a San Francisco based publisher, was founded in 1966 and over the years has developed a reputation for award-winning, innovative books. The company continues to challenge conventional publishing wisdom, setting trends in both subject and format, maintaining a list that includes illustrated titles in design, art, architecture, photography, food, lifestyle and pop culture, as well as much-admired books for children and ancillary products through its gift division. Chronicle Books boasts best-selling titles that include The Beatles Anthology, Sylvia Long’s Hush Little Baby, The 52-Deck series, Olive, the Other Reindeer and The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook series. Chronicle Books’ objective is to create and distribute exceptional publishing that’s instantly recognizable for its spirit, creativity, and value.

Contact Ms. Renee Banks
Email Address jobs@chroniclebooks.com
Address 85 2nd street
6th floor
San Francisco, CA 94105 USA

Phone 415.537.4200
Fax 415.537.4450
Special Instructions Please include a cover letter with resume.

Humor? From Gadling?

2006-04-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

Japanese Fans by Carl Parkes

The good folks at Gadling have gone all out today, with some half-dozen hilarious posts in honor of April Fools Day. I sense from these posts, that the fabulously paid Gadling authors are mostly frustrated humor writers, who would rather be working the opening monologue for Conan O'Brien, than ragging on about esoteric travel trivia. Fine work, and too bad this sort of opportunity only comes up once a year.

Fans of our America’s 43rd president will finally have something to rejoice about later this month when the new Bushland presidential theme park opens. Built atop the breeding grounds of the endangered Texas blind salamander, Bushland embraces the life and accomplishments of George W.

This wonderful family getaway has something for all ages; the Michael Moore Harpoon Toss, the Cheney Shooting Range, the Deficit Roller Coaster (which only goes up), and the Karl Rove Spinner (the opening of the Karl Rove Steamboat Cruise has been postponed until problematic leaks are fixed).

Gadling: Bushland to Open

From the same people who have brought you volumes about single topic esoterica, comes the newest, perhaps most important book: Foot Odor: The Complete History.

Author Mark Farklansky, whose books about Flour and Glue revealed the untold stories of these common products, has really outdone himself here with a mesmerizing account of where foot odor came from and its impact on world history.

Gadling: Foot Odor, A History

Pangaea is one of the more difficult places to reach on this planet, but also one of the most rewarding. I was therefore pleased to discover that Old World Travels has just announced a two-week tour of this fascinating region which leaves later this month. An April trip is perfect timing because springtime in Pangaea is indeed wonderful. Plants and animals are slowly blossoming to life and every day seems so very fresh and new. I’ve never been myself, but this is indeed the Old Country from where my ancestors, in one form or another, originally heralded.

Gadling: Springtime in Pangaea

Here's an odd one: The Nepalese government wants to make it easier, much easier, for people to climb towering Mount Everest. Turns out they are planning to build a working, electric escalator that will carry people from base camp to the summit in less than an hour. The engineering effort is being put in the hands of the Japanese, in a serious political snub to the Chinese who had also bid on the project. The proposed escalator will be approximately fifteen miles long and will rise and fall with the jagged gradations of the mountain. It will move approximately five miles an hour and will offer superb views of the surrounding Himalayas. There will be rest stops, as well, built into the structure, that will allow riders to stop for tea or snacks. For children who grow easily bored by gaping mountain vistas, they are planning to offer portable DVD players and a wide selection of films.

Gadling: Nepalese Plan Everescalator

Mark Burnett Productions has just announced a new travel themed reality show to be carried by FOX next season. The concept, tentatively titled Long Pigs, combines the successful themes of two other hit reality shows; Survivor and The Surreal Life. Long Pigs stars a cast of B-level celebrities who have to share a yurt in the barren Gobi desert with a tribe of Korowai cannibals from southeastern Papua for 40 days.

The cast will have to rely on finely honed outdoor skills to survive as the only food provided are salt and pepper, a barrel of wine reduction basting sauce, and a three day’s supply of Fig Newtons (the show is sponsored by the cookie company

Gadling: New Mark Burnett Reality Show

If you enjoy the outdoors and getting back to nature, you’re going to be downright feral over one of the hottest new trends in adventure travel. Forget expensive Gortex and metal ice axes, we’re talking pre-bronze age here. Yes, everyone is abuzz about the new hunter-gatherer parks that are sprouting up around the country, as well as in other parts of the world.

Gadling: Hunter-Gatherer Parks

Newspapers with No Hot Links

2006-03-27T14:04:00.000-08:00

Yogyakarta Batik by Carl Parkes

Is it just me, or do newspapers seem to be shooting themselves in the foot with every passing day? You write a story about ten useful travel websites, and you don't even provide any hot links in your website? Hello, newspapers, there is this new thingie called the internet, and it survives and blooms off something called "links."

I can hardly believe this.

Every year, as more travelers use the Internet to plan and pay for their vacations, more players are trying to get a piece of the action.

In 2005, more than 64 million Americans bought or reserved an airline ticket, hotel room, rental car or package tour online, up nearly 20 million from 2004, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. With each leisure traveler spending an average of $1,288 online, real money is changing hands. We took a look at several dozen sites that have come online during the past year. Most weren't worth more than a cursory glance, but several broke new ground, fit a niche or at least accomplished what they set out to do.

Here are 10 sites worth checking out.

Arizona Central Link via Washington Post

Spontaneous Travel by Gadling Neil Woodburn

2006-03-27T13:53:00.000-08:00

Lombok Cattle Traders by Carl Parkes

It sounds so good, but few people actually allow themselves to indulge in spontaneous travel, but Neil Woodburn at Gadling recently answered the call of impulse, with impressive results. Me? I'm going to Texas next month, northern Arizona in May, and perhaps Philadelphia in June. Nothing spontaneous.....it's all planned well in advance.

Spontaneous travel is rare in life, but when it occurs it is fabulously rewarding.

Case in point: Saturday at noon I was sitting at home in Los Angeles talking on the phone with my girlfriend who was at a conference in San Francisco. Over the course of a 15 minute conversation, I learned that my college team, UCLA, was playing in the Elite Eight in San Francisco (I had thought they were playing on the other side of the country). I also remembered that Gogol Bordello, after their Friday show in LA, was also playing in San Francisco Saturday night.

By 12:30 I had reservations on a 2:00 Southwest flight. I made it to the airport by 1:00, arrived in San Francisco at 3:30, caught a BART bus to the Oakland Sports Arena by 4:00 and, by tip-off, was sitting in a seat my girlfriend had procured from a scalper a mere two hours earlier.

After the game, which UCLA won, we headed out to dinner, and then to a club called Slim’s where we tipped the doorman $50 to let the two of us into the sold-out Gogol Bordello show. By 2 a.m. we were wiped out. A quick cab back to the very hip and cool, highly recommended Ian Schrager hotel Clift, and then it was night-night.

Gadling Link

Oxford Dictionary FAQ

2006-03-25T16:23:00.000-08:00

Chappelle Burns His 50M Comedy Central Check

From Oxford Dictionaries, whatever the hell that might be, a collection of their most frequently asked questions. Might prove useful for writers such as myself, who have no idea what they are doing.

We have built a database of some of the questions sent in to the Oxford Word and Language Service team, so it is likely that if your question is a fairly broad one on grammar, usage, or words then it will be answered here. Simply choose a category and then browse the list of questions.

Ask Oxford Link

They may refute the "supposed disease," but I memorized pneumonultramiscroscopticsilicovolcaniosis early in my days, and I stand by my childhood challenges. It's a disease you get from inhaling volcanic ash.

Use it someday, and impress your friends

Creative Airplane Seating

2006-03-25T15:57:00.000-08:00

Plane Subterfuge by Bjork

Tired of getting bumped from flights which are supposedly filled, when you know for sure there are plenty of empty seats, but the airlines computers are so screwed up they haven't a clue?

Me too.

Some young lady so desperately wanted to attend the recent movie/rock/SFSX week in Austin took matters into her own hands, with hilarious results. I'd say the gatekeepers should be disciplined, and she should be given a medal.

AUSTIN, Tx. -- A Chicago woman accused of stowing away on a plane to attend the South by Southwest Festival faces a federal charge.

Catherine "Cat" Chow, a 33-year-old artist, was on the standby list for a flight from St. Louis to Austin, booked through American Airlines. When she found out the flight was full, Chow snuck past gate agents, boarded the plane and hid in the bathroom, authorities said.

When a passenger knocked on the bathroom door, Chow took the man's seat. When his wife made her move, she took another seat. After she was forced to move again, a flight attendant discovered her, court documents said.

An agent with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was called to the airport. Airport police also were waiting for Chow when the plane landed.

Chow told authorities she "knew what she did was wrong, but wanted to meet with her friends in Austin . . . to participate in the South by Southwest activities," documents said.

Airport police said they found marijuana and six antidepressant tablets without a prescription label. Chow was charged with boarding an airplane without permission, a federal crime, and two state misdemeanors, possession of marijuana and possession of a dangerous drug. Chow was being held in the Travis County jail on a $3,000 bail.

NBC5 Link

Reasons to Live Abroad

2006-03-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

Vietnam Motos by Chuck

Checking my RSS links to blogs from Vietnam just brought up this outstanding article by a former San Francisan architect who found himself burned out in the U.S., and so took his Vietnamese wife back to Saigon, where he has reinvigorated his life. It's an insightful reflection on the reasons to leave it all behind, and start a new life in a new country. Do click the link to read the entire post, and find the connecting link to the story he recommends.

Approaching civilizations other than our own...

Preya has posted a very thought-provoking essay on her blog Dreaming of Hanoi (she currently lives in Colorado). This essay goes to the heart of why westerners choose to visit, live and work in Viet Nam. Please read her essay. She is very articulate in expressing her opinion that many westerners come to places like Viet Nam out of good intentions to see and experience new things, but often espouse condescending views towards the ongoing changes in these countries that are the choices of those people to improve their lives.

She sees westerners as wanting to preserve the innocence and simplicity of overseas life "for our viewing pleasure" to replace what we can no longer find at home. In so doing, westerners are using Asia as a means to the end of regaining what we have lost in the western world, treating Asia as an extension of the west rather than the unique place of Asians for Asians. I hope I have done Preya justice in this summary.

In her essay, though, she gets to the very core of my own reasons for relocating to Viet Nam. She states:

"Do not go overseas and treat the places you see and the people you meet as if their only purpose in life is to "spice up" your world and make your travels more interesting, or provide you with a place to unwind, discover yourself, etc."

Antidote to Burnout Link

Doug Lansky Interview

2006-03-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

Doug Lansky

Doug Lansky is probably best known as the guy who writes the weekly travel column "Signspotting" syndicated in several dozen newspapers here in the U.S., but he's also the author of several books by Rough Guides that cover the fundamentals of planning a trip around the world. Doug currently lives in Sweden with his Swedish wife (duh), and is a full time columnist for the inflight magazine of Air Scandanavia, or whatever they call their airline. Here's an insightful interview with Doug posted last year at a website that specializes in vacation rentals, but has loads of background content on most anyplace in the world.

Interview: Doug Lansky
Author, Speaker and Travel Writer

By Nana Chen - After telling copy machines where to go, Doug Lansky packed his bags and took off saying goodbye to life as an intern at Late Night with David Letterman, "Spy Magazine," and "The New Yorker". That was in 1992. Much has changed since. After traveling around the world and becoming an expert at it, Doug Lansky has now penned and edited numerous award-winning bestselling travel books, including The Last Trout in Venice.

Currently working on three new titles, including the upcoming “Rough Guide to Travel Survival: The Essential Field Manual,” Doug Lansky gives lectures on world travel at almost every destination you can imagine. In addition, Lansky serves as the editor of Scanorama, the In-flight magazine of Scandinavian Airlines and is a regular contributor to several major newspapers and magazines. We were able to share a few words with him via email.

Nana: You've been traveling for nearly ten years now. May I ask why you started traveling? What event started it all?

Doug: I was in London studying for a semester and between the freezing rain and almost four hours per day on the Tube, I wasn't enjoying my travel experience much and was thinking I'd just head home. I figured I'd do a bit of Inter-Railing before heading home and maybe it was the change of weather when I arrived in Portugal or falling asleep on the trains or the excitement of getting a job selling carpets in Morocco -- probably all -- I fell profoundly in love with travel. After finishing university, I told myself I wanted to travel around the world before turning 25. After 2 1/2 years on the road, I was still as hooked as when I started.

Nana: How were you able to finance your travels when you started? I know a lot of people go on work holidays, teaching ESL in Korea or milking cows in Denmark. Please tell us what sort of jobs you've had on the road.

E-Margaux Link

World Travel as College Credit

2006-03-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

Albert Hoffman as World Traveler

I've always supported the idea of world travel as a way for anybody and everybody to learn about the similarities between international cultures, and help spread the ideas of peace and prosperity through mutual understanding. Jon Carroll, our local columnist here in San Francisco, passes along a great idea: kids should be able to spend a year or more on the road and get college credit for their roadside education. Personally, I probably learned more about life by traveling than by the four years I spent pursuing a degree in Economics from the university, so I think everyone should hit the road for an extended period and open their eyes to the wonders of this world.

The wonderful Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times (who will, rumor has it, win the Pulitzer Prize this year, and good for him) has made a modest proposal. I could paraphrase it, but I'll just quote it:

"Traditionally, many young Britons, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders take a year to travel around the world on a shoestring, getting menial jobs when they run out of money. We should try to inculcate the custom of a 'gap year' in this country by offering university credit for such experiences.

"So here's my proposal: Universities should grant a semester's credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world. In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe."

I endorse the idea without reservation. About 20 percent of Americans own passports (that's an informed guess -- despite what you've read, that figure is not readily available), and a somewhat smaller percentage actually use them. I think there are lots of reasons for that, including geography -- unlike Europeans, we have to travel quite a way just to find a border to cross.

But there's xenophobia too; we seem to be a fearful lot. People who don't speak English scare us; people who don't have a lot of money scare us; people who eat organ meats scare us. Things can look dire in photographs, more dire than they are in person. And anyway, dire is not by itself life-threatening. People who live in the worst slums are, by and large, alive at the end of every day. Christians traveling in Muslim countries are, similarly, healthy -- and well fed -- when the clock strikes 12.

Even when Americans do travel, they tend to travel in groups. There is a huge English-speaking tourist bubble in almost every large city, and many people never get outside it. They see the sights, but they don't see the country. (The citizens of another famously xenophobic country, Japan, likewise tend to travel in packs; until very recently, the solitary Japanese traveler was as a rare as a nuthatch in Nome.)

I taught on a high-end cruise once, and at each port of call the travelers were ushered off the boat to a pricey hotel restaurant, then taken to an equally pricey mall for an afternoon of shopping. I still remember hanging over the rail in Mumbai, watching porters struggle with huge ceramic elephants that were going to be carted up and brought back home. Progress: It is now less acceptable to bring back the pretty parts of dead elephants.

Jon Carroll at SF Chronicle Link

Ferrari at 170 MPH

2006-03-16T15:28:00.000-08:00

Ferrari Crash PCH

Ferrari Ruins

More news about that amazing Ferrari crash last month on Pacific Coast Highway in Los Angeles.

Video May Hold Clues to PCH Wreck

L.A. County sheriff's officials say two men who crashed a rare Ferrari in Malibu last month may have been filming the incident.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's investigation into a mysterious crash that destroyed a rare $1-million Ferrari in Malibu last month is now focusing on a videotape that was purportedly shot from inside the vehicle at the time of the accident, according to sources close to the case.

The sources said that Ferrari owner Stefan Eriksson and the other man in the car, identified by authorities as Trevor Karney, had a video camera rolling as they raced on Pacific Coast Highway on the morning of Feb. 21 at speeds in excess of 162 mph.

Deputies who arrived at the scene did not recover any video equipment. But sources said detectives were later told that the high-speed driving was taped. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is under investigation.

The revelation is the latest twist in a crash that has prompted both an accident investigation and a probe by the Sheriff's Department's Homeland Security Division.

Although no one was injured in the crash, the investigation has generated significant attention because of the strange circumstances and the fact that it destroyed one of only 400 Enzo Ferraris ever made.

Eriksson, a former European video game executive, told deputies who arrived at the scene that he was not the driver and that another man, named Dietrich, was behind the wheel. Eriksson said Dietrich fled the scene.

But detectives have always been skeptical of his version of events. Investigators have taken a swab of Eriksson's saliva to match his DNA against blood found on the driver's side air bag of the Ferrari.

Eriksson also told deputies that he was a deputy commissioner of the police department of a tiny transit agency in the San Gabriel Valley.

A few minutes after the crash, two men arrived at the crash scene, identified themselves as homeland security officers and spoke to Eriksson at length before leaving.

Sheriff's Sgt. Phil Brooks said Wednesday that a few weeks before the accident, Eriksson was pulled over in West Hollywood without a driver's license.

At that time he told officers that he was a deputy police commissioner of the anti-terrorism unit of the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority and showed a badge, Brooks said.

Before coming to the U.S., Eriksson lived in England. According to Noel Hogan, a British private investigator, formerly with Scotland Yard, Eriksson once told him that he was a police officer. Hogan had been trying to recover a Mercedes SLR worth more than $450,000 that had been reported stolen in England and which Eriksson had in his possession.

Officials at the transit agency, which provides transportation for the disabled and elderly from Monrovia, said Eriksson was given the title of deputy police commissioner after undergoing a background check and offering the agency free video security cameras for its five buses.

Eriksson left video game machine manufacturer Gizmondo last fall after a Swedish newspaper printed allegations of his criminal past.

L.A. Times Link

Round-the-World with the Guardian

2006-03-15T14:48:00.000-08:00

North Korea Leader

I always wondered why Kim Jong-Il wore those elevator shoes, but now I know.

In other news, the Guardian (London newspaper) is once again looking for contestants who can take three months of their lives and travel around the world, snapping digital photos and running a blog of their adventures. But check the pitiful pay:

a digital camera
a camera phone
laptop
about $3000

Come on, Guardian, you can bump it up. That's only good enough for a weekend in Cabo, but they expect me to blog, travel, sleep and eat for that paltry sum.

They're looking for a "green" traveler (whatever that means) and a "grey" traveler over the age of 50.

Get paid to go on holiday

This week, Guardian Unlimited is launching a new series of Netjetters, the competition that allows readers to win cash, kit and a three-month trip around the world, in return for writing a regular travel diary of their experiences.

'Green' and 'grey'

This year, two Netjetters will be chosen to travel and write on the themes of "green" and "grey" travel. One recruit must come up with a trip that allows them to travel as "greenly" as possible, in line with the rising tide of interest in eco- and responsible tourism. You may choose to base this on where you go or stay, your mode of transport, what you leave behind and how lightly you tread along the way. Or it might be what you choose to do, for example volunteering or working with protected wildlife.

The other chosen Netjetter will be aged 50 years or over, to reflect the growing number of people embarking on travels later in life. To be selected in this category, you must not have outgrown your spirit of adventure.

Each of the Netjetters will win up to £2,000 towards their trip, Fuji S9500 camera, a Nokia 6630 3G camera phone and a state-of-the-art laptop, all of which will be theirs to use on their Netjetter journeys and to keep thereafter.

Guardian Link

Guidebook Reviews at The Times

2006-03-14T16:20:00.000-08:00

Luggage Meltdown in Philadelphia

The Times of London recently reviewed a handful of travel guidebook publishers in an attempt to sort out the strengths and weaknesses of each line. Not bad, but there are several obvious problems with their methodology. First, since it's a British newspaper and primarily geared toward a British readership, British guidebook publishers dominate the article. And yet most American and Australian guidebook publishers have distribution in Great Britain, so you'd expect them to at least include a few American publishers.

The reviews themselves are posted by a variety of people, who exact backgrounds aren't really revealed. Perhaps readers in London know who these people are, but I didn't have a clue. A larger problem is that everyone has a different set of criteria to judge a book, so a dozen people review a dozen books with no common thread. It's not unlike the problem of some large guidebook being written by 12 people, with 12 different personalities, and 12 different opinions about most everything. There's no uniform opinion, and you really can't compare different chapters of the book.

The Times is British and I would imagine enjoys being polite, but there isn't much criticism in any of these reviews. A bit more honesty would have made this piece far more useful to the average reader contemplating purchasing a guidebook.

It would have been much more fun if each publisher submitted the same book, or if not, a book similar to the standard. OK! Everyone send in your guide to Paris (or New York or Bali, etc.). Then have a single reviewer dig into the books and make a side-by-side comparison, and the strengths and weaknesses of each publisher would have been much more apparent.

Still, it's worth a read.

A guidebook can make or break your holiday — so it’s crucial you take the right one. The Sunday Times experts sort the bona fide from the blather.

About 4,000 travel books are published every year, and the majority are guides of one sort or another. The choice is bewildering, but what most of us want from a guidebook is simple. We’d like it to be relevant to our needs and tastes; and we’d like it to be reliable. So how do you know which guide is for you? And how do you sort the expert travelling companion from the blathering impostor?

We’ve done it for you. We asked six leading publishers to nominate the guide they’re most proud of: a book that typifies their approach. Then we asked our own experts - each with a wealth of knowledge about the relevant destination - to check them out.

The Times Link

Travel Writers and Comps

2006-03-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

Bill Dalton, Wife and Kid

Doesn't this just piss you off? Some travel writer in Los Angeles is paid a decent salary, or is paid decently for his freelance work, and ALL of his expenses are paid for by the L.A. Times, and he has the nerve to criticize other organizations for accepting freebies from some upscale hotel.

He doesn't pay for his perks, but he is so self-righteous that he demands everyone else follow the guidelines set up by the Times? Most, if not all, freelance travel writers accept complimentary hotel rooms, meals, and flights in order to make ends meet. It's an accepted industry standard and understood by everybody, aside from those few writers who have regular paying gigs at major publications.

And then they have the nerve to tell me about perks and comps and my attempts to make a living as an independent, freelance travel writer?

I could pick up the phone today and be on a plane to just about anywhere in the world tomorrow completely complimentary. Being a travel writer for major media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune (both owned by the Tribune Co.), just about any airline or hotel would be happy -- nay, thrilled -- to fly me or put me up completely free of charge. In exchange, all they'd expect from me is to give them coverage.

Now as a travel consumer journalist, here's why I don't accept free travel -- it is flat out wrong. It's wrong because it gives the impression that my journalistic independence may be swayed for the price of a free bed or an airline ticket. Did you get that -- not that my independence would be swayed, mind you, but it's the impression that it might be. Plus I'd never work in this town again (at least not for the papers I currently write for).

"Our policy does not allow us to accept complimentary accommodation or travel of any kind," says Catharine Hamm, editor of the travel section of the Los Angeles Times. And that applies to freelancers like me as well as staff writers.

What that means is that every time that I travel I pay for it entirely out of my own pocket. I won't even take a meal from a representative of a company that I might be writing about (I will accept a cup of coffee). I've even turned down a bagel and orange juice. It's just not worth the risk to my integrity as a journalist for the paltry payback.

And at the end of the day, the single most valuable asset we have as journalists is our integrity. Without it, we lose credibility and the respect of our audience. Screw with that and we're no better than any PR flack trying to sell the public soap. I quote the late, great Otis Chandler on the subject:

"If a newspaper, even a great newspaper like the Los Angeles Times, loses credibility with its community, with its readers, with its advertisers, with its shareholders, that is probably the most serious circumstance that I can possibly envision. Respect and credibility for a newspaper is irreplaceable."

This is all a long way of trying to sell my fellow Tribuners over at KTLA on the idea that it wasn't a good thing they did taking free rooms at the Ritz Carlton Huntington in Pasadena for three of the hosts of their morning show in exchange for "airtime" (first reported Saturday in the Pasadena Star-News, today in the Los Angeles Times). It's not that in doing so they were necessarily swayed in their coverage, it is the impression that they may have been that is damaging -- and not just to KTLA, but to other Tribune journalists and to journalists in general.

"I think witting or unwitting, whatever anybody in the media does reflects on every other person in the media," says Ms. Hamm. Amen to that.

It seems like journalism ethics 101, but KTLA remains steadfast in their resolve that nothing untoward was done. Ask yourselves this:

Can viewers of KTLA ever be sure that KTLA is giving the Ritz the same scrutiny they may to other hotels? Might a negative story about the Ritz slip to the back burner that maybe should have seen the light of day on KTLA? Again, it's not the actual fact of it, it is the impression, the feeling, that slight inkling that readers and viewers will take away from this. Is that loss of faith really worth the 1,200 bucks or so it would have cost for those three rooms?

KTLA should immediately reimburse the hotel for the actual, street-value expenses of its hosts' stay at the Ritz Carlton Huntington and issue a statement saying that it was wrong to accept the stays and that it will not do so in the future. The morning show hosts (who I doubt had any inkling what their producers were getting them into) ought to read it on-air. Then each of the comped hosts should reveal one negative thing about their stay at the hotel, even if it is something as minor as the water took too long to heat up in the shower, or the orange juice wasn't fresh.

Finally, whoever was responsible for booking the fiasco needs to perform a mea culpa on KTLA's website to journalists everywhere for their blundering lack of judgment. Don't journalists face enough challenges today without creating them within our ranks?

The Daily Traveler Link

Airline Myths and Legends

2006-03-02T16:07:00.000-08:00

Airplane Landing Caribbean

James Wysong is apparently a fully employed flight attendant at some American airline which hasn't recently descended into bankruptcy, and so has the time and money to blog about his experiences, including this recent hilarious missive about airline myths and legends.

James, grow a beard or goatee, or put a tattoo of some screaming, naked babe on your forehead, but please do something about your photo on your blog. It's pitiful. See my stupid blog author photo for some inspiration.

Have you ever heard an airplane story that has been passed down from year to year, only to realize when you hear it a second time that it has changed in some way? Who starts these stories? Are they true?

I have been in the airline business for many years and I hear the same stories over and over. I can't tell you positively if they are true or false, but I can give you some opinions on their probability. Take a look at these myths and legends, for instance.

Legend. An extremely large female passenger on a trans-Atlantic flight finds herself sealed to the toilet after she flushes it. It takes three mechanics on the ground to free her.

Reality check. False. Yes, airplane toilets have very powerful suction, but when the seat is down (as I assume it would be when she sat down), there is a small gap between the seat and the toilet that prevents an airtight seal from forming. I once put this story to the test by creating an airtight seal, then flushing the toilet. Yes, there was a lot of force, but after the flush cycle the pressure was released, so our robust passenger would be free to go.

Addendum. I once tried stringing a line of toilet paper from the back lavatory to the front of the airplane, then flushing the toilet. Sure enough, the string of toilet paper got sucked out in one piece. (No, I guess I didnÂt have anything better to do with my time.)

Myth. The "Mile High Club" is so enticing because the sexual climax is 10 times more intense on an airplane due to the altitude and the cabin pressure.

Reality check. False. It's just the excitement of doing it in a bizarre place and maybe getting caught - or so I am told. With the deplorable state of most airplane lavatories these days, I am barely able to raise a smile much less anything else. Or is that just age talking?

Legend. A white passenger on a British Airways flight from Johannesburg objects to being seated next to a black man and asks for another seat. The flight attendant says she'll see what she can do. She returns to say there is a seat available in first class and that the captain has approved an upgrade because he feels that no one should have to sit next to such an offensive person. The flight attendant then turns to the black man and invites him to the first class seat, to the cheers and applause of other passengers.

Reality check. I don't know if this is true, but I will tell you that I have upgraded passengers sitting next to obnoxious neighbors quite a few times.

Myth. You are more likely to get sick when flying because the airplane's circulation system spreads viruses.

Reality check. Actually, airplane air is quite healthy because it is run through HEPA air filters, which can catch up to 99.9% of small bacteria and viruses - even SARS and the bird flu virus. The real culprit is more likely to be that guy in the next seat who sneezed on you.

Legend. A Pan Am flight attendant working in first class has to deny a meal choice to a celebrity passenger. Indignant and upset, the celebrity launches into a temper tantrum. "Do you know who I am?" the passenger repeatedly exclaims. The flight attendant quickly gets on the passenger address system and announces, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a passenger who does not know who he is. If anyone can help us with this information it would be greatly appreciated."

Tripso Link

Tim Leffel and Perceptive Travel

2006-03-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

Tim Leffel Tome

Travel writer Tim Leffel has launched a new website aimed at perceptive travelers, and provides travel stories from travel guidebook authors "on the road" as well as bi-monthly reviews of new travelogues authored by Tim himself. His March-April review of three books is just great, as he praises one book profusely and slams the other two into the ground.

Fine, honest work, Tim.

He also goes on with some comparison between the cost of round-the-world travel and buying cigarettes for a year in NYC. Very funny stuff with loads of truth.

If the travel budget seems daunting, is there something else that’s sucking up your funds?

The new issue of Perceptive Travel is out today. I ended up doing the book reviews. Two books that I wasn’t so impressed with, but one that was great–The Devil’s Picnic. Why I’m bringing this up is that one line in there is really appropriate in terms of finding money for travel. The author, Taras Grescoe, notes in passing that supporting a pack-a-day cigarette habit in New York City for a year costs as much as a round-the-world plane ticket.

That can’t be right I thought–until I pulled out a calculator. At $7.50 a pack, a common price there, the tab after 365 days would be $2,737.50. That’s not just enough for a bare bones round-the-world ticket; it’s actually enough for one with a fair number of stops.

If you take that reasoning a step further, quitting smoking for two years and putting that $7.50 per day away in the bank would result in a plane ticket and enough to fund three to six months of travel in cheap countries. I’m not picking on smokers really. They get enough abuse. Apply the same reasoning to those with a two-a-day mocha latte habit, or to those who can’t stop buying new shoes, people who spend hundreds of dollars a week at restaurants, or anyone who feels they have to have the latest hot sports car in the driveway. Unless you’re really making close to nothing, budgeting is all about priorities. You pay the fixed costs and then divvy up the rest according to priorities. In too many cases, the priorities revolve around buying and consuming at a frenetic pace, or purchasing short vacation packages in the same way a shopper would purchase a new TV.

The people who most often ask how I can afford to travel so often are usually earning more money than I do. The problem is, it’s all going into their new car, their ever-growing wardrobe, and their oversized house filled with too much stuff.

Those who really want to travel do. I’ve shared guesthouses with school teachers, janitors, bartenders, and construction workers. They made travel a priority, saved their money, and took off. For most of us, it’s simply a matter of will

Tim Leffel Link

Work for Hire? Royalties? Advance?

2006-03-02T15:10:00.000-08:00

Work for Hire?

New blogger Lynn Scanlon has recently stirred up the pot with her post about advances and flat-fee work for book projects. MediaBistro has been all over the controversy with comments and criticism coming in from all directions.

When you are selected to write a book (guidebook, whatever), should you take a flat fee or a royalty, and should you request a large flat fee, or advance, on signing or should you decline the flat fee/advance for a somewhat higher royalty rate?

I've done all of the above, and feel that a high royalty rate without an advance is the best way to go. Flat fees are a suckers game. Insist on royalties. If your book sells well, then you will make longterm decent money that continues to roll in over the years. And if it doesn't sell well, you probably should have found a different book project.

Writers should assume the same risks and rewards as the publisher, who must pony up the money upfront for printing costs, editorial work, and sales, promotion, and distribution.

Here's Lynnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.. sort of like Jack in the Shining where he types for six months: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy:

Lawrence LaRose neatly ducked a question thrown at him today while he gave a talk about his 2004 book Gutted Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, New York.

He was asked how well the book was doing. Amazingly he didn't blink. He didn't get dodgy-eyed.

Gutted is selling as a used book on Amazon for $1.23.

LaRose's 1996 book, The Code: Time-Tested Secrets for Getting What You Want from Women -- Without Marrying Them, is selling on Amazon for $.30.

He wanted $20 for the hardcover version of Gutted, a few copies of which were available on a table nearby. I offered him $10. He said: "But you're an author, too." (Like I'm supposed to show some sympathy.) I pointed out to him that I could buy the book for $1.23 online!

Sold: $10.00!

Cruel and heartless though I may be toward a fellow author, I know he is just learning a lesson that I learned a long time ago, and moved over into the business side of publishing. The retail price of a book is meaningless. There is no money in publishing for the vast majority of authors. Having a book sell more than 100,000 copies is as difficult as making an NBA team.

I read somewhere, and I believe it. My titles sold very well. Maybe his first book did, too, since he smartly spoofed and rode the coattails of The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right on the publicity circuit and onto a sofa beside Oprah. But just because you sell tens of thousands of copies or even hundreds of thousands of copies, doesn't mean the big checks will roll in for the author. Not like they do for the publishing house. Read the contract.

What's an advance against royalties, really? It's a loan. Something you have to pay back before you see a dime more. Yes, there is the possibility that enough copies will be sold at high enough prices and you'll receive the maximum royalty, and you may actually manage to "pay back" that loan, but the likelihood is slim, slim, slim.

And that's the way publishers like it. The contract is designed to fill the coffers of the publishing house, not the polka-dotted, porcelain piggy bank of the author.

Here's what I recommend for authors today. Don't accept an advance against royalties. (Yippee! A $100,000 advance against royalties! OK, make it $10,000.) Surprise! It's doled out upon signing the contract, turning in an "approved" manuscript, being published, and (horrors!) reaching the sixth month mark after the pub date if the publishing house can get away with it. Get a check upfront as payment in full. Say the magic words "work for hire." You can take less than the $100,000. (What? Give up $100,000?!) Money you have in your hand today is worth much more than money tomorrow.) The size of the check you are offered will indicate the kind of support your book will get.

The Publishing Contrarian Link

****************************

And MediaBistro readers send in their responses.

Your comments on this morning's post about Lynne W. Scanlon's advice to authors to forgo advances and take a one-time payment from publishers for their books are coming in...and you're not exactly enthused over the idea. "There are so many reasons this is stupid tenumeratet even begin to ennumerate them," writes one agent. "Seriously. And I'm a guy who tends to like contrarian ideas. Maybe if you're talking about a certain kind of gimmick-driven nonfiction this makes a certain degree of sense. But for the vast number of authors, this amounts to giving away the author's piece of the future for a smaller piece of the present, which literally makes no sense."

Literary agent Janet Reid calls Scanlon's proposal "interesting," but outlines some key objections: "First, there are tax issues; all the money up front means it's all taxable in that QUARTER: 30% right off the top. Second, publishers pay advances based on what they think the book will earn... Third, this completely ignores smaller publishers who depend on paying future royalties for a book rather than big up front advances (let alone bigger up front work for hire paychecks)."

Some folks took issue with Scanlon's characterization of advances as loans. "Is there something here I'm not understanding?" asks one reader. "A loan is money given to you so that later, you pay it back." Bestselling author Tess Gerritsen provides further clarification: "It's NOT a loan (at least, it isn't in any of my contracts). It's money I get to keep, even if only ten copies sell." And, she points out, the size of the advance is a strong indicator of how much marketing push the publisher will give your book when it comes out. "If they give you a seven-figure advance, do you think they're gonna let that book die in the stores? No way. They'll throw more money after it, in advertising and promotions, to ensure their big investment doesn't flop."

Not everyone hates Scanlon's idea, though. One publishing exec says it has "a lot of merit," and asks, "Since a publisher is taking on all the risk, why should the publisher share the profits should the book take off?" He looks to the music industry for inspiration, citing the work-for-hire approach adopted by Naxos Records to produce budget-priced classical music CDs for "a slow-growth/no-growth, overpopulated market" that he views as comparable to contemporary publishing. "You need to keep costs as lean as possible and make smart pricing decisions," he says. "Naxos's model is one the book industry should consider studying."

MediaBistro Link 1

And here's some more reaction from MediaBistro readers.

Readers are still reacting to Lynne Scanlon's comments about work for hire, leading to a third wave of letters coming in. "I still don't get her point," says Tess Gerritsen. "Since advances are calculated partly on how many copies the publisher thinks will sell, how is that different from 'work for hire' where the publisher pays a flat fee based on how many copies they think the book will sell? It's still cash on the barrel, with the obvious difference: If the book sells like gangbusters, the author benefits from that success with royalties." Gerritsen also observes that "many, if not most, top-selling authors never earn out their advancesÂand they have absolutely no problems negotiating their next contracts."

Mark Haskell Smith points to Hollywood for a less glamorous countermodel of work for hire. "The board of directors (and many members) of the WGA in Los Angeles have been trying for years to figure out a way to get ownership of original written material retained by writers," he says. "Right now the studios own the material and all work is work for hire. In that environment, an author could easily sell a novel to a publisher and then discover another novelist coming in to 'polish' it before it hits the marketplace. Since the original material would be work for hire, the publisher would own it and could, basically, do whatever they want." For that matter, I'm sure that comic book authors and artists would have an interesting perspective on the work for hire debate as well...

The executive who expressed support for the idea returned to clarify his comments about publishers taking all the risk. "I'm simply pointing out a fact," he writes. "In the writer-publisher relationship, the publisher takes on the financial risk. The writer gets paid no matter what. The publisher is spending money in the hope of a return. Many books post losses. In my experience, most writers don't try to live on their writing income, so it's not correct to characterize their activity as risking a financial loss. They are not 'in business' in the same way a publisher is."

The debate continues over at Scanlon's Publishing Contrarian, including her "bottom line" rationale for why her approach is right: "Ten-thousand-copies-sold is often enough, no MORE than enough, for a publishing house to be happy. In fact, very happy... It's the 10,000 copies here, 10,000 copies there, that are the bread and butter sales for a publishing house, but not for the author."

MediaBistro Link 2

And then Scanlon responds to her critics, with a new post and commentary at MediaBistro. She must be loving this.

Contrarian Rebuts Your Criticisms

Publishing Contrarian Lynne W. Scanlon responds to some of yesterday's letters reacting to her recommendation that writers embrace the "work-for-hire" compensation model when dealing with publishers. An agent pointed out that getting all the money up front meant it would all be taxable in one quarter; Scanlon replies, "Most advances are tiny and most writers have more than enough write-offs to offset the tax issue. Stretching a $10,000, $25,000 or even $40,000 advance over a year or two years or three, rather than getting the cash in hand (when it isn't much to live on anyhow) makes no sense to me if you want to pay your bills." In response to Tess Gerritsen's observation that an advance against royalties isn't a loan, in the sense you don't have to pay it back if the book doesn't sell enough copies, she retorts, "If you 'default,' so-to-speak, and do not 'earn back' your advance, best of luck with your next contract!"

But it's actually the comments from a publishing executive who appreciates Scanlon's idea that drew the most response yesterday afternoon. "Of course a publishing executive thinks that going to a work-for-hire model has a lot of merit," replies one agent. "Publishers have always wanted the ability to control the intellectual property of an author without strings attached." In response to the executive's claim that publishers take "all the risk" on books and shouldn't have to share the profits, writer and industry educator Bella Stander (at whose "Book Promotion 101" workshops, I should disclose, Sarah and I are both scheduled to speak) says, "I find this singularly arrogant. As we know, the author takes a huge financial risk by writing a book." Another reader concurs, "Without the author's time, there would be no book, no book signings, etc. If the author doesn't make enough on their investment, there may be no second book. Both the publisher and the author need to make money and both need to be rewarded if the book takes off."

That same executive cited budget-CD label Naxos as a model for publishing work-for-hire content, prompting one of the agents who first wrote in to return with an additional comment. "Naxos is a great model," he says, "if you don't mind skipping over the best (or even the second best) talent. For the most part, Naxos uses third-rate orchestras with middling grade talent to produce cheap recordings. Most writers I know want to be considered first-rate, and they want to be treated that way."* Janet Reid also came back to respond to this line of reasoning: "Naxos pays musicians on a work-for-hire basis, not composers. Musicians are not the creators of work like writers are creators of a novel, and most of the composers Naxos records are well beyond collecting royalties given they died not just in the last century but the century before that!"

*Exceptions to the rule exist: Marin Alsop's excellent work with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on John Adams and Philip Glass, for one, and the 3-CD set of William Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and of Experience for another... (See, we don't just know books here at GalleyCat!)

MediaBistro Link 3

Amazing Race 9

2006-03-01T12:26:00.000-08:00

Bill Bryson

One of the few commercial TV programs I attempt to follow is Amazing Race, which combines the love of quirky characters with exotic destinations that remind us all of how exhilarating travel can be in our packaged world. Last night's kickoff for season 9 looks promising with the first visit to Sao Paulo and the introductions of the core participants.

Can you come back from jumping the shark? Of course you can. Last season, the Amazing Race had its "Cousin Oliver" moment when the show turned into an unwatchable "Family Edition" format. But we are a forgiving group here at Jaunted, and we welcome back our beloved "classic mode" Amazing Race, warts and all.

This week's premiere started off per usual, with Phil introducing the race, and each team introducing themselves. These intros quickly put the teams into nice, manageable, stereotypical boxes: Southern racists, bickering couple, gay dudes, your token sexagenarians, oh, and don't forget the always entertaining mother/daughter action.

After his usual race preamble, which this season took place at Red Rocks, Colorado, Phil sent the kids off to SÃ£o Paulo Brazil.

Before the eleven teams headed to Brazil, the dentist and his subservient wife informed Ray that his name was Lake, "like the ocean", and then once Ray was out of earshot, began to mutter what sounded like racial slurs. Way to make a first impression, Ocean.

Jaunted Link

The last few seasons of Amazing Race have also been well covered with excellent commentary provided by travel wizard and fellow writer Edward Hasbrouck.

The Amazing Race is back!

Back in Sao Paulo for the second time. (Don't be surprised if you've forgotten their first visit four years ago -- they didn't actually do much in Sao Paulo.) Back to teams of two adults, instead of teams of four that include children. (Too bad: As I've said repeatedly, the television producers missed a huge chance to show the world as children experience it, and to teach adult viewers how much more quickly and easily children adapt to unfamiliar settings.) But most importantly, back to travelling around the world (or at least to many continents), rather than just around North and Central America as in the most recent flop of a season of the reality-television race.

The lack of audience interest in the previous season of the race, as host Phil Keoghan has admitted in recent interviews, suggests that the excitement and education we get from travel is as much about diversity of people as of places. Yes, the USA has both tropical jungle and arctic mountaintops. Yes, the USA is a melting pot of peoples. But the world is still a lot more culturally diverse than the USA or any one country, and changing scenery outside the window of your SUV is no substitute for cultural encounter and immersion.

Edward Hasbrouck Link

Royalty Reductions Down Under

2006-02-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

Hand-Book for Travellers

Welcome Gridskipper readers. Do feel free to wander around this blog and consume whatever morsel seems tasty. And if you have an interest in Southeast Asia (who doesn't?), then head over to my main blog at:

FriskoDude -- Southeast Asia, Travel and Photography

In other depressing news, Aussie publisher Penguin has elected to cut royalties sharply to help out everyone in the business, except for the writers themselves. Writers: The Shits of the Publishing World.

Penguin cuts authors' reprint royalties

Australia's biggest book publisher has made a historic move to cut back royalties for authors with books in reprint.

Penguin Books is now enforcing a clause in writers' contracts to drop reprint rates from an average of 10 per cent, to between 6 and 8 per cent.

Penguin's Bob Sessions has defended the decision and says it will benefit authors whose books would have otherwise not been reprinted.

Mr Sessions says the new royalty deal for Australian writers is in line with the international market.

"We're not doing anything unusual," he said.

"If an author goes to a publisher in New York or London, that's what they're going to be offered as a standard rate and all the literary agents in both those countries accept that and have done for many years."

ABC Online News Link

Red Flags for Writers

2006-02-16T12:18:00.000-08:00

Passport to Adventure

Last week I signed up for a free weekly email newsletter from Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly, the "highest circulation freelance writing ezine in the world." While the newsletter is for freelancers in general, and doesn't seem to include much about travel writing, I found one great article by Angela that covers writer scams in great detail. I'll post a portion here, but do click the link at the bottom for the full story. And sign up for her free weekly email newsletter.

Last week, I received two letters from readers complimenting us on only running quality job ads. While I do occasionally screw up and get "had" by a bad one, I try very hard each week to avoid the questionable/seedy ads, and only run ads that are for real companies that pay writers real money.

I admit I get pretty upset when I see my writing website colleagues running ads that are obviously questionable or unethical, if not downright scams (pay per click, term paper mills, etc.) and, unfortunately, when I write to them to complain, they usually ignore my emails. One exception is FundsforWriters. Hope Clark will immediately remove any questionable ads to protect her readers. It's too bad that many freelance writing sites care more about how much content they put on their sites than they do about protecting their readers from the sharks in our industry.

I thought it would be a good idea this week to share a list of "red flag" words and phrases that I look for when scouring the job boards. These might help you avoid being scammed when doing your next online job search.

**RED FLAGS!**

"Start-up" - This often means little (or no) pay and, if the new company doesn't succeed, you'll probably never get your last paycheck.

"Employment Ad" which leads to no job ad at all - Watch out for those ads that simply lead you to a for-cost service for writers, such as a subscription-based service that requires writers to pay for actual job listings. These listings are often simply links to job ads already appearing freely online. Running deceptive "employment ads" like this is unethical and writers should avoid companies that play that game.

"On Site Freelance" - On site usually means "employee", not freelance. Companies that require freelancers to work on site may simply be ignorant, or may be trying to avoid paying employment taxes, overtime, and insurance costs for those workers. If you must work at their location, on their schedule, using their tools, you are probably an employee (even if you're only working part-time) and likely entitled to all the benefits of employment, including overtime pay (if you work overtime hours), the employer's portion of FICA and Medicare contributions, as well as medical insurance and other benefits given to their employees. If you believe your "employer" is taking advantage of you in this way, please contact the Wage and Hour Division at the Department of Labor. You are probably entitled to back-pay and benefits. There's a great list of items detailing this subject HERE.

"Project must be completed "ASAP!" - Many writers do work in a hurry for companies that demand immediate turn-around, often for promises of big pay on completion. However, the company never seems to have time to send a contract to the writer. This is a common scam and many of these writers, after pushing everything else aside for this "lucrative project", never get paid at all and never hear from the company again. Don't write without a contract! And, if a company needs immediate turn-around, request a down-payment for your trouble and for your own security.

"Editing/Writing Test Required" - Legitimate writing or editing tests mean taking the exact same test that all the other writers/editors take. Some companies ask writers/editors to rewrite/edit "sample chapters" from books or other items. However, they ask different writers to rewrite/edit different chapters and, before you know it, all those writers applying for the phony job have completed the entire project for the scammer.

"Revenue Sharing" - This is an old one, just like the old pay-per-click scenario. All writers either get a percentage (a minuscule percentage!) of the advertising revenue or they get paid a few pennies or less per click. You can read writers' experiences with these types of firms in my article HERE.

"Freelance Blogger" - First, let me say there are some real blogger jobs out there and there are more each week. According to Richard Hoy (yeah, my hubby), who sets up the blogs for BookLockerauthors, a blog is a running commentary on a subject, presented in "diary" format, made possible through special software that makes publishing the commentary on the Internet easy and quick. Unfortunately, many blogger ads currently appearing online are offering revenue sharing and pay-per-click payments only. This is really no different from the "revenue sharing" scheme mentioned above. If you don't have control of marketing for a company, why should your pay depend on their marketing expertise (or lack thereof)? There are also many blog "employment ads" online now offering now pay, just "exposure." Please don't fall for that one, either.

"Payment in stock / stock options" - Come on now! If a company can't afford to pay you even a few dollars for your work, do you really think this company is going anywhere? I've been in this business since 1997 and I've never met a writer who wrote for stock that ended up being worth anything at all.

Writer Weekly Link

New York Mag: The Blog Establishment

2006-02-13T10:24:00.000-08:00

New York Magazine Cover

New York magazine has just published an inside look into the world of blogging, which may, or may not, provide some useful background for those travel writers intending to make money with their travel-oriented blog or website.

By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that.

In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. “It just seems like it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me. (Indeed, a couple of pranksters last spring started a joke site called Blogebrity and posted actual lists of the blogs they figured were A-, B-, and C-level famous.)

New York Link

Get Real: Hotel Review Sites on the Web

2006-02-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's Real

Website guru and internet travel writer Durant Imboden recently pointed out an article that investigates the reality behind all those hotel review websites on the internet, such as the one I sometimes look at out of sheer boredom -- Fodor's Asia Chat (or whatever they call it). The Fodor's site is almost exclusively geared to very upscale travelers, who love to praise or damn their favorite hotels in Bangkok, and I find the site quite intelligent and useful for a travel writer trying to keep up with hotel developments in that part of the world.

Obviously, there are some shills on the site that hope to promote their favorite hotels in Bangkok or Bali, and you rarely get seriously critical comments about the properties, but it's not always a love fest. But you probably need to take the effulsive praise with the grain of salt, especially with the larger and more mainstream websites that invite commentary from the unwashed masses.

Here's what Durant has to say about the controversy:

The article describes how some hotels and resorts have "reputation management" departments that submit positive reviews under pseudonyms to user-review sites like TripAdvisor.com and IgoUgo.com. Others offer incentives to guests who post positive reviews at such sites. The bigger review sites are having to respond with more editorial control and penalties for hotels that abuse the system.

In another publication, PC MAGAZINE, columnist Bill Machrone writes about "turking," which involves the payment of tiny amounts (e.g., a penny per review) to users who name the three best pizza parlors in Philadelphia, the three best sushi bars in Silicon Valley, etc. Machrone talks about the dangers that turking could encourage a "vast, unregulated workforce, well under the minimum-wage radar" and speculates that "people clever for their own good" might pack turking-based sites with "multiple reviews, fake identities, and computer-reworded opinions." See:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1917750,00.asp

It seems that publishers who rely on free or almost-free contributions are beginning to discover that they get what they pay for. :-)

- Durant

Durant Imboden
Europe for Visitors
http://europeforvisitors.com

And here's a short bit from the New York Times article:

Business travelers like Michelle Madhok used to consider online hotel reviews a reliable reference.

Travelers once took reviews on Web sites at face value, but the proliferation of voices and the manipulation by hoteliers have made skeptics of the site operators and their readers.

Officials at TripAdvisor.com say they closely monitor reviews to eliminate any spurious recommendations for certain hotels.
Whenever she traveled to an unfamiliar city, Ms. Madhok said, she clicked on sites like TripAdvisor.com or IgoUgo.com, where she found thousands of ratings written by real guests.

Or so she thought.

Ms. Madhok, the president of the Internet shopping site Shefinds.com, said she was now becoming increasingly skeptical of what she saw online. "I read reviews of hotels that I've stayed at," she said. "And they're just wrong. I wonder if they've really stayed at the hotel."

On a recent visit to a spa in New York, she says, her doubts turned to disbelief: the resort was discreetly offering a free reflexology treatment to customers who posted a positive review of the establishment on Citysearch.com. "It was very troubling," she said.

As Web sites that publish guest hotel reviews become more influential, some hotels — from bed-and-breakfasts to large resorts — are going to greater lengths to ensure that their properties are rated highly. Their efforts, analysts say, range from encouraging guests to write flattering reviews to, in extreme cases, submitting bogus recommendations to Web sites.

The hotels justify their actions, the analysts say, as a counterweight to out-of-context rants by disgruntled guests; both sides are exploiting a new technology that lacks the safeguards of the traditional travel guidebooks, which are written by professional writers and edited for accuracy.

It was not always so. In the early days of hotel review sites on the Web, the Internet was a less diverse place, and the postings generally came from like-minded travelers, the experts say. But as more and more people are using the Internet to make travel decisions, there are more incentives, and opportunities, to manipulate reviews.

The major hotel chains deny that they try to influence online reviews in any way. But publishers at the most popular review Web sites say they have been inundated by fraudulent posts and have had to develop numerous measures to protect travelers.

Analysts and Web site operators say they fear that the effort is a losing battle. "Most sites can't catch a fake review," said Stanley E. Roberts, the chief executive of We8there.com, a lodging and dining review site.

Even so, Mr. Roberts says he reads every review before it is posted — a laborious process that relies on instinct and experience. Still, he said, "I'm never sure if a fake is going to make it through."

The relentless efforts by hotels to influence their online ratings have made some review sites suspicious, if not paranoid. "We assume that every review we get is bogus, and it is bogus until proven otherwise," said Kenneth J. Marshall, who publishes HotelShark.com, a small hotel review site "We have to look for a reason to publish it." Indeed, more than half the reviews he receives do not make the cut, he said. As a result, only about 1,200 hotels are reviewed on his site.

IgoUgo.com, another ratings site, takes a different approach to ferreting out fraudulent write-ups. The guest commentaries it publishes are put into context, with detailed information about each reviewer, "so you can see exactly who is writing the review and if that person has similar travel needs to yourself," said Jim Donnelly, the site's vice president for marketing.

IgoUgo counts about 670 active business travelers in its membership. Their postings are also monitored by editors as an extra precaution.

TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia, is perhaps the best known of the hotel ratings sites and proclaims it is the largest, with more than three million reader reviews. It is so concerned with review fraud that it hired Reed Meyer to create a fraud detection algorithm to sniff out suspect reviews. Mr. Meyer would not disclose how the program worked because he did not want to tip off hotels on how to circumvent it. Nor will he say how many reviews have been weeded out by the application.

Christine Petersen, TripAdvisor's senior vice president for marketing, said, "Hotels periodically try to get around the system." In one memorable case, an Italian hotelier offered the site a bottle of Limoncello di Capri liqueur if the site would remove a poor review of his property. The site declined.

"If a hotel is caught trying to influence the process, they're put on a watch list," she said. "That influences their ranking, and is a huge black mark against them."

New York Times Link

Fly the Friendly Skies

2006-02-10T10:41:00.000-08:00

Saudi Airlines

Are you sick and tired of long, boring trans-Pacific flights, stuffed into economy class with horrid food and surly waitresses? A very clever guy in Saudi Arabia may have discovered the solution.

Cargo worker sleeps, wakes up in Turkey

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) — It was a short flight, and Muhammet Ahmet Mursi slept almost the whole way. No leg room complaints. No cramped seats. No annoying intercom announcements.

Only the heat wasn't on and it started to get a little cold. Cold enough to make Mursi wake up. Cold enough to make him realize he was in the cargo hold. Cold enough that he screamed so loud the pilots heard him.

Mursi, a cargo worker in Saudi Arabia, fell asleep on the job Wednesday night as he loaded the suitcases of Muslim pilgrims from Turkey on a Turkish Airlines flight from the Saudi port city of Jeddah to the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir.

Mursi woke up somewhere over southeastern Turkey, television station NTV reported Thursday. He managed to make himself heard from among the boxes and suitcases he was stretched out on, prompting the pilots to pump him some hot air. Bearded, wearing all orange and on a stretcher, Mursi was seen being taken from an airport in Diyarbakir, Turkey for medical treatment at a local hospital. Yusuf Yagmur, a doctor, said Mursi was suffering from pneumonia.

"The patient was in a panic and he had pneumonia," Yagmur told Anatolia news agency. "His treatment will take a few days." He will be returned to Saudi Arabia, probably on a seat, when his treatment is complete, NTV said.

USA Today Link

MediaBistro Tips for Travel Writers/Photographers

2006-02-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

Hindu Pilgrims by Carl Parkes

MediaBistro may sponsor ongoing seminars for prospective travel writers, but they rarely post articles about the craft, so I was surprised to see this story today with a very sensible tips for any and all travel writers. Take your damn camera along and take your best photos, to illustration your story and perhaps boost your paltry income from the writing itself.

Freelance writing and freelance photography often seem like completely different worlds. However, there is one genre where writers and photogs are often the same people: travel writing. To save money, publications often ask travel writers to turn in their trip pictures if they're useable for the piece. Not only do you get a nice clip with a published photo credit, you get extra money as well. Most of us though are new to invoicing and formatting photos for publication, so I spoke with a few travel writers on what other writers should know about selling their pictures.

"I have sold my pictures with several other non-travel stories to national magazines," says Gayle Formon, who teaches mb's Travel Writing Boot Camp. "Editors usually asked me to take photos and if they used any of them, I would simply ask them what their page rate was and who I should bill."

"The issue of shooting for your own articles did come up in my last class, and students had an opportunity to talk to travel editors about it. Certainly, when working for, or pitching, a smaller (poorer) publication, if you can come back from a trip with some fantastic shots, that can only work in your favor. If I had a good photographic eye, I would certainly tell an editor, maybe even show a portfolio.

Some editors will be glad to get two for the price of one, but the bargain should be simply that they don't have to pay to send a writer and a photographer to a place. Writers should expect to be paid separately, even if it's just a token amount. Otherwise, they're letting themselves be taken advantage of--which happens all too often in the freelance world. If I were given the assignment to shoot and report, I'd take it with the understanding that the photography assignment is on spec.

If they like something enough to use it, they should pay for it. Again, most pubs have a page rate, and pay a set amount based on size of the picture. I never brought up payment until after pictures were chosen for a layout, and then I simply asked how much the rate was and who I should bill."

Travel writer Bill Becher very helpfully sent me several tips on how writers can take and tell the best pictures they can to supplement their pay for a travel writing clip:

"'Do we have art?'" is the constant refrain of newspaper editors. (For some reason, newspaper people refer to photographs as "art"). If you can say yes, you'll increase the chance your story will be published and you'll earn more money. If you're writing on assignment for a glossy magazine, congratulations, but you'll probably find that the magazine will assign a photographer. So the rest of this discussion will focus on newspaper travel sections.

Pay for photos depends on the paper and its circulation, most will have a going rate (from $25 to $150 per photo and up, depending on size, quality and black and white or color).

Here are 10 tips for budding travel photographers:

1. Think like a movie director. Don't turn in all shots of scenery from a distance. Take an overall establishing shot, then a closer shot of people doing something that helps tell your story, then a really tight shot of something. An example might be an overall shot of a pink sand beach with palms and thatched huts, a shot of a couple of people coming out of the surf, and a close-up of starfish washed up on shore.

2. Get caption info. You don't need model releases for editorial use, but you should be able to supply a couple of sentences describing what's in the photo and names and hometowns of people featured in your shots. Check spelling.

3. Hold the camera steady! Many photos are too fuzzy ("soft") because of camera shake, especially with point and shot cameras. Use a tripod or lean against something when you shoot. But be sure to move around between shots and try different angles. For best light, shoot early or late in the day.

4. Most newspapers are entirely digital these days. If you only have slides or prints the paper will probably be able to scan negatives or slides, but digital is the way to go. Your camera should be capable of taking an image at least 2,500 pixels on the large side, this usually translates to a 5 mega pixel camera or better. More is better as it allows cropping. You may be asked to summit photos via e-mail, FTP, or a CD. Advanced digital cameras should be set to Adobe RGB II mode and sharpening turned off.

5. Good equipment like a digital SLR camera with selection of lenses and flash helps but I've sold many photos shot with a 5-7 mega pixel point and shoot camera. Set the camera on the highest resolution .jpg file. Don't edit it in Photoshop, even if you think you know what you're doing, let the paper's photo editors do that. Especially don't sharpen photos, as this needs to be done to press requirements.

MediaBistro Link

Banging on Adventure Travel

2006-02-04T15:13:00.000-08:00

Through the Looking Glass

Travel writers who are writing stories for magazines or websites always need to find an underlying theme to their articles, whether it is following Conrad on his journeys around Southeast Asia or finding Orwell in Burma. You can't just write about nonsense and expect anyone to give a damn.

And so it goes with even the most lauded adventure travel writers on the planet such as Richard Bangs, founder of Sobek and the brave soul who rafted down a river in Central Africa and went on to establish his adventure travel company, now incorporated into Mountain Travel if I've got my facts straight.

Bangs wrote recently about the changes in adventure travel over the past few decades, and he's certainly qualified to write such an article, as he is a bonified expert on the subject. Why, then, so many inaccuracies? Most of the article is spot on, but his wildly imaginative writing style means he should exaggerate every failure in present day adventure travel? Why would he do that?

But I love his new words: faddism, rolling skein, panolpy of adventures. Nice wordsmithing, there.

The original adventure travelers were merchants on expedition, seeking proceeds for their imperial backers,

As an example, he cites Leif Erikson. Hello? Leif as merchant on expedition, seeking proceed for his imperial backer?

Leif Ericson was blown off course sailing from Norway to Greenland about A.D. 1000 and ended up in North America.

I'm sure the Norweigans will be thrilled to learn that their national hero was blown off course and only stumbled across North America. And where did Bangs get his notion about this theory?

The advent of modern international adventure travel traces to some 35 years ago, with the first organized treks to the Nepalese Himalayas, and soon thereafter the first commercial raft trips in Africa.

Guess who led the first commercial raft trips in Africa?

So much has changed. Nepal, which throughout the 1980's was the archetypically adventure travel destination, has been embroiled in a Maoist revolution the last several years and is on few itineraries today. The nearby kingdom of Bhutan has been the beneficiary, and is seeing record tourism. Virtually all the trekkers who go to Bhutan wander among the high peaks and immerse themselves in the Buddhist culture.

Bhutan, to my understanding, has very strict limits on international tourism, and I think the country only admits some 5,000 visitors per year. The tours may be filled up, but I doubt this is any direct response to the problems in Kathmandu.

In the 1970's, there were overland treks in Afghanistan, camel safaris in Algeria and river runs in New Guinea, none of which are viable today.

Richard should check with the tour operators which do organized river journeys up the Sepik, as I did several years ago. All are still in business. If you're nuts enough, you can still buy a canoe and paddle down the Sepik, although I wouldn't really recommend it. New Guinea is the most dangerous country I've ever visited.

In the 80's, popular offerings included felucca trips down the Egyptian Nile, climbing Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, diving the Red Sea, even surfing in Bali. None of those is offered anymore, for fear of religious-based terrorism.

Surfing is now longer available in Bali? Richard, please tie down your hat and visit Nick at www.baliblog.com

I don't know about diving the Red Sea, but is it true that "none of those are offered anymore"?

Even natural disasters take their toll. Thailand had long been a top adventure destination until the tsunami hit in 2004; more than a year later, visitation numbers remain significantly down.

Tourism in tsunami zones is down about 20-30%, but is expected to rebound next year. Most people understand that a great tsunami is an extremely rare occurrence, and when the infrastructure at Khao Lak (most devastated) is rebuilt, the Swedish tourists will return. This statement is pure sensationalism and will only scare away people who should, should, should go to Thailand to help support the Thai people working in the local tourist industry. Shame on Richard.

Today, the fear of avian flu is keeping many Americans away from Southeast Asia and China.

Wrong. Outdated and sad sensationalism. Why is Richard a fear-mongering type? We expect it from Bush, but not from the guy whose purpose in life is to promote grand adventure travel.....to see the world and spread the wealth.

Conversely, destinations rarely visited by American adventurers in the 70's, 80's and 90's have in recent years become popular, like Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Panama, all of which I've traveled to in the last 18 months, delighting in their incipient adventure offerings.

Note: Slate sent Bangs to Libya last year to report on the opening of that country. His report was colorful and honest, but he really seemed to hate most of the trip. And now he promotes the place. Really, Libya is NOT popular, not matter what Bangs tells you. Journalistic license, I guess.

I recently spent a week in Costa Rica with longtime friends including Michael Kaye, owner of one of the original Latin American adventure companies, which he founded in 1978. We rafted the Class-IV Pacuare River (which he pioneered), surfed the Pacific coast, biked some 80 miles through the rainforest, deep-sea fished the Caribbean, and went wildlife, whale and bird watching.

I have no idea the motivations behind this paragraph, but you've just got to wonder.............

New York Times Link

IHT Travel Lies

2006-02-04T13:11:00.000-08:00

Sihanoukville Independence Beach

Sihanoukville Ochheteal Beach

Sihanoukville Otres Beach

Sihanoukville Serendipity Beach

Sihanoukville Victory Beach

Sihanoukville Sokha Beach

Do not believe any travel stories you read in the International Herald Tribune.

See the photos of the beaches of Sihanoukville above? Would you spend even a single nickel to visit any of these crudy, dirty, brown-sand beaches? Of course, you wouldn't, but you'd rather spend your time at Southeast Asian beaches which are truly beautiful, such as Boracay, El Nido, Ko Phi Phi, and Samui. Why would you be sucked into wasting your hard earned dollars on some third-rank beach resort in Cambodia?

I've been to Sihanoukville and was disgusted by the cattle that wandered the beach at sunset, shitting over everything. And the town has little more to offer than rundown guesthouses and low-rent brothels.

But then the IHT journalist was given a free trip to the beach resort, where he stayed at the four-star resort, and had nothing but wonderful things to say about his vacation. Travel writing at its worst.

SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia "It's the next Goa, the new Phi Phi. If you love the cusp, or that fabulous moment when a destination morphs from backpackers bolthole into a new compass point for monied bohemians, make tracks for Sihanoukville now," insisted my friend in Bangkok, and the idea of a cheap farniente week at the beach sounded ideal after a lot of temple climbing in Angkor Wat.

The beach was even lovelier by day - basically empty and lapped by the warm, limpid aquamarine waters of the Gulf of Thailand. We quickly abandoned plans to explore Sihanoukville, which is often referred to as the "youngest" city in Cambodia since it was founded in the late '50s, in favor of a recurring triangle of idleness consisting of swimming, reading and napping, in exactly that order.

If this quiet beach town, popular with Cambodia's glamorous beau monde during the '60s before the country was devastated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, is slated to become the next Phuket, the turning point came with the opening of the Sokha Beach Hotel in May 2004. This 188-room, four-star hotel brought world-class comforts (satellite television, air conditioning, room service) to a place that had only had cheap and decidedly rustic guesthouses (Sokha Beach Resort, Street 2 Thnou Sangkat 4, Mttapheap District, Sihanoukville; tel. 855 34 935 999, fax 855 34 935 008, www.sokhahotels.com).

IHT Sihanoukville Travel Story Link

Rory MacLean and Magic Bus

2006-02-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

Burning Man

British travel writer Rory MacLean has just finished his latest travelogue and it sounds like a winner wrapped inside an enigma: Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India. Did Rory actually do this trip and, if so, what could he possibly remember of places like Kabul? He probably had to ask expert advice from surviving hippie travelers who made the journey back in the 1960s such as Dalton and Wheeler to spark his brain cells back into action.

In any event, it sounds like my kind of book, plus he discusses some interesting challenges with rights and old photographs in his latest newsletter. You might as well sign up, as Rory is pretty tight with his newsletters and they come far too infrequently in my opinion. He's at Rory MacLean Dot Com

Magic Bus is finished. Yesterday the proof-read manuscript was sent to the typesetter. The jacket has been designed and the subtitle ('On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India') agreed. I've met Rosie the-forever-young-and-sparkling-publicist and drafted ideas for newspaper features. The book's publication is set for June 29th. But finished? Not quite yet.

For one thing there are the rights clearances. Pop music was among the most important creations of the 1960s. Lyrics inspired, guided or in some cases misguided that generation and their search for a new way of living. I heard this sentiment expressed again and again during my research. In an early issue of the Village Voice I read of a Dylan debut performance, 'His voice is crude, his appearance scruffy and as a performer he lacks all traces of a professional. But one brief listening to the emotional understatement in his voice emphasizes the power of his lyrics and his genuine concern for the state of the world.' As far as I'm concerned, no book can be written about the Sixties without quoting or paraphrasing -- lyrics.

In Magic Bus I quote short extracts from ten different songs Dylan, The Beatles and Pink Floyd among others -- and the usage of each quotation has to be licensed to me by the song's writer or his/her representative. Easy? Well, I've spent at least an hour a day for the past month searching for rights holders, begging for permission and sending off cheques (the cost is borne by a book's author, not its publisher). Dylan, Sony (for Lennon and McCartney), Music Sales, EMI, Warner Chappell and Faber Music have been helpful, enthusiastic and understanding over fees. I'm sorry to report that the people representing Bob Seger whose music I love and I so wanted to quote asked for £750 in advance on a percentage of book sales (I only wanted to use 19 words!). It was with a very heavy heart that I had to cut his lines from the book.

My other preoccupation at the moment is with Sixties and Seventies photographs. I went back to many 'veterans' of the Asia Overland trail to gather together a small collection of their original images. Most of them are incredibly evocative, even those shot on battered Instamatics. I hope there will be an opportunity to publish them later in the year. Stay tuned for details.

A History of Travel Guidebooks (Part Two)

2006-02-02T14:42:00.000-08:00

Guidebooks Galore

Here's another story about the history of travel guidebooks as published recently in the Sydney Morning Herald, which takes a more classic approach to the craft, but also points out the changing styles between the original favorites and newer updates from Lonely Planet and other "travellers" guides. At the bottom, an interesting list of the best selling travel guidebooks in Australia.

Published by John Murray, it would be the pioneer title of one the world's first great guidebook empires, Murray's Handbooks, which would eventually publish about 400 titles. Its exhaustive, two-volume 1845 Handbook for Travellers in Spain, written by Richard Ford after four years of research and a decade of writing, is the classic among guidebooks.

Karl Baedeker is said to have written his first guidebook - Holland, Belgium and the Rhine - for Murray's Handbooks, but in 1829, with the publication of Baedeker's German-language guide to the Rhine Valley, he also became its first competition. Guidebooks to Austria, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland followed, and by 1861, two years after Karl's death, Baedeker was publishing English-language guides.

Baedeker created a guidebook template that has barely wavered in almost two centuries. The books were saturated in tourist sights but also offered guidance on pragmatic details such as money, language, visas, best seasons to visit, transport options and recommended hotels and restaurants.

Sydney Morning Herald Link

A History of Travel Guidebooks

2006-02-02T10:24:00.000-08:00

Tony and Maureen 1973

PublishersWeekly.com has just posted a long article about the history of travel guidebook publishing, starting with Murray in 1836, Baedeker in 1839, along with the founding of both Moon Publications and Lonely Planet in Australia in 1973. Apparently, Bill Dalton beat Tony Wheeler by about six months, a curious fact I didn't know anything about, and I've known Bill for almost 30 years.

The PublishersWeekly.com links at the bottom also work, so you might want to check the travel guidebook publications schedules for 2006, if only to keep track of what's going on with Avalon and LP.

As Hofer was getting Insight off the ground, other adventurous travelers were making tracks off ever more lightly beaten paths. The year was 1973, and both Bill Dalton, whose Moon Publications was soon to launch, and Tony and Maureen Wheeler, the inspiration behind Lonely Planet, were traipsing through their respective territories in Asia.

There may be some confusion about which made its appearance first, but the record is clear: Dalton's A Traveller's Notes: Indonesia appeared in April 1973 as a six-page typed and mimeographed pamphlet distributed as a "gypsy guide" during a 10-day arts festival in southeastern Australia. Tony Wheeler's Across Asia on the Cheap, the first Lonely Planet guide, appeared in October under somewhat similar circumstances, with a reference to Dalton's book in it ("…A Traveller's Notes should be available in most big bookshops for 50 cents," he writes).

The last edition of the Indonesia book, 1,350 pages, was published in 1995. "Bill Dalton was a writer who became a publisher, Tony Wheeler was an MBA who briefly became a writer," says Bill Newlin, publisher of Avalon Travel, Moon's current owner and himself a onetime travel writer. "Bill did a wonderful job of establishing the template that we've continued to develop over the past 15 years."

It's no accident, Newlin says, that Southeast Asia was the locale Dalton and his colleagues at Lonely Planet focused on. "It was a new frontier, a countercultural phenomenon, an updating of the Grand Tour, as Europe became more common." Dalton sold his majority interest in 1989 and stayed on as publisher until 1990. He lives in Bali and stays in touch with the company on an occasional basis.

Publishers Weekly Link

Travails of a Flight Attendant

2006-01-31T12:09:00.000-08:00

Visit North America

Nothing to do with the Travails of Travel Writing, but I found the following post by James Wysong more than just funny.

Recently, an irate reader let me know he was sick of me moaning about my job as a flight attendant. His exact words were, "If you don't like it, the last I heard, the drink-tosser's job was voluntary."

I think he got the wrong opinion of my attitude toward the job, but he got me thinking about signs to look out for in the future. So, I drew up an informal poll and asked more than a hundred flight attendants when they would know it was time to take off their wings. Here are some of the best and most interesting answers.

You know it's time to quit being a flight attendant when:

The copilot and the captain are both younger than you.

You can remember when they cooked eggs to order in first class.

Passengers ask you questions at the airport and you aren't even in uniform.

You see a passenger for the first time and know what he wants to drink even before he asks. (I am correct about 90 percent of the time. Some people just look like a ginger ale.)

You wake up in a strange city, don't remember where you are, and don't really care.

Your "secret knock" at home is the same as the code for the cockpit door.

You have a huge collection of miniature alcohol bottles at home. (At last count, I had 512 miniatures from more than 50 countries.)

You take alcohol off the airplane, and you aren't a drinker.

You use the seat backs as support to walk down the aisles. Bless her heart, I flew with an 82-year-old flight attendant who needed the bar cart to prop her up in the aisle.

A younger crew member asks you what it was like in the "good old days."

Several hotel staffs know you by name.

You're the last one to sit down to your family dinner, and the first one to clear the plates.

You know the safety demonstration announcements by heart, and you prove it by reciting them in the shower.

You have airplane disaster dreams, and you like them.

You carry a non-uniform jacket with you just in case the day is full of cancellations and you will need to hide from angry passengers in the terminal.

A younger crew member asks you if you still go out for drinks with the crew "at your age."

You start to smell like a Boeing aircraft. Eau de Boeing they call it.

You are serving dinner at home -- it's either chicken or beef, and not very good, and you think about charging the family for it.

When an angry passenger explains why he will never fly on your airline again, you agree with him and begin to wonder why anyone flies on your airline.

You lie to perfect strangers about which airline you work for.

You are on a tropical-island layover with beautiful weather and a fun crew, and you think the layover should be shorter so you can get home.

On the way to work, you fantasize about phoning in a bomb threat just so your flight will be canceled.

You see oversize luggage and you instinctively start to growl.

Top management's bonuses increase, your paycheck and pension decrease, and you get curious about the going rate for hit men.

You carry a flask everywhere you go.

You start saying "Buh-bye" in your sleep.

Tripso Link

Blogger Corruption?

2006-01-30T12:16:00.000-08:00

World Globe

Gridskipper is a daily blog that covers the urban world of trendy restaurants, flashy hotels, hot nightclubs, and plenty of underground happenings with a snarky appeal. It's a fun site and worth putting in your RSS Reader.

Today, Gridskipper approaches investigative journalism with a story about some 20 bloggers who have been invited on a press trip to Amsterdam, with the only requirement that each blogger place a pair of advertisements on their blog. Tit-for-tat sort of thing.

I don't find this sort of arrangement particularly odious, and god knows I've had plenty of freebies during my many years as a freelance travel writer, though Gridskipper makes some compelling arguments against the travel writer/blogger-freebie situation.

Leaving off that many of the anti-junket bloggers simply object in principle to advertising on blogs, and/or that they equate blogs and citizen journalism as the second coming of Christ, their collective naivete about travel journalism is laughable. The process by which old-media journalists visit destinations and "report" on them for travel editorial is almost without exception supported -- in whole or in part -- by the destinations visited or the vendors described.

Economically it would never work any other way. Newspapers cannot spend thousands of dollars to send reporters and photographers to one city for one story, or even a series of stories, without getting price breaks or comps. Magazines usually have a little more leeway financially, but that's only because they bring in more dollars per story for the ads they already sold around that upcoming story. (Newspapers use the same methodology by selling ads around themed special travel sections.)

Even with the intermediary of the publishing company taking money from a vendor and passing it on to the journalist for expenses, the ad money is what makes the travel possible. Some media outlets insert notices identifying such practicies in the story, but it's all the same game whether they admit it or not.

Of course, there are plenty of freelancers who pay their own way and sell their stories on a mercenary basis, but they are both exceptional and typically doing so for personal reasons besides a pathological fear of compromise. The key is whether you trust the author and/or media outlet to give you an honest opinion. And frankly, it's usually painfully obvious who's been aesthetically bought and who has not.

If anything, the Amsterdam blogger project is going overboard with the transparency thing. Given that the bloggers aren't asked to actually blog about Amsterdam as part of the deal, what the Dutch are doing is trading the trip for publicity, i.e. the adspace. If some of the bloggers have a good time and blog about it, that's great too of course, and who really believes that at least one blogger won't report on a positive experience? And who really believes that at least one blogger won't report a negative experience? Publicity is publicity, and if the Dutch chose bloggers they thought were most likely to say complimentary and relevant things, well duh.

Of course, none of this will convince anyone who is constitutionally allergic to blog advertising in the first place, nor will it allay the suspicions of anyone who views every financial transaction as a political act tainted with potential (or inevitable) corruption. To them, I can only say: You should already be taking travel journalism you read anywhere -- including here -- with anything from a grain to a truckload of salt. And if the citzen journalists of the blogosphere can't collectively tell shit from shinola by now, they aren't much use regardless.

Gridskipper Link

Flickr and Creative Commons

2006-01-30T10:23:00.000-08:00

Singapore Ballerina by Carl Parkes

I just received a rather sweet request from a high school student in Utah, who would like to use one of my Flickr photos in her art project. Several times yearly I receive such requests from individuals and non-profits, and I always say Yes with great enthusiasm.

Hi Carl-

You have some fantastic photographs! I understand you have creative commons license that does not allow derivative works unless permission is granted by the author of the work.

I am 16 years old and am taking AP art in high school, I am also a ballet dancer. In addition, my father works in Irian Jaya Indonesia, so am deeply influenced by many of your photos.

There is one in particular that I would like to paint. The title of it on flickr, is "singapore ballerina." I am unsure if this is how I go about asking for permission to do this, so forgive my ignorance.

Thank you in advance for your reply.

Kristina P.

Utah

Travel Industry Dream Jobs

2006-01-24T16:21:00.000-08:00

Yukata Disco by Carl Parkes

I've been a travel writer for almost 20 years and have traveled around the world, and written six guidebooks to Southeast with Moon Publications and National Geographic. I've also updated and written original reviews for several hundred hotels in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore for Reed Travel/Star Service, the largest travel-trade publication in the world. Also, staff journalist for two years at Pacific Asia Travel Association, back in the days when they had an American publication outlet. I've also written for scuba diving magazines and photography specialties.

I know the score.

And then USA Today runs a story on dream travel jobs, and I almost want to throw all the authors out the window for their lying ways. There is NOT a hint of truth in any of these profiles, but they continue to feed the public hunger for notion of travel employee as gifted bird.

I've done most of these jobs in one form or another, and have the real lowdown on these so-called professions.

Jen Leo gets sick and tired of my cynicism, so I don't bother making comments on her excellent blog, but somebody, somewhere needs to drill down some sense of realism in this travel profession. Rolf Potts is also skeptical of my jaded views, but then he did the Round-the-World thing last year and hasn't peeped a word about the reality of that event (disaster?).

Nobody should write for free. Nobody should write for slave wages. Nobody should promote websites that don't pay or pay shitty wages. Thirty years ago the going rate for travel writers was $1 per word.

What are you getting paid today? Blogs will never get you coverage and will not impress any real editor. Don't do it. Don't kill what remains of the travel writing industry.

Who is killing the travel writing industry? It ain't me. I'm just lighting a candle over the corpse.

Ask someone what he or she'd do if they won the lottery and chances are the T-word will come up. For many, travel is the dream realized, the ultimate reward for a job well done.

But there are workers out there who don't need to hit the jackpot to take off. Travel is their job, and it doesn't involve herding passengers onto airplanes or swabbing ship decks, either.

USA TODAY's Jayne Clark looks at five of the best jobs and profiles those who have them.

USA Today Link

Tom Swick and the Key West Literary Salon

2006-01-24T15:47:00.000-08:00

Nikko by Carl Parkes

Last week, the two good fellows who own the incredibly rich franchise known as WorldHum asked their buddy Tom Swick to pen a few notes about the week-long literary fest in Key West, and Tommy Boy came through in spades. Tom can write like your best buddy in your favorite neighborhood bar, who just returned from a wildly successful fishing trip and not only offers you some fresh trout but also his heartfelt advice and colorful stories.

Tom Swick is a great travel writer because he doesn't act or write like a travel writer. He writes like your friend. He attends the conference but seems half indifferent to most of the speakers with the notable exception of Pico Iyer, who dazzles everyone with his stories but mostly his philosophies about life and love and the art and craft of successful travel writing.

Video Night in Kathmandu has always been one of my favorite travel books, though I always wished Pico had made it a plural night. Just sounds better. But I digress.

Tom is such a casual and cool character that he takes the time to chat with street people and street performers, who honestly seem to be more interesting than the windbags going on inside the tent. And he takes notes, and then translates the notes into prose. It is so simple and so honest, so why don't more travel writers use this simple technique? Beats me.

Anyway, Tom filed five reports with WorldHum and all of them are worth reading. Another view comes from another reporter, who found the Key West event all puffed up and full of itself.

I'm a travel writer and have been know to get all full of myself at times, so I understand the dilemma. Talk, boast, pride, SATW awards, and all that other crap you can take with you to the next life. Yeah.

WorldHum Welcomes Tom Swick

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day One

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Two

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Three

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Four

Tom Swick Reports from Key West -- Day Five

And then there's this cheerful but revealing follow up story about the Key West event:

Lost amid the aimless speech of renowned travel writers
By Chauncey Mabe
Books Editor
Posted January 15 2006

Sometimes the main purpose of literary events seems to lie in giving writers the opportunity to show how inept they can be when they let their mouths, as opposed to their fingers, do the talking.

Take last weekend's Key West Literary Seminar, which gathered top travel writers for three days of bloviation on the meaning of their profession in the not-so-brave new world of the 21st century.

Keynote speakers Pico Iyer and Tim Cahill offered opposing examples of the way writers can make fools of themselves in talking extemporaneously. Iyer, delivering the opening night's John Hersey Memorial Address, spoke with a rapid, breathtaking grace, tossing off thought-provoking ideas like a parade Santa with a bag of candy.

Which was wonderful. Really, wonderful. And yet Iyer's lecture grew wearisome in its unparsed intellectual weight. Iyer would have been more wonderful still had he perhaps blocked up a few ideas, jotted down an outline, spoken to some specific point.

Cahill, a writer known for his use of humor, also spoke without notes when he took the podium for the John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Talk on Saturday evening. Judging from the ungainly pauses and vast distances between punch lines, Cahill had never spoken in public before. At least, not in English.

Unintentional amusement was offered by many writers, especially in the naked ego category. Barry Lopez, speaking in tones not heard since Moses descended the mount, said that once we've been to the places he's been, met the people he's met, had the spiritual experiences he's had, then we too can go home in the serene knowledge that everyday life is what really matters.

Kira Salak displayed an appalling ignorance of her own literary tradition, declaring the world is yet to be discovered by women, all the classic-era travel writers having been men. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, as the careers of Frances Trollope, Freya Stark and Beryl Markham attest.

That's not to say Key West was anything less than the usual thrilling literary experience. While the great minds on stage never arrived at consensus -- beyond the obvious "the inner journey is what matters" -- they provided much stimulation and entertainment.

Perhaps out of politeness, no one pointed out the obvious flaw in the "inner journey" idea of travel writing, which is that most writers aren't nearly as interesting as they think they are, and surely less interesting than the places they visit. Inner journey, indeed. Tell it to your mom.

To their credit, the writers grappled bravely with what novelist Kate Wheeler called "the costs of travel." Gretel Ehrlich said "almost every ecosystem in the world is in collapse," while Lawrence Millman said the bodies of Inuits are "toxic waste dumps" containing eight times the American average for mercury; all "concerned" travel writers should be radical environmentalists, he said. Others rued the "McDonalds-ization" of the world.

Indeed, the writers even hinted at what became obvious to any attentive listener, which is that travel writing is among the trivial genres. Apart from self-discovery and a cool lifestyle for the writer, what do these journeys and the resulting verbiage mean? More than one writer implied that only by crossing the frontier to journalism does travel writing gain heft. "There is a nobility about making the effort to be a witness" to a troubled world, Wheeler said. "All good writing is reporting," added Eddy Harris.

But the best part of the seminar, as always, lay not with enlightenment, but access. If you weren't satisfied with an author's remarks on stage, you could easily talk to them personally afterward. For example, I found Pico Iyer happily pinned in a corner next to the men's room, signing autographs and chatting. I asked about the morality of travel in an age of global warming, social unrest and terror.

"In the modern world travel does all kinds of damage, it is true," Iyer said. "But there is good, too, just in the fact of going to different places and meeting different people. The rest of the world loves America, but you might not know that if you don't travel.

"I take very seriously the idea of `global neighborhood.' It's good to get out and meet the neighbors."

Chauncey Mabe can be reached at cmabe@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4710.

Sun Sentinel Link

New York Times on Cambodia

2006-01-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

Cambodia Portraits

Are you an aspiring travel writer, looking for inspiration and good instructions on the art and craft of the genre? Then run, run, run from anything ever published by the New York Times. Don't believe me? In one of the most arrogant, misguided, self-centered, and off balance travel articles of the year, the NYT wants you to see Cambodia as an ultra-rich tourist, just so you can avoid the realities and wonders of this marvelous country. The attitude is sheer stupidity, overlaid with smug satisfaction that you will be protected by your wealth and never subjected to the long and torturous history of the country, not to mention its perilous present.

Somebody should send this writer to Tuol Seng, to get the Raffles out of his system. Excuse me, I'm gonna puke.

In almost every part of the country, you can find a conceptually and architecturally ambitious hotel: In mountainous Ratanakiri, there's the Terres Rouges Lodge, a former provincial governor's lakeside residence that has, Time Asia said last July, "the best bar in the middle of nowhere." On the Sanker River in Battambang, Cambodia's second-largest city, there's La Villa, a 1930 house that in October opened as a six-room hotel filled with Art Deco antiques. And sometime this summer, you should be able to head south to Kep and stay at La Villa de Monsieur Thomas, a 1908 oceanfront mansion that's being transformed into a French restaurant ringed with bungalows.

Cambodia is not alone in its luxury revolution. Since the mid-1990's, the former French colonies of Southeast Asia have made enormous leaps in catering to tourists who prefer plunge pools to bucket showers. From the forests of Laos to the beaches of Vietnam to the ruins of Cambodia, you can find well-conceived, well-outfitted, well-run hotels that will sleep you in style for hundreds of dollars a night.

Less than a decade ago, there were no hotels with infinity pools, no restaurants serving fricassee of wild boar, no silk merchants who took Visa. (Also, no paved roads.) The foreigners who climbed the 328 steps of Mount Phousi were usually backpackers who sought guidance from Lonely Planet's "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring." Today, the traveler with a Lonely Planet in one hand is likely to have a Mandarina Duck carry-on in the other.

Outside, however, it was a different story: A guest assistant from Hôtel de la Paix carried my bag through the parking lot - past a new terminal designed to handle 1.5 million passengers a year when it opens this summer - to a Lexus S.U.V. As we drove into town, listening to Morcheeba on the car's iPod Mini, the driver and I discussed development on the airport road: I could remember when it had few hotels and restaurants; he could remember when it had none.

At la Paix, an artfully serene white palace designed by the landscape architect Bill Bensley, another assistant led me into the expansive arts lounge, where I sipped fresh orange juice and split my attention between the movie "Indochine," which was being projected on the wall, and the youthful staff members, who moved about with a surprising sureness of purpose.

Soon, an assistant took me to my room - dark woods, creamy fabrics, functioning Wi-Fi and another iPod - and cheerfully helped me plan my stay: a trip to Angkor Wat (with an "excellence guide," he wrote on his notepad) and, almost as important, a local SIM card for my cellphone ("first thing in the morning"). I wandered to the second-floor pool, which flowed like a river from the spa and down to the courtyard, at whose center grew a knotty ficus. Everywhere: calm. The hotel was aptly named.

New York Times Link

Travel Resources for Travel Writers

2006-01-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

Young Burmese Monks by Carl Parkes

Each year, the fine folks at the Los Angeles Times go to the trouble to update several very important lists for both the casual tourist and the professional travel writer, and we all humbly thank them for their efforts.

States Government Tourist Offices

Foreign Government Tourist Offices

California Visitors Bureaus

National Parkes in California

Bob Krist Bora Bora Photos

2006-01-06T15:07:00.000-08:00

Bora Bora by Bob Krist

After the amazing stamp photo by Carl Purcell, another longtime member of SATW has hit the mark with his wonderful and rather surrealistic photos of Bora Bora. Congrats to both of the gang, and hope to see you guys on one of the SATW gigs this year.

Bob Krist Photography Link

Carl Purcell Stamp Photo

2006-01-06T15:02:00.000-08:00

Carl Purcell Photo

Major congrats to SATW member Carl Purcell for his photo now posted on new U.S. stamps, though the question remains: will he get one cent per stamp sold? Royalties are the way to go, Carl, so hang tuff.

Bookstore Theft

2006-01-06T13:33:00.000-08:00

Stolen Book

I'm not sure that anyone would bother stealing a copy of my Southeast Asia Handbook, when imprints of the South Beach Diet and the Bible are so available, but never counter the urges of some poor backpacker on his first trip to the region.

If the New York Times were to compile a "Most Stolen Books" list, up near the top would be the Beat Generation classics "Howl," by Alan Ginsberg, and "On the Road," by Jack Kerouac. Also up there, not surprisingly, would be "Steal This Book," the popular '70's hippie guide on how to live for free, by Abbie Hoffman.

And topping the list, in some cities at least, would be none other than the Holy Bible itself.

"It's true, it's absolutely true," says Kevin Finn, the manager at Book People, an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas. "The most shoplifted book is the Bible."

Why? "Perhaps people feel the Bible should be free," he says. "The average King James Bible with a zipper is about 35 bucks."

Nationwide, bookstores net about $16 billion in sales every year, according to the American Booksellers Association; and the several prominent stories polled around the country for this article estimated that they lose anywhere from 1 to 5 percent to theft, some hundreds of millions a year, and much of it during the frenzied activity generated by the Christmas season.

As more and more independent bookstores close because of rising costs and stiff competition, successfully limiting "shrinkage," or unaccounted-for losses, can often mean the difference in ending up in the red or the black.

Stolen Books Link

Tripoli Report

2006-01-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

Nigerian Circus Ape

The following post is cross-posted from my main Southeast Asia blog over at FriskoDude

I've read a few early reports from Americans on their organized tours to Tripoli and beyond, but none of it really rang true. Just accolades about spectacular desert scenery and visits to deserted Roman cities. Not much truth in any of those Slate stories, but fortunately the Los Angeles Weekly has posted a jarring account of the situation in the land of Khaddafi.

Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the facade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The bastard couldn't even leave people alone when they were home.

The posters weren't funny anymore. There were too damn many of them, for one thing. And, besides, Qaddafi is ugly. He may earn a few charisma points for traveling to Brussels and pitching his Bedouin tent on the Parliament lawn, but he's no Che Guevara in the guapo department.

I felt ashamed that I first found his portraits even slightly amusing. The novelty wore off in less than a day, and he's been in power longer than I've been alive.

He was an abstraction when I first got there. But after walking around his outdoor laboratory and everywhere seeing his beady eyes and that arrogant jut of his mouth, it suddenly hit me. He isn't merely Libya's tyrant. He is a man who would be god.

His Mukhabarat, the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.

And he is deranged. He says he's the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can't help it if the people of Libya love him so much they plaster his portrait up everywhere. Fuck him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.

LA Weekly Link

Amazon Connect for Authors

2005-12-27T09:35:00.000-08:00

Brad Newsham Hits the Beach

The always creative Amazon has come up with another way for book authors to promote their work, and it sounds like a fine way to meld the worlds of travel guidebook authorship with blogging.

The entries were part of a new program called Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company's online bookstore site. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.

New York Times Link

Longitude Best Travel Books 2005

2005-12-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

Bill Bryson by Simon Schluter

As the end of the year approaches, you can expect the standard listings of "best of" books for the year, including a few sites that specialize in travel literature. Most of these digests are just recycles of reviews and hardly surprise, though I thought the list compliled and profiled at Longitude was adventurous and elegant.

Longitude
Best of 2005
READING AND TRAVEL GUIDE

Our 15 favorite books of 2005, including an atlas we can't keep our hands off, followed by additional New & Notable books of the year.

Atlas Maior • Peter van der Krogt
ART & ARCHITECTURE • 2005 • HARD COVER • 626 PAGES

A richly embellished, gloriously annotated collection of maps from the largest, most complete atlas of its day, published between 1662 and 1672 by Amsterdam mapmaker and entrepreneur Joan Blaeu. The gold-heightened, hand-colored 11-volume original, from which this sumptuous book is taken, is the showpiece of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Editor Peter van der Grogt provides a history of this exceptional example of art and cartography. (MAP22, $200.00)

The Explorer's Eye, First-Hand Accounts of Adventure and Exploration • Fergus Fleming • Annabel Merullo • Michael Palin
EXPLORATION • 2005 • HARD COVER • 264 PAGES

A gripping tale of 50 heroes and explorers from Alexander Von Humboldt to Robert Peary, Jacques Cousteau and Neil Armstrong, featuring a choice selection of archival photographs. Fleming once again dishes up surprises, telling quotes and even-more-telling photographs in this collection of diary excerpts, quotes and archival illustrations. Well done indeed. (EXP40, $45.00)

Finding George Orwell in Burma • Emma Larkin
TRAVEL NARRATIVE • 2005 • HARD COVER • 294 PAGES

In this penetrating book, Larkin searches for the legacy of Orwell in modern Burma, combining travel, history and reportage into an incisive portrait of the country. Writing under a pseudonym, Larkin -- a British journalist who speaks Burmese fluently -- exposes the corruption and horror of Burma's dictatorship through the people she meets on her year-long quest. Along the way she visits many of the places Orwell frequented during his five years as a civil servant in the 1930s. (BMA40, $22.95)

Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed • Jared Diamond
HISTORY • 2005 • HARD COVER • 592 PAGES

Diamond's provocative analysis of ecological disaster (usually pollution or deforestation) and the subsequent collapse of society. A follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel, it uses diverse examples from Easter Island and the Maya to Greenland's medieval Norse in order to make his arguments, which are insightful and tightly logical. A paperback version is expected in December. (GEN324, $29.95)

The Gods Drink Whiskey, Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha • Stephen T. Asma
TRAVEL NARRATIVE • 2005 • HARD COVER • 256 PAGES

Asma, a university professor and a Buddhist, writes with verve and humor of his stint teaching at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh. The book is both an introduction to Theravada Buddhism and a portrait of contemporary Cambodia. He confesses in his preface quite pointedly that it is his mission to take "California" out of Buddhism and his earthy account of his (mis)adventures is refreshingly free of cant and high-minded prattle. He is also acutely aware of his position as a western scholar in a Buddhist country (albeit one where Buddhism was outlawed by the repugnant Khmer Rouge). (CBD46, $24.95)

Feet on the Street, Rambles Around New Orleans • Roy Blount, Jr.
TRAVEL NARRATIVE • 2005 • HARD COVER • 144 PAGES

Organized as eight wonderfully digressive, personal rambles around a favorite city, Feet on the Street takes in the neighborhoods, music, history, food and local characters of New Orleans. A book in the exceptional Crown Journeys series, which marries writers and places. (USS370, $16.00)

Into a Paris Quartier, Reine Margot's Chapel and other Haunts of St. Germain • Diane Johnson
TRAVEL NARRATIVE • 2005 • HARD COVER • 204 PAGES

An affectionate, personal portrait of place, Johnson writes with insight, verve and wit of her neighborhood on the Left Bank. She weaves history, anecdote, and tales of the many, mostly American, expatriates of St. Germain. The book, a volume in the National Geographic Directions series, works as both a history and walking guide. (FRN491, $20.00)

The Fate Of Africa • Meredith Martin
HISTORY • 2005 • HARD COVER • 752 PAGES

Ambitious in scope, immensely readable -- and as big as a doorstop -- Meredith Martin's overview of the tumult, horrors and strides made in Africa since independence is invaluable. A veteran newspaperman and historian, Martin has written biographies of Mandela and Mugabe. He is particularly strong in sketching the personalities and events in South and East Africa. (AFR154, $35.00)

A History of the World In 6 Glasses • Tom Standage
FOOD • 2005 • HARD COVER • 240 PAGES

A history of the world as seen though six key beverages, from the stone age to now. Standage argues, the drinks that mattered are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Each is a tale of politics, prestige, imperialism, commerce and society. The technology editor for The Economist, Standage documents social and technological trends through the ages in this highly enjoyable chronicle. (GEN333, $25.00)

Why Birds Sing, A Journey Through the Mystery of Bird Song • David Rothenberg
NATURAL HISTORY • 2005 • HARD COVER • 258 PAGES

Rothenberg, a jazz clarinetist and philosopher with a strong interest in the interconnectedness of things, weaves music, poetry and science in this intriguing series of essays. It's a riff on the meaning and pleasure of birdsong, including, of course, a chapter on the nightingale. He opens the book with an account of a jam session with -- and for -- the birds of the national aviary. (BRD23, $26.00)

The City of Falling Angels • John Berendt
HISTORY • 2005 • HARD COVER • 414 PAGES

Berendt here does for Venice what he did for Savannah, Georgia in the phenomenally popular Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. His central hook is the investigation of the devastating fire of January 29, 1996, which destroyed the Venice opera house. What follows is intrigue, political machinations, financial chicanery, and, of course murder. Berendt succeeds in conveying a certain essence of what it is like to live in modern Venice. (ITL644, $25.95)

Hungry Planet, What the World Eats • Peter Menzel • Faith D'Aluisio
FOOD • 2005 • HARD COVER • 288 PAGES

As in their mind-expanding, gorgeously photographed and provocative Material World, Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio once again present diverse families around the world, this time focusing on what people eat. The photographs themselves (of 30 families in 24 countries with a week's worth of groceries arrayed around them) are fascinating -- and the accompanying sidebars and statistics on food habits, diet, and economics are just as riveting. With essays by Michael Pollan, Alfred Crosby, Carl Safina and others. (WLD65, $40.00)

Longitude Link