The world of travel writing is abuzz! Seeing how six different people today have sent me the same story, I feel like I should comment. Here’s what I’m talkin’ about:

Travel writer tells newspaper he plagiarized, dealt drugs

I am in a rare position in that I’m one of the few people who has actually read this book (it comes out April 22, I believe). I also know Thomas Kohnstamm professionally. He was briefly my editor at Rough Guides, and in fact is partially responsible for my getting hired at Lonely Planet–he suggested I apply and put in a good word for me. I like the guy.

So of course I’m not going to slag him off. But I will say that his book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, was clearly not written with me in mind. I even feel a little embarrassed to have read it, since now I know way too much about Thomas’s sex life. It is written for guys in their mid-20s who aspire to being guidebook writers because they think they might get laid and maybe even score some drugs.

Guess what! Thomas confirms that, indeed, being a guidebook author does get you laid! Hey, even I can confirm that it gets you laid, and you know that’s saying a lot.

As for the drugs, well, I’m just not the sort of person people offer them to. So when I started going broke on my first research trip to the Yucatan, I didn’t have a pocketful of ecstasy to unload for some quick cash. (Technical point: Thomas did not sell drugs–he traded them. Honestly, officer, what’s the big deal?)

That’s where Thomas’s book veers away from mid-20s swashbuckling tale of dudeness into cold, hard reality. Guidebook authors get paid jack! I got paid, I think, $2,100 for my first job for Rough Guides. Even with no context, you’re probably thinking this is pitiful. It definitely is. This was so pitiful, in fact, that it’s what prompted Thomas to suggest, a bit later, that I write for Lonely Planet, where the pay is somewhat better, at least on the surface. But, hey, at the time, I was broke, cooking school was looking way too pricey, and the job sounded like fun.

I spent my entire pay on my expenses, as I wanted to make sure I did a good job, so I arranged a six-week trip and Spanish classes, to brush my bilingual ass up. Even in six weeks in the Yucatan, I still did not have enough time to visit everything! I feel like I did a good job on my update, but there were points where I had to tell myself, “OK, I don’t have to pick the best thing after surveying all the options–I just have to be sure that my recommendations are genuinely good.” And then get the hell outta Dodge/Progreso/Motul/whatever and on to the next town, all the while having this horrible feeling that I’ve missed the most amazing thing.

Fortunately, I get paid better now, and I have some royalty deals, which currently don’t earn me anything but have potential and give me a smidge of job security (LP doesn’t pay royalties–a bit more on this later). And I also know the territory I write about. So since I busted ass and visited 800 hotels on my first research trip, I don’t have to do that so thoroughly anymore, and now I can spend a little bit more time in Progreso and figure out what the deal is. (Actually, I still haven’t figured that one out. It’s either desolate, or filled with drunks. Recommendations, anyone?)

Another interesting point Thomas’s book raises: freebies. Halfway through his trip, with about $3 to his name, he decides he’ll try to cut a deal with the owner of the hotel he’s staying in. Hotel owner laughs and says something to the effect of, “Dude–I know you’re the LP writer! Why are you trying to pay me? All the writers before you have stayed here for free!”

This is a huge deal in Lonely Planet-land, because there’s supposedly a no-freebies policy. But if you look at the wording in the front of an LP book, it says writers can’t take free stuff in exchange for positive coverage. You can see the giant loophole, right?

What’s funny about this is that it’s exactly the same policy that Rough Guides and Moon have–even though LP is using the policy to imply it’s somehow better, cleaner, more righteous than these other publishers. My editors at both Moon and RG say, yes, I can arrange free hotel stays, etc. And I do. (No guidebook publisher pays expenses straight up. RG does pay my airfare. LP allegedly pays so much in its flat fee that your expenses should be covered, but that’s not always the case.)

Yes–omigod!–I take free stuff! I take much less free stuff than I used to (and when I say “stuff”, I just mean hotel rooms–I can’t bring myself to schmooze for free food–that’s truly wretched) because after my first trip to the Yucatan, I realized two major drawbacks to freebies: 1) It’s really awkward to extricate yourself if it turns out the place sucks, and 2) hotel owners who know you’re a guidebook author can talk your freakin’ ear off and eat up your entire morning.

Now I find it’s worth it to shell out $25 to stay in a youth hostel, or $40 in a hotel room, just to buy my freedom and quiet time. I only stay for free with people I know and like. But when I was first visiting the Yucatan and New Mexico, staying at a different hotel every night was really the only way to get to know the scene (and I certainly wasn’t paid enough to afford the whole range of hotels I was supposed to be evaluating). Staying at a hotel is really the only way to judge whether it’s good. Me just walking in and seeing that the room is clean is a start, but if the owner is a racist jerk, or the place is infested with bugs, I’m not going to discover that till later that night.

So now I’m very judicious in who I approach for a free hotel room. Usually, it’s just the really ritzy places. I can’t afford to pay my own way there, and of course a tour around the property will leave me stunned with the glamour and beauty of it all. Only if I stay will I figure out if the service really has its act together, or if the sheets are not quite so lovely as claimed. Believe me, I’ve gotten extremely picky about this shit.

Staying in all those free hotels has also gotten me a great network of people to call up and ask random questions of. And they write to me and tell me when things have changed, and I put that news on my update websites, which make even the current books better. Hotel owners are informed, opinionated people who know the place they live very well–but they’re not going to volunteer information unless I stay the night and chat them up. Even though my ethics have been “compromised” by the occasional free bed, I am a far greater expert on the Riviera Maya today than I would have been if I’d done the same job for Lonely Planet and adhered to their so-called no-freebies policy.

(For the record, I did not take any freebies when I covered Cairo for Lonely Planet last year. I didn’t want to argue them on the legal language on my first job out–and, hey, hotels in Cairo are cheap. LP does pay enough that I can afford $20 a night, or at least justify it: over years of doing this job, I’ve learned to put the profit motive aside and just make life good for me when on the road, no matter the cost. Also, as a side note, since LP does not pay royalties or even give you first crack at doing the job a second time, I felt much less invested in the scene, and didn’t bother making long-term connections. I went, I saw a lot of hotel rooms, and I feel like I did a solid job. But I’m not going to keep up on hotel news, or anything else, in Cairo, the way I do for the Riviera Maya or Santa Fe.)

So that’s a long way of justifying the way I do my job. But it is something everyone asks about, so there you have it.

But the real problem is that guidebook writing, when done well and conscientiously, is a really hard job to do for more than a few years. I am feeling the burnout for sure–my head is filled with addresses and URLs and random mental notes I have yet to commit to paper because I’ve been driving all day. I haven’t gotten to write more than 45 words on any given subject in about five years (that’s why these blog posts get so long, probably). I never get a published book review or other major acclaim–I thrive on random emails from readers (few and far between) and feedback from editors (only somewhat more frequent).

Between last November and the end of this July, I will have updated three whole books and written a new first edition. And I will have gotten paid, after expenses, roughly half of what I used to earn as a mid-level magazine editor, and I’m not even adjusting for inflation since I quit that job in 2000. Oh, why be coy? I’m talking $25,000 as opposed to $50,000 and benefits.

In these eight months, I had about three weeks’ vacation, which I recognize is much better than most Americans, but I spent a couple days of that meeting Lonely Planet editors in Melbourne, and I fielded all kinds of queries from other editors on text I’d just handed in, so I wasn’t really off the clock. When I’m on the road for research, I work 18-hour days, seven days a week. When I get paid well and properly, I figure I’m earning about $1,000 a week…which is still sad when I consider I could’ve stayed home and worked a 35-hour week as a copy editor–no stress, leave at 6pm, laugh about “danglers”–and earned the same amount.

But I don’t want to work in an office, so I’m willing to take a pay cut. And I can afford to do this job and not get paid super well. That’s because I’ve become the worst stereotype in the guidebook author field: a writer with a rich husband! Actually, my husband isn’t rich at all–he makes only a little more than I used to make in my salary job–but he does have full health coverage, and that extends to me. That’s the only thing that makes my freelance life possible. I was just feeling like I was getting into the black and not having to freak out about money every month when Peter and I got married. If I hadn’t gotten hitched, I don’t think I’d still be doing the work I’m doing today–or I’d be doing it very, very badly, muttering to myself, “They’re not paying me enough to do [fill in the blank].” But I’m such a perfectionist, I find it hard to say that–and that’s why LP, Moon and RG all have me over a barrel.

So what I’m getting at is I don’t hold anything against Thomas–his book is sensationalist and a little ridiculous, and I suspect he’s making things seem a bit more scandalous than they are for the sake of the press. That quote about not traveling to Colombia for the Colombia book–well, true enough, but I’m pretty sure that was totally with the approval of Lonely Planet. I remember him telling me he’d taken a desk job with them–and complaining that they were too cheap to send him there. It’s actually kind of noble that Thomas will add that to his list of bad behavior, rather than putting it on LP.*

What’s the moral? I guess you could read his book. My real advice (and Thomas’s, I sense), even though it might put me out of a job, is not to be such a slave to guidebooks. You can bet Thomas isn’t the only person who has worked like this (as I said above, even I feel like I haven’t done my job as well as I should have), so you’re probably better off picking your own restaurant rather than one out of a book. I mean, unless you’re using my books! I really, really care about the restaurants, and you can bet I’m not recommending one just because I had sex with the waiter.

Incidentally, I’m also reading another travel media tell-all right now: Chuck Thompson’s Smile When You’re Lying. It’s hilarious. It has a lot less sex in it, or at least sex as performed by the narrator–there’s still a lot of use of the word “poontang”, just FYI in case you’re sensitive. And it makes me absolutely sick about the world of travel magazines.

Which leads me to the other humongous problem with my job: there’s nowhere to take my skill set and expertise to earn more money, except to travel magazines. And then it’s all about the expenses-paid trip, or the freebies from the PR people, or the delicate phrasing so as not to alienate readers or advertisers. I already know from experience that gets so messy–what am I going to do with more free nights at a deluxe Riviera Maya resort? I’ve worked really hard to do my job well and as ethically as possible, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m never going to get rewarded for that.

But Thomas’s book might be a little bit of a shakeup. Lonely Planet does at least review its fees annually, and is looking at them a lot more closely now. If we all get paid a teeny bit better because of his trashy tell-all, that would be great. I might not quit this job after all. And a big paycheck might blot out the terrible image I have in my head of him having a quickie with some Brazilian chick with crazy shoes. (See–I told you the other stuff about guidebook publishing gets overshadowed.)

*Thomas confirmed to me that his quote was taken totally out of context. Interesting that LP’s rebuttal (on BBC–remember, BBC Worldwide now owns a majority stake in LP) doesn’t take any responsibility for the Colombia book either.

**Apologies for comments still being broken. Feel free to email me at zora at rovinggastronome dot com.

***And another thing! Continued commentary in my next post….