PlanetEye Madrid Guide

Good friend and fellow blogger Abha Malpani is in her last week as the local Madrid expert on PlanetEye, an excellent travel website and blog covering dozens of cities. Starting next week I'll be replacing her as she prepares to move back to Dubai. So check out her posts on PlanetEye and tune in next week for my first contributions. It's my first paid blogging gig. Thanks for pressuring me to join the blogosphere, Abha!

The Next Generation of Guidebooks

Yesterday I went to the grand opening of an art gallery in Madrid. It's not a new gallery, but it's moved from the outskirts of town to the center. I'll be putting my review online as part of the quarterly update of Night & Day Madrid by Pulse Guides. It will be online within two weeks, making us probably the first guidebook to mention it.

This is how guidebooks need to be in the future. When there's a major new site, it should be on the publisher's site within a matter of weeks, instead of waiting a year or two for a new print edition. It's amazing how many publishers haven't figured that out yet.

I discussed the changes in the guidebook industry at length in an earlier post. Now I'm getting to be part of them.

Madrid Guidebook Project

I've just signed up with Pulse Guides to write online updates for their new Madrid guidebook. Pulse Guides has a series called Night & Day for people who only have a few days in a city and want to get the best experience in a short time. Talented travel writer Lara Cummings wrote the book, but I'll be responsible for quarterly updates and expansions, a monthly letter on the website, and contributions to the Pulse Guides' newsletter. You can read my monthly letter, about Madrid's autumn art season, here.

I have a good feeling about this company. Too many guidebook publishers are still working off an old business model, thinking that simply coming out with a new edition every two or three years is enough to drive sales. Not when everyone checks the Internet for travel information! By publishing new information about every city every month, and putting a major expansion to each title online every quarter, Pulse Guides is going to leave traditional guidebooks in the dust. It's not the only guidebook to post online updates, but it's amazing how few others there are.

Book Review: A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome

For travelers who like art, there's a new series out from Roaring Forties Press called ArtPlace, which looks at popular destinations through the eyes of their greatest artists. A couple of days ago on my other blog, Midlist Writer, I interviewed Angela K. Nickerson about how she landed a job writing A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome. Today I'm reviewing the book itself.

First off, the book is beautiful. There are high-quality color photos on every page, many being the talented work of Nickerson herself, and the layout is clean, well-presented, and friendly to the eye. The whole project shows the typical love of the book you get from the small press. There are also readable maps showing all the major sites where you can see Michelangelo's art in Florence and Rome.

The text is well-written, lively without being pat, informative without being burdensome, and at 163 pages, it's easily readable on the plane as you head to Italy. It is not a comprehensive guide to Rome, but rather a supplementary book for a visitor who already has a guidebook but would like to know more.

There were a couple of rocky bits in the first chapter, where Nickerson is talking about the world into which Michelangelo was born. Christopher Columbus did not land on the coast of North America, but on various Caribbean islands and the coasts of South and Central America. The Portuguese, not Spain, conquered Brazil. But once she gets to her main topic Nickerson hits her stride. She leads us through the master's early work in Florence, to his first commissions in Rome. She's especially good at putting him in the political and religious context of the time, where popes and powerful merchants tried to prove their worth through patronizing art. Sidebars fill us in on such things as Renaissance manners, some of Michelangelo's sonnets, and the Bella Figura of the Italian woman.

Even avid history readers will discover something new here. I had no idea the ruinous cost of expanding St. Peters was a major cause in the selling of indulgences (forgiveness for sins), which in turn was an important impetus for the Reformation.

In all, A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome is a worthy addition to your luggage.

Cover shot courtesy of Roaring Forties Press. Other images courtesy Angela K. Nickerson.

Grizzled Old Traveler Interviewed on Written Road (again!)

This week Abha Malpani asked a group of travel writers how important blogging was to their career. She was kind enough to ask my opinion even though I´ve only been at this less than two months. Click here to see our answers.

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!

Grizzled Old Traveler Interviewed on Write To Travel

I got interviewed today on Liz Lewis' site Write to Travel. Liz asks me about how I got started writing guidebooks and travel features, and where I think the industry is going. The site is worth checking out, and not just for reading my opinions. :-)

Death of the Guidebook? Maybe Not

There's been a lot of buzz on the Net about changes in the guidebook industry. Moon Handbooks has been canceling titles, citing competition from Lonely Planet and the Internet, and some influential guidebook authors such as Robert Reid are saying their profession may be doomed. Online guides offer up-to-the-minute reviews and it won't be long until travelers will be looking things up on their mobile instead of a guidebook.

But is the guidebook doomed? This grizzled old traveler thinks not. As Reid himself points out, there's still room for an authoritative voice from a writer who has been everywhere in a destination, something few other travelers can offer. Moon author David Stanley adds that most websites are in fact advertising venues, and therefore not reliable. (He also blames poor planning and rigid templates for Moon's troubles).

I believe the guidebook will survive, but it will be a guide ebook, downloaded from the Net either for a fee or loaded with ads. Writers will have to update more often, so will need to live in the places they write about. The business is changing, no doubt about it, but there's still a market out there. It's notable that both authors have created websites to continue their guidebooks in the new format. Best of luck to them. I might just join you.