The organisers of the Lincoln Festival of Literature have asked me to present a workshop on travel writing on the 13th May. I think they hope that armed with my words of wisdom the young folk of Lincolnshire will be able to escape from the county and lead a rich and varied life that goes beyond supporting a football team that will, in all likelihood, never get out of League Two.
Now, it’s true, I can offer all kinds of hard-won advice on writing travel literature and getting published. Six years of being rejected by every publisher on the planet gave all kinds of insights on the machinations of the global publishing cabal. And marrying someone who works in the industry has equipped me with the sort of inside information that could get me killed if I’m too indiscreet.
My experience in the other fields of travel writing, however, is at best sketchy. I wouldn’t know how to pitch an idea to the editor of a travel magazine if my life depended on it. And I suspect that any guidebook I wrote would be limited to the hotel I stayed in and the bar that played the best music and had the cutest waitresses.
So I used a gift certificate I got for answering a few questions for Amazon.co.uk about their associates program to buy the Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing. It arrived in the post yesterday and I’ve got to say the sections of writing articles and for guidebooks are detailed and extensive. It also lists ‘frugality’ as one of the quintessential qualities a travel writer needs, pointing out that it can be months, even years before your initial outlay on travelling will be recouped.
However, the section on writing travel literature is a bit of a worry, especially the part on what you can expect as an advance on your first book. According to the author of the book, Don George, publishers will cough up £10,000 in the UK, $US15,000 in the States and $AU20,000 in Oz. I don’t know where he got these figures from, but he certainly didn’t get them from my publishers. I was three or four books in before I got anywhere near those figures. And I’m only getting a tiny fraction of the amount Don quoted for the States for Vroom.
I think I need to be having words with my publishers!
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I wanted to write about ‘cheapie Australian labour’ but you wouldn’t hear the manical laughter that accompanied so rude a remark, and then it would merely be rude and not amusing at all.
For me, a travel book is worth gold but then if that were the case, I couldn’t afford them. It does stun me to learn that you don’t get as much as one used to get for writing a quickie romance for Harlequin romance …
My Canadian friend was bemused by you in the warzone in ‘The Wrong Way Way Home’ … so I explained all I knew about the Ozzies. I’m not sure whether that cleared things up for her but I tried.
Exit one Kiwi, laughing quietly to herself.
Ha ha ha… where did Don George get those figures from? Maybe HE gets that kinda dough but here in the trenches in the US, I got less than a third that for my first travel lit book. Even less for a small-time new guidebook, and that took six months or so of ground research and writing. My first book job was updating a guidebook on camping. I got $500 flat fee, no expenses. Considering all the gas I spent driving the backroads of Virginia on that one, I probably broke even.
You don’t do it for the money, folks. You do it for…. hell, I’m not sure why. The love of it? No, that’s why you travel, not why you suffer through humiliating titles and other people’s imprints on something bearing your name.
Ha! What’s really funny about those figures is that Lonely Planet itself doesn’t pay anywhere near that for its own non-guidebook titles–according to the writers anyway.
I would agree you are lucky to top US$10,000 for an advance and even that needs to be from one of the larger publishing conglomerates. Most of us would go immediately buy a whole case of champagne if a publisher offered us $15,000 for an advance–and invite everyone over for a party.
Don’s book is very good though. Here’s a review of it on a travel writing site:
http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/travel/travel_writing/michael_shapiro_reviews_travel_writing_book.shtml