Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Crafting the Travel Guidebook: How to Write, Publish & Sell Your Travel Book

Author: Barbara Hudgins

ISBN: 9780960776207

If you have any preconceptions about writing a travel guidebook, you can put them aside until you have read Barbara Hudgins Crafting the Travel Guidebook: How to Write, Publish & Sell Your Travel Book. As Hudgins mentions in her introduction, “Travel writing may be an art, but putting a travel guidebook together is a craft.”  

Hudgins is a seasoned travel writer and is best known as the original author and self-publisher of New Jersey Day Trips which sold over 110,000 copies in several editions before she sold the rights to Rutgers University Press. Hudgins has also written extensively on a variety of subjects for several newspapers and magazines.

Crafting the Travel Guidebook divides itself into four parts focusing on getting started, constructing a framework, using words and pictures and the paths to publishing and promotion. 

The first part is a detailed exploration of the concept of your book. If the concept is vague, your book will go nowhere fast.  It is here where you must ask yourself what territory you plan to cover.  If it centers on the outdoors, what activity will be covered. If it is a how-to-do-it book, what is its subject? Consequently, there must be perimeters of the territory, activity and subject, that is related to the specific category of you book. 

Considerable thought must also be devoted to the book’s format and its organization. What about your own personal experiences, how much will you include? Research is very important, have you thought about its planning?

If you are proposing the book to a publisher, how well can you adapt your style to their pre-set format, and what are your credentials to write the book?

All of these broad topics are subdivided into smaller sections where Hudgins practically leads you by the hand and examines each in detail.  

In the second part, Hudgins examines the construction of the book’s framework covering the following topics: icons, directions, price and hours, foreign exchanges, punctuation and grammar and sidebars and callouts. For example, if you are using icons, which ones will be used? There are the standard ones that denote wheelchair access, credit cards, etc and then there are the unique ones that go beyond these. As Hudgins mentions, it is essential to notify your readers either at the beginning or end of your book, what exactly your icons mean. Also examined in this section are how chapters flow, front and back matters such as title, subtitle, copyright page, acknowledgement, and table of contents as well as the glossary, index, and appendix. 

Hudgins deals with the essential required skills of a travel writer in the third part. Here is where we learn about the abilities of observation, writing physical descriptions, narrating, presenting an opinion, sense of fairness, effective summing up, checking facts and not to be omitted is grammar and spelling. Considerable ink is also given to plagiarism, copyright infringement, and second hand prose. This part ends with a series of writing exercises.

The final part covers the paths to publishing or promotion or what some refer to as the business side that involve the choice of the kind of publishing you wish to pursue, traditional or self-publishing, the book proposal, and publicity and promotion. Hudgins also provides her readers with a 15- page list of traditional publishers that accept non-agented manuscripts from travel writers. These include large, mid-size and small publishers, their addresses, phone numbers, web site and a brief description of the books they publish. It should also be pointed out that Hudgins devotes an entire chapter on the difference between traditional publishing, self-publishing and subsidy publishing. 

Adding to the book’s thoroughness is an appendix listing several travel books that are referred to or quoted in the text. There is also a list of other resources such as books on travel writing, publishing and self-publishing, marketing and promotion, organizations for writers and publishers, websites, blogs and newsletters.

Anyone searching for a highly informative and well researched resource into the “nitty gritty” of travel guide book writing will be well served by this book.

Hudgins keeps the book’s tone light and approachable. Moreover, she does a first-rate job presenting and examining all of the essential ingredients that go into travel guide books.

The above review was contributed by: The  Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com, Norm Goldman, B.A. LL.L, Retired Title Attorney: Norm is also a travel writer and together with his artist wife, Lily, the couple meld Norm's words with Lily's art. To check out their travel site click on Sketchandtravel.com   Click here to view Norm’s Reviews & Interviews.

Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Crafting the Travel Guidebook: How to Write, Publish & Sell Your Travel Book