Travelblather

Well. It seems hard to believe, but my Day By Day Guide to Seville has been on the bookshelves of all good booksellers (apart from branches of WHSmith at airports and rail stations) for nearly two years now. So it's time to update it for the 2nd edition. This will be the first time I've updated a guidebook. I'm due to have a kick off meeting with my editor soon and doubtless he'll give me advice and guidance. But here's my thinking in the meantime. I'd be really interested to hear from other guidebook scribes about what they do. I'll then aim to summarise the comments in another post sometime.

Checking Maps - the Day by Day format is very map heavy. Every hotel, shop, restaurant and attraction is pinpointed on a map. There are 31 maps, with roughly 400 establishments marked on them. I could divide the city up into blocks and literally walk the streets ticking everywhere off. I reckon it will be quite a complicated task. I will need to cross check all the different chapters in the book as I walk down a particular street to tick off each shop, bar, hotel etc. Or else I could just call them all on the phone and check the details by phone - would that do? I do need to verify opening hours, credit card acceptance etc.

Adding New Places - I know there are several new hotels that are good that have opened and doubtless there will be new restaurants too. I will ask the Seville Tourist Board office, but they are not over-helpful. I will also ask the Seville Hotels and Restaurant Associations. Who else?

Revising the Layout - the Day By Day format is quite prescriptive. It's all about walking tours. I think it's highly unlikely that I will drop a tour and insert a different one in its place. But should I do something a bit more radical and make clear to my publisher I've made changes and show a potential purchaser that this is a new edition?

How long will it take? I reckon it was a good three months of research and writing to do the first edition - which ran to about 40,000 words. Plotting the places on maps was particularly time-consuming, but now that the maps are all done it should be quite quick to strike out places that have closed and add in new ones. I guess re-jigging the map keys will be a bit tedious. I hope to get the second edition done in 6 weeks quite possibly 4. I plan to spend at least 3, maybe 4 weeks on location. Do I need to spend that long there?

That's the sum total of my thinking so far. It would be brilliant if other guidebook gurus could share their thoughts about the best way to go about updating a guidebook.

WHSmith (WHS) which has a virtual monopoly on airport and ralilway station book retailing is rumoured to have signed a deal with Penguin (publisher of DK Eyewitness & Top 10 Guides and Rough Guides) to only stock Penguin travel guides in its travel sector bookstores. That's around 450 of its outlets in airports and rail stations across the UK.

The report in book publishing industry magazine The Bookseller suggests that in return WHS is getting a whopping 72% discount and a cash bung up front.

I love the justification from a WHS spokesman. If it wasn't such a serious issue I'd find it hilarious:

(Clearly he or she has never spent time waiting for a delayed flight or connecting between flights.)

But let's face it, it's a totally transparent attempt to put a positive spin on a clearly anti-competitive, anti-customer move.The market is being carved up.

According to the Bookseller report, Penguin titles account for 18% of travel guides sold. So folks, because you're 'extremely time pressed' your choice of travel guides will be restricted by over 80%.

Given that WHS is getting such a clonking discount, I wonder if they will pass any of these savings on to customers in the form of reduced prices. Somehow I don't think so.

The message? Buy your guidebooks before you travel... from somewhere other than Smiths.

[Disclosure: I am the author of the Frommer's Day by Day Guide to Seville. Last time I was passing through Gatwick Airport there were 4 copies on the shelf in WHSmith, clearly that won't be the case much longer.]

I make no apologies for a bit of an overt plug here. I'm a huge fan of Rough Guides. Over the years I've used them in countless destinations and as a research tool for all manner of features. I think the recent redesign has really come good to. The list of 'Things Not To Miss' right at the front of each guide has I am sure informed many a travel journalist's pitch to a travel editor. It certainly has mine... a fantastic way to get the low down on the top sites a country has to offer in the space of five minutes!

Brand new editions for Autumn will make fans of Australia happy with new first editions of Tasmania and East Coast Australia about to hit the shelves. There are also brand new guides to Fiji, Puerto Rico and South East Asia on a Budget along with 2nd editions to Cape Town and the Yucatan, 3rd edition to the Caribbean, 4th edition to Austria and a thumping 7th edition to India. Wouldn't like to have to do that fact checking on that one - must be a hell of a job...

One other speaker who really caught my interest was Genevieve Shore, Penguin’s digital director. She made some great comments about the importance of creative talent. As someone who gets paid to be creative with writing, it was music to my ears.

Regardless of what medium you use to publish - good old books, ebooks, web, mobile devices - it doesn't matter how clever your technology is if the content it delivers doesn't do the job it's supposed to do. That requires thought, composition, creativity - stuff that is unique. Genevieve refered to Kevin Kelly's excellent commentary about how content in the world of the web needs to be 'better than free.' Kevin's stuff is fascinating.

It frustrates me a great deal that due to a few early philanthropic souls - those pioneers of the web deciding to share everything for free - we are now stuck with this perception that if it's on-line it must be free. I don't get this. Both I and Genevieve commented on the importance going forward of micropayments. People are prepared to pay for stuff even online (I really believe this) if it really fulfills a need for them. Take the example of Lonely Planet which I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago. It offers downloadable PDF files of chapters  from some of its books for relatively modest payments. If that encourages exponential numbers of people to buy then ultimately it will be more lucrative than selling the complete guidebook at a far higher price to far fewer people.

Joel Brandon Bravo from What's On When threw in a useful observation later in the afternoon about this too. He pointed out that whilst people expect to get stuff on-ine for free, they are very familar with paying for stuff on their mobiles (think ringtones, games etc) and of course there's a ready made billing platform in the phone bill. Maybe the short term future for paid for content is on mobile devices?

OK. I finally got time to sit down and distil stuff from the interesting presentations at the Bookseller seminar about the future of travel publishing which I hosted last week.

I found Alex Ingram Waterstone's Travel Buyer particularly interesting - perhaps because I know little about how travel guides are actually sold in-store. There used to be just one period each year when book retailers really pushed travel guides in the UK. That was November and early December in the run-up to Christmas. December is still by far the best month for travel guide sales. But Spring is increasingly important for city break guidebook sales nowadays. Useful info if youabout publishing deadlines here.

But... what really hit me was his comments about occasional titles that just suddenly come from nowhere and sell a truckload. This is not common in travel guide books (compared with say fiction where suddenly a new author is 'discovered' and shifts 100,000s of units overnight.)

So how come a city guide to Marrakech: Time Out Marrakech was so popular they ran extra promotions for it the way they normally only do with sexer categories like fiction and had to keep ordering more stocks. Why?

Well, he reckoned it was that a low cost airline (easyJet) suddenly started serving the route. Time Out was the only publisher offering a city break guide to Marrakech.

What does that say to travel publishers?

1) You need to think really laterally about external trends that might have an impact upon travelling habits. What's going to make people travel somewhere new? And why?
2) Sometimes it's worth taking an educated punt on what the next 'hot' destination (or trend) might be
3) Get close to low cost airlines if you sell city break guides. I touched on this in my presentation at the seminar. If you book a flight with easyJet to somewhere they offer you discounted hotels, car hire and currency at the end of the booking process. How about a discounted guidebook too?