Travel Blog

A fellow travel writer recently wrote about the decision he made years ago to go it alone, i.e., to stop sending his work to newspapers and magazines and to publish it himself in newsletters and blogs. Back then he could see, he wrote, where mainstream media was headed.

I admire people who possess the entrepreneurial skills to make a go of it by publishing themselves. Though I sometimes wonder if their dissatisfaction with mainstream media, their frustration with editors, their desire to “take control over their work” were all caused by a poor success-failure ratio when selling their work. One never sends rejections to oneself.

When you self-publish, you are a true independent, which means you miss out on the thrill of getting an acceptance from an editor at a magazine. And the delight is tied to a feeling of accomplishment that, no matter how proud you are of the piece you’ve written, doesn’t come with self-publication. No writer goes out for a celebratory dinner after appearing in his own newsletter. Also, publishing in a magazine, especially a general interest magazine, gets you “accidental readers” who would never have found you on the internet because they had – or thought they had – no interest in your subject.   

And then there are the economics. To make a go of it as a writer/publisher, you have to appeal to a large audience, which in travel means focusing heavily on information and tips, the practical stuff that the majority of travelers want. The writer referred to earlier has been very successful since going independent. “Sponsored posts and brand deals have been flowing like a wide-open faucet,” he wrote, “and I'm having trouble keeping track of the orders. I'm actually glad I'm not traveling this month because I've got so much content to crank out that I'm getting paid well for.”

There were words and phrases in that passage that gave me pause. “Sponsored posts” and “brand deals” suggest corporate partnerships, which are probably a necessity in his chosen field but smack to me, an old newspaper guy, of a conflict of interest. So perhaps he’s not that independent after all. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not all that eager to read the “content” that any writer is about to “crank out.” When I was a travel editor, I used to complain about the freelancers who took free trips and then “cranked out” articles that all sounded the same. Ah, but I was an editor, the stickler this writer no longer has to deal with.