Travelblather

I’ve not posted for a while. I got a really nice tweet from @DavidRobertHogg this week saying he wanted to read more from me. (Thank you).

The reason (apart from being busy) is frankly I’m depressed about the way things are going online. It feels like I might rant about how 'real people matter' and 'quality content counts', but the macro data suggests that actually the billions of schmucks who use the net couldn’t give a toss. For them the price-quality ratio has become totally decoupled. They expect to get stuff for free or at nominal cost and don’t think for a moment about what that means about what they are getting. It’s depressing.

The most recent example is one I came across mourning the fact that my Seville guidebook will probably never be published in print again. (Thanks Google). I was looking at Amazon and came across a Kindle-only competitor. It costs £1.02 compared with my guidebook which costs £6.74. (Admittedly my guidebook isn’t available as a Kindle book so it’s not a completely fair comparison). Guide to Seville by EUprintpresspublishing is a piece of crap – probably copied and pasted from Wikipedia and I think put through a piece of translation software. A couple of sentences from the first paragraph:

“Seville (Seville Seville in English or in Spanish) is the artistic, cultural and financial capital of Andalusia and Seville province. It is situated in a plane passing through the Guadalquivir river – sailing from Seville to the site of injection in the bay of Cadiz in the Atlantic ocean.”

What a piece of unmitigated shite.

I tweeted about it and got some amused tweets of horror back from other travel writers like @Mike_Gerrard, @mary_novakovich and @itsjamesstewart as they looked at other examples from the series and came up with:

“house-boats in Amsterdam are 'complete homes with electricity, water, gas and sewage'”

“inside the Cuba guide it refers to that well-known cook 'Chef Guevara'

Should Amazon (and others who are tech companies but pretend they are publishers like Google and Apple) engage in at least some quality control and not let people publish crap like this?

Mike suggested that ‘people would decide if these books are any good’. The Seville guide does have two 1* reviews which are pretty explicit about how bad the guides are. Like this one:

“A few pages of badly translated, half baked information. I was shocked to find that such an item was available.”

But Mike also discovered that EVERY guide has a glowing 5-star review by someone called Deni who didn't buy the book.

This then is ‘content’ online these days. The idiots who use the internet are so dumb, they buy it. And the people who publish it engage in fraudulent activity to promote it.

Is there anything we can do? Will the market ensure crap like this sinks to the bottom of the pile or will we all drown in piles of it and find it increasingly hard to discover the good stuff?

I'm delighted to welcome Nellie Huang and her husband Alberto to Travelblather. I've wanted to get the inside story on their Wild Junket Magazine project for months. From a standing start they have already hit the 100,000 user mark which is a tremendous achievement. So... how have they done it? I asked a few questions.

How did Wild Junket Magazine start?
It started as a way to provide more value to our readers than the usual blog post or eBook. We wanted to combine our (Nellie and Alberto) skills to create a unique product that would fill a gap in the market. With Nellie's experience in travel writing and my proficiency in photography and design, it felt like the perfect option. It was also an excellent time to launch the digital magazine as there were less than ten digital travel magazines in the market then. We also did some research and found out that more than 50% of magazine readers in the US now access content through digital sources.

What are its USPs? What makes it different?
We are a new-age magazine designed for modern, social travelers who are looking for more than just quality content. With links embedded and videos soon to be included, we provide a full multimedia experience rather than just old-school magazine content. What makes us stand out from the other digital magazines is that we marry long form travel narratives with an interactive design and format.

You're personally pretty strongly associated with the Wild Junket brand (indeed some might say you ARE Wild Junket) - do you think having a real person at the centre of the project helps people connect with it more?
I (Nellie) have spent years building the WildJunket brand, and I think that with a real person behind the brand, readers feel that there's a more personal connection. They know who we are, what we stand for, and are able to relate with us and interact with us on a deeper level. Even though we are delivering a professional product here, we don't want to lose the familiarity that our readers have with us.

What's your thinking about charging people to read your content?
We believe that payment is proportional to quality of content. That is why we pay our contributors to have the best possible content for our magazine and therefore readers in turn pay for the quality content we offer. We think this is something our readers understand and appreciate. Although this system does work, we want even more people to enjoy our work, so we plan to make our magazine free and widely available for new website subscribers. The new website which is dedicated to just the magazine, will be launched at the end of the year and all newsletter subscribers will have free access to the magazine.

So does that mean you are abandoning the subscriber model?
No. Our readers generally fall into two groups: those that found our magazine through Zinio or Magzter, and those who are loyal readers of our website. Our goal is to increase our numbers for both groups of readers. We'll keep the subscription model, but our aim for 2013 is to increase advertising revenue, so we want to focus more on building our readership rather than making money from subscriptions. So, to convert even more of our website readers to magazine readers, we’ll give them free access to the magazine if they subscribe to our newsletter. This way we’ll really build up our mailing list and increase subscriber numbers. Of course we run the risk of Zinio/Magzter subscribers heading over to the website for a free subscription - but that just means we gain another website reader - which is a good thing!

You offer the magazine on multiple platforms - why?
We don't want to limit readers to just one platform. Each person enjoys content in a different way and from different sources. There are still a few platforms we would like to get on, so we are working hard to meet the goal. As a matter of fact, we didn't intend to release print versions of our issues but we decided to offer it on the print-on-demand site, Magcloud, due to a few readers' requests. It's all about what our readers want.

What have been your biggest learnings about publishing on multiple platforms?
Each platform has its own set of rules and functionality and it can be difficult to comply with everything. But once we found a common area to work from and organized ourselves properly, it was not very different from publishing on just one platform.

Which platform has been most successful for you?
Zinio has proven to be the most successful to date, allowing us to reach readers outside of our initial fan base. They are the biggest online magazine store and also the most professional, in terms of production process and organization. This is why we have made them our default subscription platform.

How do you adapt the content to work across different platforms - is it just technical or do you edit it and write it in different ways too?
It is mostly technical. We try to be as consistent as possible so that a person reading our print issue will receive the same content from his/her iPad. And since most platforms are PDF based, the technical changes are usually easy to perform.

How do you choose what kinds of features to publish each issue?
We plan our editorial calendar months in advance and we tend to plan each issue's content around a certain theme. For example, our winter issue has a focus on winter activities featuring destinations like Iceland and Finland, but we also make sure to include other non-related destinations like Cambodia and Palestine to give it variety. Starting from our Winter 2012/2013 issue, we will be publishing on a quarterly rather than bimonthly basis, which helps us to plan things better. In general, we tend to publish articles on less conventional destinations and unusual experiences: such as a yurt stay in Mongolia or learning to build an igloo in Austria.

What's in it for advertisers? Give us your best sales pitch!
By partnering up with us, advertisers can get access to over 115,000 unique readers. Each issue receives over 1,65 million unique views over a shelf life of 3 months. These readers are mainly based in the US, UK and Canada, aged 25 to 44 years old, who book all their trips online and travel at least three times a year. Our readers love adventure and special interest journeys such as wildlife safaris, mountain treks and expedition cruises.

We have worked with several global companies such as G Adventures, Viator Tours, Lattitude, and Visit Finland. They have all found advertising on our magazine an effective way of reaching their targeted clientele.

We're also proud to share that WildJunket Magazine is a finalist in the Digital Magazine Awards 2012, for both Best Travel Magazine of the Year and Magazine Launch of the Year! We are very excited and we're confident this means that our magazine is looking at a bright future.

How can people subscribe or find out more?
There are many ways to subscribe to WildJunket Magazine: directly from our iOS Newsstand app, or via Zinio and Magzter that are available for both computer and mobile devices. You can also get print copies of our issues delivered straight to your doorstep on Magcloud.

Are you interested in writers pitching ideas at you and do you pay?
We are more than happy to receive new pitches although we have already planned the editorial calendar for the next year. We pay for contributions. Anyone interested can check our guidelines here: http://www.wildjunket.com/magazine/editorial-guidelines

I can't remember how I came across Iain and Claire's travel blog Old World Wandering – but I was immediately impressed by the quality of the writing and the look and feel of the design. I love the fact that they are writing in-depth, thoughtful pieces of prose.

As I browsed around the site I spotted that they are trying to fund their next travel writing expedition – a trip from Shanghai to Cape Town - using Kickstarter. Basically they need a bunch of people to commit money to the venture. I have to admit I thought this was a brave thing to do – and like their blog, different. A constant theme on this blog is the challenge to make travel writing pay in this new world of the web – and here is an interesting new model. Which I have seen some people succeed with recently too.

So I asked if they’d like to talk some more about the project and the funding model. Here’s a really interesting guest post written by Iain.

"With only 10 days left to go, my Kickstarter project is still almost $30,000 away from its target. If I don’t raise the whole amount, I get nothing, and statistically my chances of success are slim. I’ll keep trying anyway, and I’ll also use Kickstarter again – if differently – because I believe it’s one part of a model that will eventually support writing of quality published online.

I've watched successful travel bloggers follow two paths: either they write to a narrow set of keywords and sell advertising or they build an audience around their personality, which leads to speaking engagements and endorsements. There is obviously overlap between the two, and there may be success stories I don't know about, but I believe that there is also a third business model slowly taking shape that will support long-form travel writing published independently.

I describe Old World Wandering, the travelogue I write with my partner, Claire, as an experiment. It began simply enough, in 2006, with updates for family and friends, but slowly – like a petulant child – our little travelogue has grown large and promising enough to take over our lives. That may sound familiar, and far from experimental, but 18 months ago, when we published Claire’s 3,500-word dispatch from Attukal Pongala, the largest gathering of women in the world, we started an experiment that has yet to produce a stable result. Claire’s article was picked up by The Browser, which curates “writing worth reading.” The traffic from that encouraged us to write even longer articles, like my three-part, 10,574-word epic about an Indian village cursed by tourism, and we were soon being featured by other curators of lengthy prose, like Longform and Longreads, which by collating links are also assembling a passionate community.

Claire and I write as well as we can, in as much detail as we can, but despite a measure of critical success and a growing list of subscribers, we're still a long way from making Old World Wandering financially sustainable. A 10,000-word article about a relatively abstract subject is going to see a lot less search-engine traffic than twenty highly specific 500-word articles, for a start. In-depth writing also takes time – 71 hours of carefully clocked work, in the case of the Chinese of Vientiane – and the growing long-form community is partly a response to established newspapers and magazines cutting their budgets for in-depth features, which tell stories that twenty 500-word articles just can’t.

In an interview, Graham Boynton – who was an editor at Conde Nast Traveler and travel editor of the Telegraph Group – described the problem succinctly:

I have no doubt that travel websites, blogs, and tweets are rapidly replacing conventional print travel journalism, but the problem is there is not enough money in it for the journalists to earn a decent living. If writers who want to specialise in travel lose the financial incentive to do so, then the gene pool of travel literature will be diminished. That, to my mind, is the greatest crisis facing travel writing – the dumbing down of the genre.

I think Kickstarter is a part of the solution to this crisis because it allows a relatively small group of passionate people to make something happen. Extremely successful campaigns often have surprisingly few backers: Matter – a journalism project we looked at closely – raised $140,202 from just 2,566 backers. It did that by emphasising a big issue – the low quality of science and technology reporting both on and offline – instead of speaking in too much detail about what Matter might actually do. We’ve tried to approach our campaign in the same way, by highlighting the importance of travel writing that connects past with present and community with place, instead of packaging destinations for visitors to consume, but we’ve also made too many mistakes. We haven’t spent enough time engaging with other travel writers, for instance. We worried that they might take our campaign as criticism of their own experiments, but what has actually happened is that other travel writers – who know how tricky all of this is – appreciate what we’re trying to achieve, and have given us genuine, unselfish support.

Our biggest mistake by far was underestimating how many people would see our campaign. We’ve worked hard at promoting it using social media, but no larger site has picked it up yet, and only 700 or so people have watched our video. Twenty two percent of them get through all four minutes, and almost exactly half of those people have backed us. If we can keep that ratio up, we only need to get 5,000 people to watch our video, and that helps me to believe that there is still enough time to save my Kickstarter project, and my travel writing experiment, with your support."

You can find out more and join up to back the project here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oldworldwandering/old-world-wandering

In my last post I speculated about the future of Frommer’s printed travel guides now that Google has bought them. It got me thinking about ebooks and self publishing. I already author an iPhone app to Seville and I retain the rights to that content across other media. So nothing to stop me publishing it as an ebook. David Whitley recently published Hardly Paradise: Anti-Postcards From A Grumpy Traveller a stack of his travel features as an ebook. It looks like it wasn’t a particularly complex task. And, get this. At the moment the writer gets 70% of the sale price (Amazon retains 30%). That’s a pretty good deal. So I took myself off to a seminar about ebooks hosted by Women in Journalism (yes, blokes are allowed to go along) - called How to write a best seller - how e-books have changed the rules.

The session was chaired by Alexandra Campbell, author and novelist (as Nina Bell) and panellists were Catherine Ryan Howard, author of Self-Printed: The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing'); Philip Jones, editor of the Bookseller, agent Antony Topping of Greene & Heaton agency, Caroline Hogg, commissioning editor at Avon (HarperCollins publishing), who specialises in commercial fiction. So – a good panel and a good chairperson too. Here are a few key takeaways for me.

Ebooks will revolutionise the marketplace
Philip Jones: “Publishers haven’t really woken up to the impact ebooks will have”. Booksellers however have. Big time. Antony Topping pointed out that whilst high street book retailers used to take a title on and order a good number of copies, they now order tiny numbers and won’t commit to more until they are sure it sells. This makes life difficult for publishers – what kind of print run, how big a risk? Certain kinds of literary fiction and  non-fiction are much harder to get off the ground now too. The future could see whole genres moving online only and the high street being the place you buy just the big photogenic coffee table books, complicated textbooks and really big selling works of fiction. Who knows? There’s innovation happening. Amazon has recently introduced a new category of ebook called Amazon Singles. Longer features which are typically much shorter than a novel, but more than a magazine article. Singles are priced $1 to $5. Typical word count is 5000 to 30,000 words. I think this idea is REALLY interesting. In the past, there was no way to easily sell work of this length. Magazines aren’t big enough, and publishers don’t want to commit to such low page counts. Ebooks have no such limitations. The format seems ideal for tablets and smartphones. You can imagine grabbing a sandwich at lunchtime and turning to your iPad to spend an hour reading about a $150 million bank heist. Lifted, by Wired and New Yorker writer Evan Ratliff is just 34 pages long. (NB I paraphrased these last few sentences from this piece in Wired.)

Certain types of eBook sell better than others
The winners at the moment are sci-fi, women’s fiction, crime and erotica – serial fiction is selling particularly well. If you have an idea for a book – better have the sequel and #3 and #4 ready to go soon after. Antony Topping: “Because journalists (like you people here in the room) are used to churning out the copy fast this could be an opportunity for you – if you can turn your hand to fiction successfully.” (I wonder if the other category that sells well is ‘How to write ebooks and make money’?)
Philip had a counter point which I agree with: “It takes time to create a great book – this new model doesn’t allow for that. To rush something out to the market can be a big mistake.” Antony agreed – he said that for him as an agent if someone comes to him with a manuscript that has already been self-published as an ebook it has been ‘tarnished’ and he’s less likely to consider it unless it has sold really well. (Then of course it’s a different ball game.)

Amazon owns e-publishing
There are other options – you can publish ebooks on the Nook (the Barnes and Noble platform and reader due in the UK soonish); Kobo (the reader is on sale in WHSmith in the UK) and Apple’s iBooks author - but Amazon is the one that shifts the product and that’s down to the Kindle. Antony suggested Amazon could start giving away Kindles for free soon. What interested me was the way the panellists spoke in hushed tones about Amazon. Amazon keeps its data about how many copies of ebooks are selling to itself. Only Amazon really knows what is selling. There are best seller lists – but the implication was that that algorithm is more complex than pure sales numbers. Could Amazon start to favour self-published ebooks where they take 30% of the sale and control the author relationship completely at the expense of ebooks from traditional publishers? What impact do reviews have on rankings? As Catherine Ryan Howard put it “Amazon pays my wages… they could change the rules tomorrow. It feels a bit like they are reeling us all in before whipping the carpet from under our feet”.
What’s to stop Amazon deciding to only pay 50% royalties rather than the current 70%? Not a lot.

Publishing an ebook on Amazon is easy
You go to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing page, sign up (which takes about half an hour) and upload your book and cover pic. Job done. According to Catherine there’s no real quality control. She quoted an example (which has since been removed) of someone uploading a book called ’50 Shades of Grey’ which featured 50 pages each with a different hue of grey on it. For a while it was a best seller. People used to price stuff on there at 99c – but nowadays there is some kind of price/quality equation in play in her opinion. People steer clear of the 99c price bracket because it denotes dross. The sweet spot for pricing is USD2.99 she thinks. Right now images just don’t really work – it’s just words. And that for me is a big disappointment. Travel books need images in my opinion. It looks like it will be a while before this happens. Maybe apps remain the better product for an online travel guide? (Actually – there’s no maybe, I think they do.)

Small could well be beautiful
Ebooks don’t have geographical boundaries the way traditional publishers and printed books do. Once you publish online anyone who speaks the same language can buy your book. This means that smaller more niche topics that wouldn’t sell enough copies in one market to be viable could well work when exposed to the worldwide market on line. So, write a really good book about say food for toddlers with milk allergies and you could be selling copies to people in Canada, Australia, the US etc etc. I can see a whole new discipline not dissimilar to SEO of people analysing the Amazon product list for ‘content gaps’ that would be profitable and then finding writers to fill them.

Presence and profile online are essential
Catherine the self-publisher talked about self-publishing being about entrepreneurship (above and beyond writing skills) and Caroline the publisher agreed. Even for a more traditional publisher authors have to be socially connected online – doing the twitter, blogging and Facebook stuff is considered pretty essential for new authors regardless of whether they’re self publishing an ebook or working with a publisher. A word that kept coming up was discoverability. To be successful an ebook has to pop up in search results – both in the Kindle store and elsewhere online too. That could be about choosing a really tightly defined niche and writing about that. It’s also definitely about thinking laterally when you upload your ebook about what tags to give it - one great example from Caroline was using the tag ‘Downton Abbey’ for a work of romantic fiction that happens to be set in the 1920s. People often want to find a book a bit like something else that interests them.

A final word from Catherine – who had some really smart stuff to day – “Self publishing probably won’t make you a fortune – it’s something to consider more as a sideline.”

I’m planning more posts about the future of publishing to complement the series that my editor at Frommer’s Mark Henshall wrote a month or so back. Mark dealt mainly with theory – although he also provided lots of links to examples.

But what about the practice?

Actually publishing on the iPad or adapting a guidebook series for the iPhone? How easy is it? What works and what doesn’t?

I got a recent email from a guy called Thomas Tegart. He and a friend are self-publishing a new travel magazine on the iPad called Overnight Buses. What I particularly like is their focus on ‘long form’ content (as it’s called these days). To you and me – a decent read rather than the usual 500 words of fluff or contrived list of top whatevers that constitutes a travel piece on-line.

So I asked him a bunch of questions and he provided some interesting responses! You can try the launch edition of Overnight Buses for FREE from the app store.

If you’re a travel company or tourist board they’re looking for launch advertisers with free spots available to help them test the product – see Q4. If you’re a travel writer, they are accepting submissions – I’ve provided a link at the end of this post.

Their submission guidelines made me smile:

“NO guides, how-to’s, where to’s, what’s hot, hotel reviews, top-ten beach lists, best places to go, recommendations or anything involving a cruise ship unless a murder took place and you solved it. Please.” [emphasis theirs!]

Over to you Thomas…

What made you set up Overnight Buses Travel Magazine (OBTM)?
The reasons were both personal and professional. I was a lawyer sick of working 15 hour days, and my co-founder wanted the chance to design something besides ads. We both love travel and love reading travel writing and the chance to contribute something more to that genre was very appealing. The normal entrepreneurship reasons also apply: the chance to control your own destiny and to shape your own company. Both of us also wanted to create a social responsible company that would play a part in the community we live in. It's not yet happening because the revenue isn't there, but we hope in the future it will be something we're proud of.

What differentiates OBTM from similar publications?
What differentiates us from a content point of view is our focus on long-form travel articles. There is quite a bit of competition in the travel website space and from blogs and travel magazines in general, but many of them don't publish really long travel narratives. Three of our current travel articles are over 5000 words. We also decided not to focus on destination pieces or short snippets. That is our main differentiator in terms of content. We differentiate ourselves on the App Store by our concentration on design. Ours is a pretty simple app, but we focused on readability, even going so far as to count our characters per line to make sure they were the optimal length for reading. My co-founder Jen Kuhn is a CLIO award winning designer, so that helped too.

As far as I know, there are not any other long-form travel magazines on the iPad yet; we're the only one. There is another iPad travel magazine start-up called TRVL that focuses on mostly travel photography, and of course the established big media players in the industry have their iPad apps. There are also some long-form apps out there and webpages dedicated to longer stories, like the Atavist and Longreads, but nothing dedicated solely to travel writing on the iPad.

How do you see self-publishing like this changing/developing in the next 12 to 18 months?
I see a lot more independent publishers like us getting into the act. Publishing is basically free if you know how to design and can learn a bit of code. Our platform is a free open source publishing tool called Baker. So for us, we managed to design and launch a travel magazine in about 4 months with just two people. Besides the cost of acquiring content, the only other cost was the $99 fee to become an Apple developer. Of course, we already had the Adobe software, a Mac and everything else needed to design, but basically anyone else with a Mac could have done the same thing using free tools as well.

What will make OBTM financially successful?
Finding advertisers that fit our brand and expanding our readership base, just like other magazines. There are over 60 million iPads out there, so if you think in old school terms of the market opportunity, that's basically almost the population of Great Britain. Definitely enough to support a few travel magazines. Another thing that will make us successful is finding great contributors and raising our rates to get the best stories.

In terms of revenue, we will be testing out ads with an update to make sure our analytics is working and matching up page views correctly (we are giving out free space in exchange for people helping us test). Then we plan on soliciting ads for our second issue that will be launched in July. Incidentally, if you know anyone at a tourism board who might be interested in a free ad let me know. All they would have to do is share their analytics with us to make sure our ad is counting everything correctly. The ad would only run for a few months, so not very long. We already have ads for an app, a guidebook and some travel books, so a tourism ad would be a great way to show some diversity while we're testing.

Do you have any start-up funding?
We don't have any investors. I had saved up a bit of money as a lawyer and we're using that to buy our stories, so we're pretty bootstrapped. We have enough for a few issues and will be using advertising to extend that period as we go. Really the only thing that made this possible was Baker, as it allowed us to use our current skills to publish. It’s basically a wrap around for a website. Our app is really running on Mobile Safari, Apple's web browser, but all the content is on the device, so no internet connection is necessary. Baker allows you to code normal webpages and then wraps it up in an app and hides that from the user. Before Baker we were stuck with figuring out how to publish without needing to learn how to code. Baker still requires a bit of Mac coding skills, which I had to learn, along with knowing how to code HTML, which I also had to learn. But coding HTML is rather simple to understand and Mac coding is not, so Baker put our app within reach.

How do you plan to build an audience?
I'm doing a PR campaign by myself. My co-founder Jen has a full-time job at the moment, so her spare time is taken up with that and then designing the next issue. That's about it for now until we have advertising revenue, which should begin with the second issue. Our contributors have been very helpful in spreading the word so far as well and the App Store also provides a built-in audience, though not as much as you would expect.

What 3 things would you differently/key things have you learnt so far?
I'm not sure we would have done much differently. I've made a few mistakes so far in my PR campaign, but nothing too serious. One of the key things I've learned is to stay motivated. Doing a PR campaign is like getting constantly rejected for dates, it's quite discouraging. But staying positive is key. So is only concentrating on what NEEDS to be done. We both have stuff we want to get done, like having a great website or being on twitter, but we both have realized we don't have the energy for everything. So we try and concentrate only what has to be done to launch.

I also wish I was a better editor. We get many submissions that are good stories, but they're not great. I can tell a great story from a good one, I just can't edit a good story into a great one. I know something is wrong with the story, but I can't tell the author how to fix it. It’s a drawback of mine that I wish I knew how to fix, because it's hard to turn writers away. Some stories just need a little work, but I can't seem to pin down what it is.

If you’d like to write for Overnight buses check out the submissions guidelines

And if you’d like to try it out head to the App store – it’s FREE for now.

Have you considered publishing an iPad app? Do you reckon this idea will work?