Frommer’s Travel Writing 101

By Abha | Permalink |

5 comments | March 16th, 2008 | Trackback

For those of you who missed this, at end of last year, Frommer’s came out with a Travel Writing 101 series of articles, written by Robert Haru Fisher: a contributing editor and columnist for Frommers.com, a former editor-in-chief of the Fodor Travel Guides, a former president of the Society of American Travel Writers and director of the British Guild of Travel Writers.

He recently posted the 5th piece in the series entitled “The Freelance Life”. In the article, he gives his take on the luring promises made to us by numerous titles, including — “Get Paid To Travel” and “How To Make A Six Figure Income Traveling The World”. He also gives some insight into the life of a freelance travel-writer and touches on pay scales for dailies, monthlies, and guidebooks.

I’d like to post two excerpts from the article:
Advice on freelancing:

“You have to be well organized to freelance. You must keep a meticulous record of where you send each article, date, name of contact, and then have a tickle file system to remind you to call/email the editor, get paid and send out a thank you note. You also have to keep in touch with editors who like your work, sending them proposals for new articles and for feedback. At the same time, you are scouting for new markets, researching new publications or websites, and developing your own website and/or blog to keep editors appraised of your work and talents. If you are planning a trip, you will let editors know in case they want something from the area. And you will network a lot.”

On six-income figures:

“A six-figure income is possible, of course, though it will take very hard work and probably will represent the combined income of writing and selling really good photographs, or perhaps earning additional bucks also from some form of electronic work, such as broadcasting.”

You can read the entire piece here, and here are links to the first, second and third features of the “How to be a travel-writer” series. (I don’t know what happened to the link for the fourth, but I couldn’t find it. Enjoy the rest!)