Travelblather

Here's the content of my talk at Travelblogcamp - delivered to a boisterous room of travel writers, bloggers, PRs and tour cos on the evening of Tuesday 6th November.

What does back to basics mean?

I thought long and hard about this. I decided for me it means putting aside the bright glittery things that the internet throws at us and remembering what really matters. Sure technology marches onwards – but you know what? People are still people. They still have similar desires when it comes to choosing a holiday. They still need similar information much of the time.

Apparently there’s some kind of big election going on this evening. Something to do with the next leader of the free world (apparently). And back to basics has a bit of a campaigning edge to it doesn’t it. It could almost be a conservative party slogan.

So, ladies and gents – I give you my Back to Basics content manifesto. Like I say, it’s at heart all about trying to ignore the frilly bullshit of the net and focus on important stuff. Stuff that’s about people, not machines.

Like any good manifesto it has a bunch of bullet points - unlike most manifestos there will probably be a few swear words.

1) Great content isn’t regulated by Google
I hate the way Google has become this all-knowing arbiter of what’s best. We are so lazy – it’s so damn easy to click the first search result Google (or Bing for that matter) comes back with. You know what – I’ll let you into a little secret. Google is still gameable. Big companies spend zillions on SEO because despite all the pandas and penguins you can still game the algorithm. And frankly – it just isn’t that good anyway. So… people… once in a while make yourself go to page 6. Don’t let Google dictate what is or isn’t good. And if you find something that’s good there… on page 6. Promote it… talk about it. Tell your friends and colleagues to read it. Go on - G+ it if you really must.

2) Great content should not be at the behest of advertisers
If your business model relies solely on advertising, then the ad guys will rule the roost and sure as day follows night the content you publish will be compromised. They just want your content to sell stuff for them. People don’t as a rule like being sold to very much. I read a great interview in the Times magazine with Lewis Hamilton a while back. There was sentence in there about how Lewis was wearing a particular brand of watch (Tag if you want to know). It was totally unsubtle. So much so that I’m sure the writer did it on purpose. Lewis Hamilton is of course sponsored by them. I hate that shit. It is so demeaning to the reader. Are we – any of us – that easy to influence? (PR people – next time you insist on some kind of lunatically obvious product placement… ask yourself what the point is. And if it’s just to keep your client happy have the guts to tell then they are wrong.)

3) Great content should not be free
I hate the way content online is free. It distorts the market. How can we as consumers tell what’s good and what’s not if there is no price attached to anything? It’s the most basic of mechanisms in consumer society. And the smart arses who came up with the idea of short circuiting it did us all a massive disservice. By ‘good’ I don’t just mean how well written something is, but how trustworthy and believable. Friends – if you are enjoying ‘free’ content or ‘free’ social networks – firstly it might well not be any good. Secondly you are paying for it – far more subtle and dubious ways. YOU are the content. Your every move is being watched so that you can be sold stuff. The sophistication of this technology is getting better and better – but it has hardly started. I don’t like that one little bit. If you want a great book to put on your Christmas present list I cannot recommend The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From Youby Eli Pariser highly enough. If you want to really see where the free model will end up… read it and be as concerned as I am. Don’t worry – there’s a link to the book on my blog – right now.

4) Great content is all about the reader
I work for a search and social media agency iCrossing part time – mainly because I got bored of the lousy money on offer for travel writing. One thing that I have been amazed by is the number of big brand companies that you ask ‘who is your customer’ and they don’t have a clue. The old model of creating search term driven fluff to reel people in and try and sell them stuff has made many larger travel brands totally lazy. They just spent cash gaming Google to get them at the top of search results and sat back. Just pour as many people in the top of the funnel and enough will book to keep you in business. It’s leading to a superabundance of cheap crap on the internet. Great content by contrast is written with a reader in mind. Do you know who yours are? If you take the time to create content that's properly focussed on your reader, they will come back. There's this old marketing maxim called the 80/20 rule. 20 % of your customers account for 80% of your business. Instead of just chucking as many people through the front door of your website as possible - try developing long term relationships with that 20% - they'll keep coming back if you give them reason to.

5) Great content takes time to create
One of the things that defines quality is uniqueness. And writing something unique takes time and research and consideration. It’s a craft. As readers we need to get better at spotting that kind of really great stuff and promoting it. And as content creators we need to stand up to whoever pays the bill and tell them how much it will cost and why they should make the investment. Sure it’s easy to say and hard to do – but the recent changes in the algorithm have produced this sudden obsession with content. In some ways that’s a good thing – at least it has made people think about content seriously. But it’s still all too often all about churning out mediocre content as fast as possible for SEO purposes. Insist on giving them better content and make them pay. It’s about quality not quantity. If you’ve banged something out in half an hour without doing any research first – take it from me – it’s crap.

6) Great content is about detail
Writing really good travel journalism is in my opinion about spotting the little things that people miss and surfacing them in smart and concise ways. Often it’s about taking the time to stop and look and listen and smell and taste. Moments of quiet on busy trips are often hard to come by – but they are gold dust. A vital part of listening is asking the right kinds of questions of the right kinds of people. Really good travel journalism is often about telling stories – other peoples’ stories. Learning to seek out those hidden gems of interest or local wisdom and finding entertaining and engaging ways to communicate them takes time and focus. It’s a craft and it’s something you can get better at even if you’ve done it for a decade or more.

7) Great content is collaborative
Remember editors? The role of the editor has been forgotten in the online world of self-published blogs. Editors can be arrogant people – but they tend to be where they are for a reason. The people in editorial positions at national magazines and newspapers and book publishers have an instinct for their readers that has taken years to develop. Importantly they are people (not an algorithm). They choose what to publish and what not to publish for all sorts of reasons. Some very subtle – often quite human. Content – proper content – is about real communication. And that suggests a relationship. Relationships are quirky, fun, frustrating things – but they are all about being human. I don’t want a machine dictating what I should read. I want a real person. Editors don’t just add coherence and relevance – they also ensure quality control. I’m sorry. Maybe kids in their 20s don’t care about decent sentence construction and grammar. But I do. That’s not about being pedantic. It’s about the craft of writing – things like rhythm, assonance, alliteration, metaphors and similes.

 What do you think?

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.”

The dust hasn’t really settled on Google’s acquisition of the Frommer’s travel guide brand. I author Frommer’s guidebooks to Seville and Andalusia and the previous owner Wiley had made it clear it intended to find a purchaser several months ago. It’s been a frustrating wait – at least we now know who the new owner is. But what does it mean? Well the short answer is no one knows – but here are a few of my thoughts.

A big YES for quality content
I’ve always thought of Google as being on the ‘anti-professional content’ team. It set out originally to populate its clever tools like maps, places etc with user generated content. It was very much part of the ‘everything on the web should be free’ brigade. Spending cash – and a lot of it too – on a professional travel publisher makes it clear that Google sees that the web needs content created by professionals to be able to really deliver. Seeing as Google is the way most of us find stuff on the web, that’s a big endorsement for the idea of investing in quality content for your website to ensure search engine visibility. If the search engine itself is doing it, then you probably should to? (This tallies with all the stuff Google says in public - even if SEO folks might argue that frankly ranking well is still all about links.)

But what kind of content?
You can see immediately how listings – short accurate and appropriate write-ups of places like restaurants, hotels and shops will dovetail neatly with Google Places* – basically the content you get served up on a place’s Google + page when you click on a pointer on a Google map. This kind of thing was exactly why Google bought restaurant review publisher Zagat this year too – Zagat reviews now sit above user reviews. If you search for a specific place by name you’ll start to see Frommer’s reviews crop up in the search results pretty soon I imagine. Right now if you Google say New York and click maps the info if you click the pointer for New York features Wikipedia content – presumably we’ll start to see Frommer’s content on this page too. (*Is it called Google places? Does anyone else get completely confused by the way Google keeps chopping and changes its products?)

Does Google have any experience of print publishing though? I don’t think so(?) and that’s concerning for me as a guidebook writer and someone who believes passionately that guidebooks still have a place in travel planning and inspiration. I really hope the guidebook remains a core part of the product offering. Maybe as the Guardian newspaper has done there should be a move towards digital first but print should still be a part of the package. Interestingly adopting the mantra of 'digital first' suggests a need for fresher more up to date information. Could that lead to more regular updates and indeed more work for professional guidebook writers? I hope so.

As promised, here's a second guest post - this one from travel writer David Whitley - he's taking a meat cleaver to certain practices in the SEO industry. Do you agree with him? 

The offal trade
Imagine, for the purpose of an overly extended metaphor, that you are a butcher. You know a shady character who will sell you discarded offal from the abattoir on the cheap. It’s not fit for human consumption, but you convince a few gullible restaurant-owners they can sell it as steak.

The restaurateurs  make a profit as a result of your offal, but are eventually fined heavily by trading standards or shut down by the police. So you suggest they  at least try to make the offal look like steak by hiding it inside other poor quality meat. And – even better – you’ll do the hiding for them. Customers soon realise they’re not being fed steak and leave in their droves. The restaurants get a reputation for poor quality which is passed on to the supplier – you.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going to happen – the restaurants are either going to struggle to survive or get shut down. And if the same doesn’t happen to you, then the police are going to keep such a close eye on you that you may as well give up too.

The Trojan horses of SEO
This, I think, is where we currently stand with the web advertising industry. Or at least the SEO/ linkbuilding sector of it anyway. First they tried disguising links as adverts in the sidebars, and Google slapped down the sites that were buying such links. Now they’re trying to fill the web with sponsored posts written entirely for the purpose of squeezing in a link disguised as a feature. And if a website owner is really lucky, the SEO agency will supply a guest post that just about scans but is in no way readable. Again, the guest post is a Trojan horse for a link aimed at boosting Google rankings.

Jeremy’s previous post  - and several excellent comments – addressed this topic. The crux is that search engines (most pertinently, Google) want good quality content. Instead of continually finding ways to sneak around Google’s ever-increasing menagerie of toothy guard animals, SEO spivs are going to have to start attaching their links to that good quality content that Google wants. And that doesn’t mean looking for ever more sophisticated ways to dress the offal up as steak.

The dying sponsored post model
Here’s a prediction. The ‘sponsored post’ model that both marketers and owners of insipid blogs are so eager to cling to is dying. You can keep pumping it with ever more elaborate drugs, but it is fatally flawed. The ‘sponsorship’ in the term is closer in spirit to that in “state-sponsored terrorism” than “The FA Cup, proudly sponsored by E.On”.

That doesn’t mean that sponsored posts can’t work, however. In fact, done right, they’re probably far less obnoxious to the reader than flashing display adverts. But the sponsorship model needs to be more along the lines of sponsoring football clubs or roundabouts than sponsoring industrial sabotage. SEO people shouldn’t be thinking: “How can I sneak this by?” They should be thinking: “What would I be proud to attach this to?”

Let’s go back to the butcher’s shop. As it turns out, the cost of buying edible offal from the abattoir isn’t much more than buying the unfit stuff from the shady trader. There’s some more good news too – there are some restaurants in town that have good chefs. Chefs who have really good recipes which the offal can fit inoffensively into. They won’t pretend that the offal is steak, but they will make excellent sausages or meat pies that have small bits of your offal in them.

These restaurants can get a strong reputation and loyal customer base, while your butcher’s shop can bask in the glow of that reputation by boasting that you’re a proud supplier. Just let the chefs add the offal to their own recipes in a way that they know is best rather than trying to supply your own recipe book and forcing them to pretend it’s steak.

Launching the new model
Last week, I relaunched my website, GrumpyTraveller.com. With it, I put up an advertising rate card and details of advertising I will and won’t accept. The basic gist is that vetted advertisers are allowed to sponsor posts on the site for a fee, but that the topics of said post will be of my choosing. Alongside the post, they get a banner advert and a 75 word blurb at the bottom with a maximum of two links. That blurb needs to be aimed at humans rather than search engines – more a “we’re proud to be associated with this content and we’d like to tell you about what we do” than a desperate exercise in link stuffing. I’ll reject anything written as search engine bait. But once it is right, that ad and blurb stays with the post forever.

“We can supply a guest post…”
This is all pretty clearly explained, but I’ve already had queries about sponsored posts from SEO agencies who clearly can’t read. They’re wedded to the idea of providing guest posts stuffed with links. Frankly, if the guest post was any good, they’d be running it on their own site and attracting links organically from people who want to share and draw attention to it. It’s like when Gary Barlow writes one of his rare good songs, he saves it for Take That whilst churning out tons of mediocre ones to give to former X Factor contestants.

I’ve no doubt that I’ll also get a few unimpressed marketers who’ll tell me that what I’m charging is more than other sites charge.

Cheap audiences?
Fine by me, chaps. Go and sneak your links onto other sites where owners are happy to fill up their great web toilet with as much faeces as they can get paid for. When that toilet overflows and everyone involved comes out stinking of effluent, then the pariah status will be richly deserved.

I’m proud of the content on my site. It’s not just OK – it’s really good. I sincerely hope the readers of that content think so as well. I sincerely hope they trust its integrity and read it with the thoughtful intelligence that the comments (both on-site and via Twitter) suggest.

That’s not a cheap audience, and I won’t give them cheap content funded by cheap advertising. Want cheap and mediocre? Then there are plenty of other avenues. Good luck to you staggering down those increasingly dangerous alleys.

What advertising should be based on
The web needs an advertising model based on fairness, honesty and mutual benefit rather than deceit and desperately trying to resist arrest. One of human beings employing their brains, taste and judgement to think about what is a good fit. It needs something along the lines of sponsoring a small football or cricket club – you’re helping to fund something you’re proud to be associated with, whilst taking the opportunity to explain what you do to a distinct audience. Nothing sneaky, nothing nasty, nothing borderline dishonest.

It’d be sad to think that this idea is too revolutionary to stomach, but I suspect it will be for a while yet. Still, when the crushing realisation dawns that it’s far better to play well than search for gaps in the rule book, I’m happy to talk. I suspect a few other site owners will be too.

Image by: bunchofpants