Nearly five years ago my old mentor Don George approached me with some interview questions for a book on travel writing he was putting together for Lonely Planet. My Q&A appeared on pp. 35-38 of Travel Writing, which hit bookstores worldwide in early 2005. With Travel Writing going into a second edition this year, I…

Not long ago, Abha Malpani queried me for a Written Road post she was writing about whether or not beginner writers should write for free in the name of building up story clips. Should a person, she asked, be open to writing without pay in the beginning of their career? This is what I told her:…

The Write To Travel blog recently interviewed me about my experiences as a professional travel writer. The Q&A format mimicked the questions I ask writers in my own Travel Writers series, and our resulting exchange might be termed “6 Answers About Life As a Professional Travel Writer.” Here’s what was discussed: 1) Did you always want…

For the past seven years, I’ve been asking my various travel writer interview subjects how they got started writing. Frank Bures recently asked me that same question for a travel-writing class he’s teaching, and this is what I told him: My writing aspirations can be traced back to about age 13, when I started writing…

As I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog, college students researching journalism, travel literature, and Americans abroad interview me quite frequently. I rarely see the final result of these academic research projects, but I always find the interview process interesting — and hence I will share some of these interviews in coming weeks. I’ll…

A reader named Scott recently wrote me with the following question: How do you get published? I am working on a book proposal, but publishers don’t take unsolicited manuscripts or proposals and agents don’t seem to want unpublished writers. The book is nonfiction, about living and working in Russia for the last two years. I…

Why you need an agent These days, book editors want to deal initially with agents, not authors. An agent is your best intermediary to the book world. A committed agent will work to help you through the legal aspect of contracts, and help manage your career. Your agent will be your initial editor, as you…

by Rolf Potts When my Vagabonding column debuted in Salon.com, lots of readers wrote to ask me how they, too, could get jobs as travel writers. This, I’ll admit, was a tough question to answer. After all, travel writing is not really something you can study for in college, and there are certainly no travel…