Yet More on the Lonely Planet Pseudo-Scandal

Can you tell my blood's up? While a certain Lonely Planet author has been getting a well-deserved thrashing on this blog and a few hundred others, I have to say that this whole thing does point out a few serious problems in the guidebook industry, things publishers should really look at if they want to improve their reputations and quality of their product. To wit:

1. Insufficient advances. The more you pay your writers, the longer they can stay in the destination and the more they can learn about it. Duh.

2. Insufficient fact checking. Most guidebooks aren't fact checked by the publisher, opening them up to lazy authors fudging facts or making things up.

3. Tight Deadlines. This can lead to writers cutting corners, yet no matter how tight a deadline the writer has, the book will still take months to come out, reducing its accuracy.

4. Rigid templates. The editors, the vast majority of whom aren't travelers themselves, sit in a boardroom and come up with a template they think will work great, and cram every guidebook into this template, whether it fits or not. This is contributing to the current implosion of the Moon Handbooks series.

5. Insufficient Marketing. Many publishers think that as long as they have a good distributor and get on a lot of bookstore shelves that they don't have to market their books. See number 4 above for what can happen.

Actually, all of these problems can be projected to a greater or lesser extent on all fields of publishing. While publishing makes tens of billions of dollars a year in the U.S. alone, it's very hard on individual authors and titles. Most titles sink, and many authors quit the game, or get embittered and bite the hand that fed them, like a certain Lonely Planet author.

But nobody is going to listen to me, are they?

Don't Buy Books From Liars

Well, the Lonely Planet scandal that I mentioned a couple of posts ago is still stinking up the Internet, and I was going to write a nice long rant about what an idiot Kohnstamm is and why nobody should buy his book, but it turns out Eva Holland has already written all about it. Please read her article. It says everything I was going to say.

Except for one thing. Holland thinks most of the Kohnstamm's lies are in his guidebooks. I think his guidebooks were probably fairly well done or LP wouldn't have kept hiring him. I've found inaccuracies in LP guidebooks, and in all guidebooks, but in general I feel they're some of the better ones out there. I think most of his lies are in his so-called memoirs, the title of which will never appear on this blog. This sort of thing makes life harder for every writer.

Lonely Planet Author Claims He Faked His Research

The publishing world has been rocked by several cases of bestselling books that turned out to be false, from plagiarized novels to fake memoirs of the Holocaust. Now it's Lonely Planet's turn. Prolific LP author Thomas Kohnstamm says in his recent memoir on life as a travel writer that he plagiarized or made up parts of the dozen books he wrote for the company.

Now LP is lashing back. In a rebuttal, they say they've fact-checked his books and have found no major errors. They also said his claim that he researched the Colombia guidebook from San Francisco was "disingenuous", because he was only hired the write the history section.

So which books did Kohnstamm fake, the guidebooks or his memoirs? This is the only case I've heard of where an author came forward to admit he faked something, so this smells a bit fishy, like it's a PR ploy. But it does highlight a fault in the publishing industry in general and the guidebook industry in particular--virtually no book is fact checked by anyone other than the author. Neither of my two guidebooks were. It's a good thing for my publishers I'm too proud to plagiarize or make things up!