Squeaking reaches deafening proportions

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Courtesy of Jon Azpiri, the link is to a blog with a piece on earning US$0.15 per word, except that apparently not all words count, regardless of their grammatical importance. Read it, as they say, and weep.

Several people on the Mexican trip from which I've just returned were writing for absolutely nothing except the subsidised travel itself. One, very courteously, apologised for contributing in this way to the general undermining of rates, although there's little new in this. But I was the only person travelling solely in the expectation of receiving a fee for material to be published, and that's a first.

Those dreaming of making a living from all this should note that US$0.15 per word is starting to look generous.

Everyone's pips are squeaking

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The link is to a Times article revealing that W H Smith, which although only partly a bookshop used to be (and may still be) the UK's largest bookseller, has done a deal with Penguin which means that only Penguin group travel guides will now be stocked.

Publishers I've written for have sometimes regarded persuading W H Smith to stock them as make-or-break for the titles, such was the volume of sales from limited shelf space. Smith's was therefore able to extract truly pip-squeaking discounts meaning that there was little profit if any at all from sales there, which seemed to make a presence there rather pointless. An appearance on the shelves of Smith's amounting to little more than very expensive advertising, but in a form that guarantee the publisher got the absolute minimum yield pre sale. For those (precious few) authors on a royalty, the result was only a few pence per sale.

To gain this exclusive hold on Smith's shelves, Penguin (whose travel guide stable includes Rough Guides and DK titles), has had both to pay cash up front, and to give W H Smith a whopping 72 % discount on the cover price. I can't speak for Rough Guides, but DK doesn't pay a royalty, but rather a flat fee for total rights, so although I've been co-author/editor/consultant on a number of titles this new deal doesn't affect me. But even had there been a royalty it wouldn't have amounted to much. If the book as a £10 cover price, only £2.80 gets to the publisher, and at the very best about £0.28 of that will reach the author. Writing travel guides is more about establishing expertise and credibility than it is about getting fat.

The author of the Times piece rather takes the partners in this deal to task, but there's not much enthusiasm in the way he does it, and he doesn't really have much of interest to say. The travel book market is in a terrible state, and it's up to Smith's, in the best interests of its business, to decide how to get the maximum yield from its shelf space, and the publisher to decide how to increase its market share.

Last year guide book sales in the UK fell between seven and thirteen per cent (according to a piece in The Bookseller), and that was before the recession began to bite. According to this Times piece, in the first four months of this year DK's sales fell by 16.5%, and Rough Guides' by fully 30%. There are probably mass redundancies underway even as I type.

No doubt Penguin sales through W H Smith will rise a little, as those making last-minute purchases at airports and railway stations (where the company is well-represented) will be faced with little alternative. But everyone else will surely quickly learn about the paucity of choice, and will shop elsewhere. Total travel sales at W H Smith outlets sharing high streets with Waterstone's, Borders, Books Etc., and other big chains may well drop however.

But this is all further indication, for those not yet driven away from the thought of travel writing by various postings below, that now is not the best time to be entering the business. In the last few weeks I've seen one travel section I write for regularly simply vanish, and had another frequent magazine client contact me to say that rates were being reduced by ten per cent including on work already commissioned, filed, but not yet actually printed (which is completely disgusting).

In the end, the purpose of travel writing for newspapers and magazines is to keep the advertisements from seeming too numerous, and bumping into one another. When there's less advertising, there are fewer pages, and less demand for text. Leisure travel is one of the first things to go in a recession, and when fewer people are buying travel, travel companies have less money with which to place advertising.

Right now you'd be better to write on living on a budget than on travel. At least until such times as editors realise that a well-written piece about somewhere the reader can only dream of visiting is just as attractive as a nuts and bolts piece about somewhere swamped with overseas visitors.

Personally I'm in the middle of writing a piece on lawn mower racing, and a series of China book reviews.

'Don't like Jamaica...'

'...I love her.'

Partway through my Jamaican visit this 1970s 10cc tune came back to me, but my Jamaica Tourism Board minder had never heard of it, and even suggested (teasingly) that she thought I was making it up. But this is the 21st century, the small but comfortable hotel I was in (Sunset Resort, on Treasure Beach) had broadband, and by the next morning I'd downloaded a copy of the song, transferred it to my iPod, and gave it to her to listen to over breakfast.

She wasn't impressed, and indeed I hadn't remembered that the whole thing is slightly mocking.

I'm not particularly keen on these trips that introduce me to a country I've never visited before (and in this case a region previously unknown to me). It doesn't seem reasonable that after a week I'm going to come back with something intelligent to say. But of course this is wrongly conceived, since intelligence is about the last thing most (thankfully not all) editors and readers (ditto) want from their travel sections. But there are times when such trips become necessary either to assist the bank account or because editorial interest is turning in a particular direction and stories on a particular region is all that they want.

The whole thing was very poorly handled by Jamaica's New York-based agency, with long lacunae between email replies, a complete failure either to produce story ideas or promote Jamaica in any way despite being invited several times to do so, and final agreement on a trip only reached a week before it was taken, and long after one deadline had gone by.

I saw a draft itinerary only five days before departure, and was given merely 1.5 hours to comment (!) before the USA shut down for the long holiday weekend. It was only then that I discovered that my piece on driving round lesser-known corners of Jamaica was going to amount to no more than being driven around Jamaica with the permanent company of a minder. Had I been aware of this earlier I might well not have taken the trip.

But it's just as well I did, because no sooner had I arrived then things actually clicked into action. My guide, the amiable Claudia, was not of the 'minder' kind, was not in denial about Jamaica's reputation, and indeed would have been hard put to deny some of its problems since only a few minutes after leaving the airport when we stopped so I could use a bank machine, someone immediately offered me some dope. She was justifiably horrified, not that I was in the slightest bit bothered about it, and drove the man away. This was, however, the only time anything of this kind happened to me in a week.

It's always tricky when you have to have someone with an agenda at your elbow for a week, although some countries' tourism boards, and apparently Jamaica's is one, will only operate in this way. But Claudia's agenda was principally to make sure I got the stories I wanted, and it rapidly became clear that very little of my requests had been transmitted to Jamaica at all. As a result within two days we'd abandoned the existing skeletal itinerary and Claudia was spending large parts of the day on the phone to various people rearranging and reconfirming in general thoroughly sorting things out. If, en route from A to B, I spotted a turn-off to something that looked interesting, there would follow a rapid discussion about it, and an immediate change of plan if that's what I wanted. I very quickly forgot to be peeved that I wasn't driving myself and musing privately into my dictaphone. In terms of flexibility I might just as well have been driving, and while loneliness can sometimes be a problem on these trips, Claudia was very good company.

As I saw in the second half of the trip, the way most visitors treat Jamaica it might as well be the Costa del Sol, or parts of the Mexican coastline. They fly in, are collected from the airport and taken to an all-inclusive resort where they frolic on a palm-fringed beach, eat three largely foreign meals a day and drink all they want. The only Jamaicans they speak to are those working in the resort. Some take brief tours to what are inevitably the most self-consciously made-for-tourists sights on the island (although some of these are well-done). This is my idea of hell, and I simply cannot see the point (whether in Spain, Mexico, Jamaica, or anywhere else), but of course some people just want a one- or two-week break with reliable sun, sand, sea and sometimes something else beginning with 's'.

Fine, and in terms of travel writing there's nothing easier than spending three nights in each of, say, three resorts, do little more than lying around on the same all-inclusive package for a story that practically writes itself. But it's not for me.

Instead I used the excellent Sunset Resort on the south coast's Treasure Beach as a base from which to visit assorted better- and lesser-known sites in the surrounding hills, whose originally Idaho now gone-native owner volunteered to take me off in various directions, and when I came back one day feeling slack, bullied me into taking a half-hour boat ride out to a small bar on stilts. I was very glad he did, as both the trip out on a high-speed fishing boat, and the early evening spent looking down to rays and up to the sunset was a highlight.

Other high points included various roadside food stops, for jerk chicken, jerk fish, and goat curry; a day spent watching a local limited-overs cricket match (with a lively crowd of about forty), and Greenwood Great House, which I'm hoping may trigger a return to Jamaica for further work. Having seen two of the surviving great houses I'd certainly like to do something on them.

Due to someone's inability to notice that May has 31 days, it was discovered (including by me) partway through the trip, that there was a day with nothing scheduled. I was at the Hilton-run Rose Hall Resort and Spa and so ended up with a day of doing precisely what most other visitors to Jamaica do: absolutely nothing.

I rediscovered that I am now absolutely incapable of this. I put my trunks on, went and got towel, headed down to a less popular end of the beach, went for a three-minute swim, sat under a palm, and in under 15-minutes all-in was back in my room, sorting out some of my notes, doing admin email, etc. The hotel room was large, well-furnished, solid and pleasant, and lacked the self-consciously tropical motifs of others I saw (Jakes, Negril Escape). The tropics were easily visible from the balcony: white sand, turquoise water, and all

It seems to me that you can't lose with Jamaica. If it's beach time you want, there are plenty of beaches to choose from. If you want culture and history there's plenty of that, too. Possibly the ideal combination is a beach resort used as a base from which to reach the rum factories (e.g. Appleton), river trips, waterfalls, great houses, local seafood restaurants (esp. Little Ochie), small non-touristy towns with no pestering vendors, and local nightlife.

One of the most likable aspects of the country was being able, despite having a dramatically contrasting skin tone, simply to blend into the crowd, something that despite the relative lack of contrast in China, is practically impossible to achieve there. A more easygoing people more interested in simply exchanging views and making you feel comfortable you couldn't hope to meet.

Ah well. Enough rambling. I've a deadline, as usual.

To return to the title of this entry, although I did like Jamaica it really wouldn't matter if I didn't. That's not the point of this kind of travel, which is to come home with the material needed for the stories in question. Fortunately, I did that, too.

Better to arrive than to travel

So if you're boarding an overnight flight of four or five hours, landing at a time your body considers to be 3am in order to wait four hours for another four-hour flight, what would you do?

Sleep? Watch VOD? Catch up with some reading?

I worked for most of the first flight and for a further two hours after landing, frantically revising a piece delayed by domestic difficulties and now overdue. Having filed it from the business lounge in Toronto, and then having found myself upgraded to business class, I thought on the flight south to Montego Bay (Jamaica for the geographically unlettered) I'd be able to sleep the sleep of if not the just, at least of the man who met his modified deadline by the skin of his teeth.

So, needless to say, no sooner had I nodded off than the Air Canada flight attendant woke me up to find out what I wanted for breakfast.

I'm hoping a rum punch with dinner and the sound of the surf outside the window will allow me my first extended sleep for more than a week, thus enabling me to be coherent when I interview an organic farmer early tomorrow morning.

Two weeks on the couch with no deadlines. That's what, ten years on, I still want.

What is 'real travel'?

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In comment on a post in April last year (yes, it's taken me a while to get around to this), Lara Dunston wrote:

> I'm glad your press trip went well, but I'm still not persuaded to venture on one myself, I'm afraid. I just can't see how they come close to anything like real travel.

This rather begs the question, 'What is "real travel"?' It also assumes that whatever 'real travel' may be, that's the kind of travel I'm trying to have, which might turn out to be precisely the kind of confusion between work and play this blog (such as it is) is partly dedicated to dispelling.

The phrase 'real travel' is mostly heard in the dormitories of backpackerdom, meant to differentiate between travellers ('real') and tourists (in some sense 'fake'). The idea is never thought through, but is intended to indicate that uncritically following the routes and recommendations of your Lonely Planet guide is somehow superior to being spoon-fed your information on an organised tour. In fact there's little to differentiate the two.

Here a press trip (or 'fam trip' as it's often called) is being contrasted with other travel (whether independent or fully escorted isn't clear, but it's a fairly safe bet that independent travel is going to be regarded here as the only 'real' travel).

But all travel is 'real' (or none of it is), and no one who prefers to be carted from A to B need feel obliged to work out how to do it by themselves and by public bus. No one who simply wants to be on a beach need feel obliged to steep themselves in local culture and no one who thinks that following guide book recommendations for a few days amounts to meaningful cultural immersion is to be taken seriously anyway. Indeed, it's almost impossible for something to appear in any popular guide book and still be authentic. That's one of those principles of tourism that might have been constructed by Heisenberg: the more widely something is known about the less likely it is to be original and authentic. This is Neville-Hadley's Quantum Theory of Travel.

But of course, my travel is anyway business travel, undertaken for the purpose of obtaining stories agreeable to editors, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my own travel preferences. A successful trip is one in which I come back with the material I need: observations, notes on experiences, interview recordings. I may not have seen globally famous 'must-sees' despite being within five minutes of them (and I speak as one who has twice been to Alice Springs without visiting Australia's most iconic Rock--it wasn't part of the story in either case). My itinerary is agreed in advance, and even when it involves driving myself, rarely has any flexibility. But it's shaped to the needs of the stories. It's not a holiday.

In general I restrict myself to travel that can be undertaken by anyone else, and write in order to describe the experience and explain how it can be done by those who follow. This sometimes means doing more rather then less than other visitors would do, in order to be able to make a selection of experiences to recommend. One benefit of press trips with groups of journalists, although I mostly avoid these, is that there's often access provided that the average traveller wouldn't get, but which when recounted is helpful to the reader. On the excellent trip to Scottsdale that spurred the original comment, for instance, I had the opportunity to talk directly to some of the architects and their followers in a way not available to the average visitor. The point was, of course, to get information, anecdotes, and quotable material that would enliven the story and explain the experience in the words of those best qualified to comment. If this was 'unreality' then more of it is needed.

There is almost no genuinely critical travel writing for newspapers or magazines or television. This is not what the editorial and production powers feel the readers/viewers want, and the material created for these publications and broadcasts is almost universally artificial in one way or another. But the general public idea of travel is of something so imbued with glamour, whether it's the 'heroism' of hard-seat train travel in China, or the wannabe-James Bond-ness of luxury Caribbean resorts, that even someone as weary of travel as I am (and so far I've managed to avoid a trip further than Fife in Scotland this year) would have a hard time breaking the spell even if permitted by editors to do so. Indeed, it's often noticeable on website travel discussions that the unsatisfactory nature of an experience is the very last thing that either those who haven't yet travelled want to hear about, or that those who may already have travelled want to admit to. They slave and save, look forward all year to what may be the 'trip of a lifetime', and nothing is going to make them admit afterwards, that in swallowing all the clichés about a destination they were involved in duping themselves.

The best thing I can do is to avoid contributing to the overall propaganda, and if there's any distinction to be made between 'real' and 'unreal' in this context then it's to do with writing about, for instance, the insect markets in Beijing, rather than the usual goo about 'ooh-ahh Forbidden City 5000 years of culture Confucius he say'. This, however, requires a considerable amount of study and effort when venturing out of English-language territory, and is best based at least on repeated visits to the same destination. It's a lot easier just to rattle off a brainless piece on first impressions of the top sites, and it's a lot easier to publish such a piece, too.

I'm off to Jamaica next week on a trip that so far has been very poorly handled, insofar as it's taken about two months to set up with final agreement achieved, after long lacunae and one missed deadline, less than a week before departure, and with an absolutely skeletal draft itinerary which appears to have me chauffered everywhere rather than driving myself. However, the trip does seem designed to help me get the three stories I finally proposed (the intermediate PR people in New York having contributed absolutely nothing--sometimes you really do wonder what these people do to earn their money) and I'm promised that everything will stop and start at my pleasure.

The excuse (from the New York PR people) that I can't drive myself because I might get lost seems particularly absurd, not least since the tourism authorities themselves are promoting self-drive to less-visited places, which is one of the topics I'm supposed to be covering. Seeing whether this is in fact practical, and actually getting lost, is potentially part of the story.

But some tourism authorities insist on having someone at your elbow for the whole visit (and there are certainly journalists who can't survive without this, too), but it can be claustrophobic, especially to someone who prefers to use a dictaphone for notes. With the right chauffeur/guide it can be very helpful (as I remember with one in Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, one in Tokyo, and another in Asti), and in others the opposite (one in Fiji, one in Vilnius). If the timing of all this, leaving me with little option but to go to Jamaica, had been different there would have been further discussion on all this.

Regardless, the purpose of the itinerary is to get the stories. Is this artificial, in the sense that no casual traveller would adopt the same itinerary? Yes. Is it 'real'? Certainly. Getting the stories is the only thing that counts. This is work, not play.

Business as usual

There's an item on the BBC World Service this morning about how the contraction of economies globally is bringing about a rise in fraud, and this is apparently a particular growing problem in Japan, where the sums involved also tend to be large.

An expert being interviewed for the programme pinpointed three particular problems that increase the chances of money invested there going astray: that foreign investors don't understand the business culture, don't understand the language, and rely very heavily on local advisors.

Now where does that sound like?

It's a constant puzzle why in so many different ways China is treated differently from anywhere else. When talking about business in China, despite endless examples of investors leaving large sums in China and achieving either a great deal less than they might have achieved elsewhere or indeed nothing at all, and despite endless cases of breach of contract, fraud, and intellectual property theft, China doesn't get a mention here.

Maybe there's no 'growth in fraud' story to tell about China because fraud reached maximum levels a long time ago.

The interviewee went on to cite an example of foreigners allowing themselves to be intimidated by local culture, or persuaded that they shouldn't ask various questions for fear of giving cultural offence. In his example an important businessman went to Japan to check on his business, was introduced in English, but then the rest of the meeting was held in Japanese. He was asked at the end if he had any questions, but was too embarrassed to ask for the matters to be gone over again in a language he understood.

Businessmen looking to invest in China are this stupid on a daily basis, and arrive already persuaded that things must be done 'the Chinese way', often by foreign consultants with every interest in promoting the obscurity of business dealings there and the inscrutability of officialdom in order to line their own pockets with fees for steering the hapless foreign investor through it all.

The advice given in the interview was that as soon as it is suggested in Japan that you should not ask a question because of local peculiarities then alarm bells should ring. In China you should not only look a gift horse in the mouth, but you should be getting its teeth X-rayed on a daily basis in order to ensure they haven't been pulled and replaced with fakes.

The way in which China is treated differently from the rest of the world never comes out more clearly than when U.S. foreign policy is considered, not only with Clinton's recent disgusting downgrading of the importance of human rights there, a demoralising self-given black eye for the new administration, but also with recent discussions of U.S. policy towards Cuba.

Shortly after her appointment to the Obama administration, Clinton made a rousing speech about telling dictators their time was up, and there would be an end to suppression of free speech, right of assembly, of religion, etc., and put several countries on notice.

Did she mention the most extravagant offender of all? No, she did not, and made it clear before visiting China that such considerations were to get less prominence than was at least claimed for them even by the Bush administration.

While apparently embargoes are appropriate for bloody-handed regimes the U.S. government doesn't like, engagement is right for others, if they have sufficient economic clout. The rhetoric on being 'leader of the free world' and on being morally upright defenders of democracy and free speech has by now added staleness to its already rank odour.

But recently to hear a Republican official criticise Obama's possible engagement with Cuba while encouraging such engagement for China was enough almost to have me hurl my laptop across the room.

What has the European policy of engagement with Cuba achieved, he asked? Has it brought about democracy or a free press?

Well has the US's engagement with China brought those institutions there?

One reason why I rarely have time to write here...

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Link is to Wall Street Journal article of mine on the repeated foolishness of campaigns surrounding the bronze heads from Beijing's Summer Palace.