Wanna be a Great and Successful Freelance Travel Writer?

A very rich travel writer

Michael Shapiro talks about what it takes to be a surviving freelance writer. Believe me folks, it ain't easy.

Making a living as a freelancer

Every June, I mark the anniversary of leaving my last full-time job, at CNET in SF. It’s been 14 years with lots of highs and lows, but I’ve never regretted the decision to walk away from the rigidity of full-time work and hang my virtual shingle. Here are some tips that have helped me make it as a freelance writer:

Following is a roundup of advice, tips, and thoughts from freelance writer and editor Michael Shapiro. These suggestions cover the business of freelancing, rather than writing advice. A student at the first Book Passage Travel Writers Conference in 1992 and a 13-time faculty member, Shapiro has developed a productive freelance career by employing the techniques below. Michael also works with writers to develop, polish, and edit stories. He can help writers place articles in top publications. Contact me for more info.

It’s not just an adventure, it’s a job: Travel writing can be romantic, but recognize it’s a job — don’t start out writing grand epiphanies about your summer vacation. Focus on service (consumer or advice) pieces, such as a story on five little-known museums in New York. You don’t have to be a superb writer to be a competent reporter. By providing service pieces, you can develop relationships with editors that lead to more interesting assignments, including destination stories. A good way to break into magazines is by writing “front-of-the-book” features, which can be as short as a couple of paragraphs.

Stick to a routine: get up in the morning; take a shower, have breakfast and go to work. Put on shoes and get dressed. Slippers and a bathrobe don’t cut it. You can tailor your schedule to fit your personality. Be sure to carve out work-free blocks of time. I find it essential to take at least one full day off each week. Part of the attraction of freelancing is flexibility, so I give myself some leeway, for example to spend a couple of weekdays on a river trip or to take an occasional afternoon off.

Accuracy first: Be a thorough and accurate reporter above all else — then strive to be an excellent writer. Clear and concise prose is important because editorial space is so tight today. You don’t have to write with the lyrical beauty of Pico Iyer to get published. You do, however, need to get the facts right. An editor will hesitate to give you another chance if you make significant errors. Most newspaper travel editors are too busy and don’t have the resources to fact-check, so double-check your facts before submitting. Use online resources to fact-check but be aware that not all info online has been vetted or updated, so confirm by phoning or seeking multiple sources for corroboration.

Find a niche: Develop an area of expertise and work it. Only after choosing Internet travel as a niche was I able to make it as a full-time freelancer. My goal was to get editors to think of me as the Net-travel guy, so when they needed a story on this topic they’d contact me. This opened the door to more literary destinations stories: Because the Washington Post had run my Net-travel pieces, the editor there knew my work and published my Cuba by bike story.

Wanna be a great Freelance Travel Writer? Good Luck

Robert Reid talks about How to Use a Guidebook

Very Old Guidebooks

Great advise from Robert Reid on how to use a guidebook. He really, truly dissects the art and magical witchcraft on tearing apart and guidebook and making your travel plans.

While working for Lonely Planet for nearly 15 years, I researched guidebooks in Siberia and Transylvania, trained at Mountie boot camp in Saskatchewan, and even shook hands with Al Roker. But the most eye-opening thing I learned along the way was this simple fact about Americans:

ALMOST NO ONE KNOWS WHAT A “GUIDEBOOK” IS

Whenever I met someone around the US, and explained that I worked for a guidebook company, I’d find myself holding my hands mid-air and clutching an imaginary book to reinforce the point. Sometimes I’d add that “a guidebook is a book with information for travelers to plan their own trips.” Yet, almost without exception, they’d ask:

Seasoned travelers tend to know what guidebooks are, but increasingly find it fashionable to diminish their worth:

What a pity. Even while digital and web world are snatching up veteran guidebook publishers, and observers debate the industry’s uncertain future, I’m certain a guidebook remains both a travel planner’s MVP, yet at the same time one of travel’s most underrated contributors. And that if more Americans knew how to use one, even for 10 minutes, they’d travel more and farther — and better.

This article explains what 10 minutes with a guidebook can do to help you have better trips. But first, more on the exciting trend of…

Guidebook-bashing!

Over the past three years, travel writers and travelers have increasingly equated a sense of “authenticity” or “local experiences” with things “not found in a guidebook.” On Google, references to such phrases has increased by 344% from 2009 to 2012, rising from 150 instances a year to a devilish 666 last year.

National Geographic Traveler’s “Beyond the Guidebook: Where the Locals Go” blog commonly has less information than a guidebook, for example its breezy article on the Taj Mahal compared with Lonely Planet’s five-page special section.

During a recent Twitter #chat group, a few dozen people squarely defined “off-the-beaten-track destinations” as a place that’s “not in a guidebook.” Yet all 70-plus examples the #chat group gave of their favorite “off-track” destinations were in guidebooks!

And Emmy-winning Equitrekker Darley Newman champions her TV show for covering places “not in guidebooks.” Yet her top pick of an “untapped destination”? Cappadocia, Turkey, a highlight covered in every Turkey guidebook and called “the most interesting site” in the country by Tony Wheeler in Lonely Planet’s first guidebook. Back in 1973!

Poor guidebooks. Can’t get a break. Maybe we should start over from the beginning?

What is a guidebook?

Robert Reid on How to Read a Guidebook and Plan Your Trip

Climbing an Abandoned Highrise in Bangkok with Scary Photos

Wat Arun by Carl Parkes

Here's a really amazing adventure in Bangkok, as an intrepid soul climbs one of those abandoned buildings and lives to tell the tale and post some unbelieveable photos.

Sathorn Unique is a 49-story building, located in downtown Bangkok, built in 1990. At 80% construction, it was abandoned in 1997 and never completed. Locals insist, the skyscraper is haunted and call it the "Ghost Tower". They sternly instructed me to not enter the building. Well, I don't believe in ghosts so guess what I did... But more on that later.

building was meant to be one of Bangkok's most exclusive and luxury residential projects. A skyscraper with 659 residential units and 54 retails, in addition to a spectacular panoramic view of the Chao Phraya river.

The project was designed by Rangsan & Pansit architecture Co., Ltd. Nowadays the building is owned by Doctor Rangsan’s son, who offered to sell the building for 1.800.000.000 Baht ($60 Million USD).

Thailand was one of the fastest growing economies in the world during the early 90s. The economy was booming when the project started. But then everything suddenly changed in 1997. Thailand, especially Bangkok, was strongly affected by the Asian Financial Crisis. Later the country went bankrupt due acquiring too much foreign dept. The Thai Baht collapsed in 1997 and the development of the Sathorn Unique Building came to a crashing halt.

Climbing Up and Abandoned Highrise in Bangkok

Great Travel Books to Read Before You Hit the Road

Calcutta Bookstore

Boots N All is a great website all about travel, and here's their best picks for great travel books to read and inspire you before you hit the road.

Most travelers also have an affinity for reading. All the time we spend in airports and on planes, buses, and trains makes for the perfect situation to pick up a good book and get lost. There’s nothing better than reading a book set in a destination I’ve been or dream of going. There are a lot of great books out there that are great for travelers, so we talked amongst ourselves here at BootsnAll and asked our community for suggestions. We were overwhelmed with awesome suggestions, many of which we hadn’t heard of before. So we put together this list of top travel books:

Top Travel Books from BooksNAll

27 Places to Go Before You Die

Young Monks in Myanmar

Here's a mind blowing collection of great photos of places you want to go before you die. I've done a few, but not enough.

27 Places to Go Before You Die

Tony Wheeler Website

Tony and Maureen in 1973

I had no idea that Tony Wheeler had his own website, but here it is in all it's glory:

Why have I never been to Capri, that island, much beloved of dolce vita jet setters of the ‘50s and ‘60s, off the coast from Naples in Italy? So finally Maureen and I got there for a few days, after my Pistoia Literary Festival gig and before a few days in Naples.

▲ A Capri highlight, the majolica-tiled floor of the Chiesa di San Michele in Anacapri, here Adam and Eve get their Garden of Eden marching orders.

And it’s just fine, lots of the familiar fashion brands along the pedestrian streets of Capri town. Lots of cafes and restaurants turning out very traditional Italian food. Lots of walking possibilities, including out to Villa Jovis, the hilltop villa of Tiberius, the notorious Roman emperor for whom excess was never enough. He was reputed to have tossed discarded toy boys off the top level of the villa, hundreds of metres above the blue Mediterranean below. And then there’s the fabulous Blue Grotto, the Grotta Azzurra.

Visiting the grotto is a hoot. First there’s the boat trip (€13.50 a head) along the coast to the grotto, where a bunch of boats all mill around at the grotto entrance. Clearly there’s some sort of priority on who goes first, but to us outsiders it’s impossible to decipher. Finally it’s our turn and a collection of rowing boats pull up beside our larger boat and we climb from boat to rowboat, four or five at a time. Miraculously nobody falls into the sea, between big boat and rowing boat. We’re instructed to sit right down on the floor of the boat.

Next we’re rowed over to a boat moored by the entrance with a lineup of three ticket sellers to whom we pay €12.50 a head for the rowboat and grotto entry fee. All of this, one feels, could be organised much more smoothly, tidily and cleanly.

Tony Wheeler Website

Overland to India from Europe in 1967

Overland to India in 1967

A guidebook to the very, very early days of travel from Europe to India

Chuck Thompson is Back. Hide your your young daughters

Another Rant from Hell Holes Author

Chuck Thompson is the author of the just-released book, To Hellholes And Back: Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism, a follow-up to his wickedly funny Smile When You’re Lying, a takedown of the travel writing business. So where are the hellholes? Congo, India, Mexico City and — “most feared of all,” Disney World. I asked him to explain.

What’s the common thread?

On the most basic level, they’re all places that have earned extremely negative reputations with people who have never been there. Taken together, they represent the whole spread of traveler paranoia — from crime, disease and bloodshed to standing in long lines in the Florida sun next to little Caitlins and Coopers waiting to get on the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith.

India’s death-or-glory salesmen and promise of GI infections intimidated me personally, but as a global outsourcing hub and magnet for terrorists, it neatly packages the worst economic, cultural and political fears of modern America. So, a book covering these places seemed like it would have both personal meaning and universal relevance.

What’s the point you were trying to make by visiting these places?

I didn’t start off with any point in mind other than to confront some of my own biases and see what happened. I try to approach everything I write about with as agnostic a mindset as possible, which, sadly, is not much the fashion these days.

The predictable and perhaps natural way to go into a project like this is to assume that you’ll come out at the other end with a cheery, hands-across-the-sea message of global brotherhood and a stern lesson about judging others from afar. But I went to these places willing to call a spade a spade. If my experience supported it, I was fully ready to say, “You know what? I was right. This place really does suck. This society is completely screwed up.”

What I finished with was something in between. The Congo and its ubiquitous AK-47s I never need to experience again. But I gained more respect for Miley Cyrus than I would have thought possible.

Of all these destinations, which one scared you the most?

Easily the Congo. For one, just the genuine threat of violence. I mean, there’s a civil war going on there.

But more than that, the complete lack of information was alarming. It turns out virtually nobody goes to the Congo. Consequently, it’s almost impossible to get an accurate idea about what’s going on there, how to get around, and so on. Even the major guidebooks devoted to Africa include only a few perfunctory pages about the country. And all the Africans I spoke to said, “Do not go to Congo under any circumstance!”

For a while I thought I’d have to abort the trip. Then I found Henri, who got me through the country, but turned out to be an adventure in and of himself.

It seems as if you’re saying as much about tourists — specifically American tourists — as you are about the destinations you visit. What are you trying to say?

My general point about American tourists is that by and large I think they’re pretty polite and open-minded and no worse than any other travelers and not at all deserving of that old “ugly American” tag.

The larger thing I discovered while traveling for this book is that while everyone seems to love bitching about the Americanization of the world — from McDonald’s to Disney to gluttonous consumerism — the reverse seems to be much more the case these days. The world is influencing America far more than America is influencing the world. And often not in a good way.

Political corruption essentially taken for granted. Religious intolerance. Municipal bankruptcy. Enfeebled currency. Military adventurism. Toothless media. In one section I used the dismal ascendancy of soccer in this country as a symbol for all of this social decay — which I know will get a lot of people thinking I’m an ass in the same way that I angered Eric Clapton fans by dumping on him in Smile When You’re Lying, but to me it’s an apt and sort of funny metaphor.

You seem to have laid off criticizing travel writing in this book, for the most part. Do you feel as if you made your point in your last book, or do you still have something to say about travel writing? If so, what is it?

I suppose I still have plenty to say about travel writing and much of it isn’t complimentary. But, yeah, I got a lot of that off my chest in Smile and so it seemed pointless to cover the same ground again.

Most tourists try to stay away from danger. Yet danger seems to be a character in this book. Should we fear danger? Or does it make for a more interesting vacation?

Sure, danger makes for a more interesting story, but I’m a tourist who enjoys a beach resort in Cabo as much as the next guy. I can have fun without danger.

But “fear” really is an interesting part of travel. In part I did want to make the point that all of these “official” and not-so official warnings about how dangerous the world is outside the United States are just plain dumb. No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be. Government bureaucrats are more concerned with covering their asses by issuing ludicrous “warnings” than with disseminating accurate situation reports.

I just got back from Cambodia. One travel advisory I looked at before going, which claimed to be quoting the U.S. State Department, told its readers never to get inside a tuk tuk or open taxi. What a joke. Tuk tuks are a perfectly reasonable way of getting around. It’s inconceivable to me that anyone who has been to Cambodia could possibly have written such nonsense.

A lot of travelers hardly leave the safety of their hotel rooms any more, and when they do, it’s to visit a guidebook-approved tourist trap. What do you think people miss when they vacation in that kind of a bubble?

They’re not missing anything more than the backpacker or adventure crowd is missing by not experiencing the gratis champagne service in first class or the sunset view of the Grand Canal from a suite in the Hotel Danieli in Venice.

To be honest, I’m pretty weary of this idea that luxury or package travel is somehow less authentic than couch surfing or backpacking or showing up in a Third World country and taking outdoor baths in plastic tubs with water dragged up from the river. Backpackers love getting their noses in the air about the legitimacy of their travel, as though the scumbags up the hill in their air-conditioned four stars are somehow not having a real cultural experience. All travel is authentic.

Captain Cook always had his own stateroom with feather pillows and silk sheets, he hobnobbed with the upper crust everywhere he went, he was a stickler for hygiene and never left home without a few cases of good port tucked away on the foredeck — and no one ever accused him of lacking for an adventurous spirit or authentic contact with the locals, what with discovering Australia and being hacked to death by natives in Hawaii and all.

Do you think you’ll ever return to any of the places you visited for your latest book?

Congo almost certainly not. India, maybe, if you paid my way. Disney World, yeah, but only with a kid in tow. Mexico City I’ve already been back to and am going back again in March. What a fantastic city, right up there with London and Hong Kong among my favorite oversized world cities. Mexico City was definitely the big surprise of this book for me. I could live there.

Is there a larger lesson about the world we live in that you want readers to take away from your book?

I make a few arch points in the epilogue, but mostly I just want people to laugh and be entertained. You know what one of my favorite things in the world is? A quick, funny, entertaining, easy read that can get me through a couple of three-hour flights without giving me a headache or boring the shit out of me. For travelers, that’s a valuable and rare commodity and it’s what I go for on every page of the book. If my stories and opinions keep readers engaged for those brutal, endless hours in coach, I’m happy, whether they care about my larger lessons or not.