Travel writing

So you want to be a travel writer. It sounds like a dream job: free vacations to exotic far-off lands, a fat corporate credit card for paying all your expenses, a big paycheck as reward and your name on the spine of books at every airport in the world. Another advantage is that much of the work can be done as a digital nomad; you write on your laptop in a café in some interesting place and submit the work over the Internet.

Alas, many others think so too, making travel writing one of the most brutally competitive and poorly paid professions around: an accepted and published two-page article in an average publication may net you around US$150. Now figure out how many you'll need to sell to make minimum wage, and you'll realize that very few people can scrape together a living from it, much less get rich, and it's difficult to even get your foot in the door with so many others vying for the same jobs.

Social media have provided amateur travel writers and bloggers with an audience; those who assemble unusually many readers can get monetization, but for most people it remains a hobby.

Understand

“

Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

”

—Attributed to Ibn Battuta

An aspiring travel writer will need at least the following skills:

Excellent English (or whatever language you will use). No employer will pay for a copyeditor to clean up your grammar.
Photography skills. Most assignments are a one-man show, and you'll need to be able to take the pictures to accompany your story. You may also make a little extra income from this. See travel photography for more.
Selling yourself. Assignments pay peanuts, so you need to collect a lot of peanuts from a lot of different places.

Write

Travel writing has specific requirements.

Find an interesting angle. "My Tour of Bangkok" or "London is Really Expensive" is not interesting; "Bangkok's Best Markets" or "Free Museums in London" will catch a few more readers' eyes. Your editor will usually require that you come up with the angle before they sign you up.
Write short. Unless you're writing a book (and you probably shouldn't), publishers expect short, concise pieces of a page or two. That means 250-500 to 800-1000 words.
Write concise. Your readers don't need to know that you boarded a plane or took a taxi from the airport, and any story that starts by saying so will be rejected off the bat. Focus on the core of the story. (Tight word counts help.)

Sell

Making a living from any form of travel writing is difficult; there is a lot of competition, it is difficult to get noticed, and it rarely pays well even if your material is popular. It is significantly easier to do that if you are living in a low-cost country; see retiring abroad for some discussion.

Books

You've sweat blood and tears perfecting your travel diary, the magnum opus My Summer Holiday in the Podunks. Will publishers tear it out of your hands and compete for offering the highest advance? In a word, no. Book-length travel writing is as hard as becoming a published fiction author, only more difficult, because everybody thinks they can do it. Writing a travel book can be a rewarding personal experience, but unlikely to monetarily pay off.

The traditional way to get your book published is to find a publisher who will handle editing and distribution for you. This can be done without an agent, but it's usually better to have a professional that handles the complicated process of finding a good publisher and negotiating your advance. Despite helping you out, publishers usually don't do as much as you might think. They want to make money, which means that you need to convince them that your book will sell. If you don't already have a large audience or a very interesting and unique story, publishers aren't going to accept your book. While they might do a bit to help you with marketing, most of it falls onto you. Payment for traditionally published books is broken down into 2 parts: the advance and the royalties. The advance is given upfront and is totally unconditional. The royalties are a bit more complicated. They're a percent of the revenue that's given back to you (usually 10—20%, depending on your deal with the publisher), but they go to the publisher first until they have enough to recoup the advance that they gave to you. For example, say you sign a deal that gives you a $2000 advance and 20% royalties for your books, which retail $10 each. If you sell 1500 copies, that's $3000 in royalties, but you only get $1000, because the publisher takes their $2000 first. This is a bad deal if you think that the amount of money you can make from royalties is greater the the advance and the cost of producing the book, but most books never make more than the advance, so it can be worth it.

The other way to publish your book is to do it yourself. This used to be done by vanity presses that would charge exorbitant fees to print them, but nowadays, it's all done cheaply on platforms like Amazon. If you go down this route, you'll have to pay for everything, but the fact that most copies of your book will be sold digitally saves you on printing. The main draw for self-publishing is that you get to have a much higher share of the royalties, usually 70%. The downside is that customers expect to pay a lot less for e-books, which offsets the extra royalties you get. On top of that, the barrier to entry is much lower, so the competition is stiff. However, if you already have the audience needed to get published traditionally, you should be able to sell a decent number of books as long as you're diligent about marketing.

No matter what path you take, it's important to have realistic expectations about how much you're actually going to make. It's considered exceptional for a book to sell 10,000 copies in its lifetime, and if your eBook is selling at $2.99 with 70% royalties, that's roughly $21,000. That's certainly not nothing, but it's a lot less than people would think a bestselling author makes from their book. In fact, once you factor in the costs of actually traveling to do research for your book, you're probably below the poverty line unless you live in a low-cost country or have another form of income. Ironically, the people who have the best chance of making it as a travel author are the people who don't have to. While building up the audience you need to become a travel author, you'll almost certainly be using revenue-generating methods like making YouTube videos, and if you're popular enough to be a best-selling author, you're popular enough to be a professional influencer.

Guidebooks

Writing guidebooks (lots of them) can pay enough to be a job, but it's hard, monotonous work reviewing every identikit concrete barracks in Bangkok/Khao San Road. And with Wikivoyage lapping at their heels, how long can traditional guidebooks sustain themselves?

Let's Go^{[dead link]}. Employs only full-time Harvard students, but if you are one and are interested you have a pretty good shot.
Moon Handbooks. One of the only large guidebook companies which still pays royalties and allows authors to own the copyright to their book.

Magazines

Lots of magazines and newspapers write about travel, and this is probably your best bet. However, there are many types with slight differences, and it's worth paying heed to them.

Dedicated travel magazines run the gamut from high-end glossies like Travel + Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler to backpacker operations like Farang^{[dead link]}. Instead of aiming for the big names or the all-purpose titles, which probably already have better writers than you going to more interesting places than you, aim a step below at smaller, regional, more targeted magazines such as Asia Spa^{[dead link]} or Ski Canada^{[dead link]} and many others. The obvious downside is that, as in trade magazines (see below), you'll need more than a passing familiarity with the special interest in question.

Online travel magazines are another option for breaking into travel writing. Websites can include everything from highlighting worldwide locations like Brave New Traveler or Destination Deluxe to articles focusing on particular story angles such as 52 Perfect Days^{[dead link]} where all articles are written based on how to spend a perfect day or evening.

Online travel blog-a-zines websties have a completely independent and still professional approach to several topics about travelling such as destinations, resources, news, etc.

In-flight magazines, found for free in every major airline's seat pocket, are also all about travel writing. However, their function is to get people interested and drive up sales, so articles have to be enticing and gloss over bad points. The upside is that, if hired, you can expect to get free tickets to your destination (you're limited to where the airline flies, of course), free accommodation from advertisers (you'll be expected to write a glowing review) and, if you're lucky, free elephant treks, river rafting or whatever is the expensive, touristy thing to do at your destination (ditto). The magazine will pay you freelance writer rates, and all other expenses come out of your pocket.

Trade magazines focus on entirely different industries from travel, but as people like to keep abreast of what's happening elsewhere in the world, they're often interested in travel reports. The range of these is incredible: the Masonry Magazine runs a regular feature called "Masonry Around the Nation", reporting on what kind of interesting buildings have been built from bricks. The flip sides, though, are that they're not going to pay for you to travel and that you need to be familiar with the industry in question (or good enough at interviews to be able to fake it).

Newspapers often have travel sections and they may be interested in freelance work, especially if you can work in an angle that somehow relates to the home city. Again, local newspapers are easier (and pay less).

Blogging

The easiest way to get started in the business of travel writing is to hone your skills on an established travel blog website. After you become comfortable with formatting and editing on the web, then later, you might create your own website.

If you're good with video, you can also start a vlog and give viewers a more lively view of your travels. Video sites have partnership programs and you may eventually even get a company to sponsor you.

Like other forms of travel writing, out of all travel bloggers and vloggers just a fraction succeed in making a living from it.

Common revenue streams from blogging include ad placement revenue, in addition to affiliate marketing. A common (if not saturated) lucrative affiliate marketing strategy is to pitch financial products intended for casual travelers, such as travel credit cards and travel points programs. In markets such as the United States, affiliate bonuses can be hundreds of US dollars per successful conversion. The saturation of affiliate financial products marketing has created a cottage industry of blogs devoted to frequent flyer programs and credit card churning.