The Best Travel Writing Book for the Digital Age

If you're on the Travel Writing Success Newsletter list, you already know this, but the brand new third edition of Travel Writing 2.0 book is out now across all platforms! I didn't post anything about it here on the blog when it went live on Amazon in early November because I hit a snag with the Ingram Spark upload and other platforms were delayed. It's now available on Kobo, Apple, and at your favorite bookstore too (they can order it with their standard discount).

There are some remnants from the first and second editions still in place, but not many. A lot has changed since the second edition came out in 2016 and some of the people I quoted moved on to other careers or found a less competitive niche to focus on instead of travel. So you will still find advice from more than 50 other working travel writers, but the whole book got revamped. Nearly every page of Travel Writing 2.0 has been updated along the way.

As mentioned in there, one of the key determinants of success is whether a content creator is adaptable or not. Especially with all the curveballs that Google and the social platforms throw at us, we need to pivot and experiment on a regular basis.

The State of Travel Writing in 2024

There's plenty of good news in this edition, however, starting with the fact that we've collectively gotten more professional and figured out how to make real money from this pursuit. There were 200+ full-time and part-time travel writers and editors from several countries who participated in a survey I did in advance of this edition, plus we've had six more years of interviews to pull from to get a good hard look at what's working and what's not. There's NO other book out there in the world that gives you this kind of depth and certainty across a broad spectrum of travel writers and bloggers.

Want to know what people doing this full-time actually make? Well I did a dedicated post on how much money travel writers earn, but this chart for the full-timers shows that we've come a long way since the last edition and have made a huge leap since I put out the first one in 2010. The middle and the top keep growing.

The left axis is percentages, so a full one-fourth of travel bloggers and freelance writers is earning six figures or more. (For some who answered, a lot more.) If you add up the bottom two on that chart, those earning less than $40K annually were only about 15% of the total.

For comparison, here's what the income distribution was like when I did the same survey at the end of 2015:

Back then, 20% were already doing quite well, but there was a huge gulf in the middle and the two biggest buckets were the bottom ones. More than half of travel content creators were earning $40K or less from their efforts.

I'd like to think I've had a little to do with this. The majority seems to have caught up to what I've been advocating in these books since 2010 and going into in detail in my Travel Writing Overdrive course. Namely, diversify your income streams, run multiple projects to balance out your risks, and niche down to become a specialist instead of trying to be a generalist. These concepts have gone from obscure travel conference presentations I used to put on to concepts so accepted that they're now considered "too general" for anyone to talk about on stage at TBEX.

Why Travel Writing Overdrive is the Best Travel Writing Book

So yeah, I've been giving advice to fellow writers in a formal way since 2010 and before that, I had already been a blogger since 2003. That means I'm old but hopefully it also means I'm wise. I've seen it all, the equivalent of 1,000 case studies, and also had 5 sites of my own to run experiments on and learn from. By 2007 I already had 3 sites running and at one point in 2015 I had 6 before I sold one for a nice exit.

My experience is not just about online publishing, however. I was published in magazines back in the 1990s before there even was an internet and I'm not living off my past glory. In the past few years I've published multiple articles in CNN, Westways, Outside, and Global Traveler. I can also give you advice from the editor's side of the desk as well: every month I send out payments to writers for publications where I am editor and two of them accept queries.

I've spent years on the advisory board of NATJA, a board that's half filled with destination marketing organization execs, plus I spent six years picking speakers for the TBEX North America conferences for travel bloggers before stepping down last year to let someone else take the reins. On a weekly basis I'm talking to bloggers and freelance writers, but also marketing heads and PR reps.

I have strong opinions, yes, but most of them are based on real research and solid examples rather than hunches or just personal experience. Writers shared what they're earning, where they have found success, and what frustrates them the most. I have distilled all of this into a guide that can jump start your career or get you started without a couple years of learning through trial and error.

See the Get the Book page for links where you can get a copy. You'll receive decades of wisdom from me that's based on what really works, plus you'll hear from many other writers—some earning twice what I am—to give you a road map to success. Follow the advice in this book and you'd have to really muck things up to fail at travel writing. It does take time though, so the best time to start stepping things up is now.

Later I'll update an old post on the subject to show my work in terms of the steps I went through to put this out and what it cost me in terms of design work, proofing, and e-book conversion. With costs being so low now to publish a book on your own terms, you can make the production costs back in a month or two of sales and you don't have to hand 90% of those earnings over to a corporate publisher.

If you read this book you'll be a more successful writer and will spend your time in productive ways, I can promise that. There's only so much you can get from reading a book though—any book—so understand that this is the start of the journey. If you like my no-b.s., results-focused style and you want to get more personalized advice, get on the notification list and join the mastermind level later of Travel Writing Overdrive. You can see what past graduates have to say on the student testimonials page.

Let's rock this year!