[Above: Literary agent Sarah Jane Freymann talks to Paris American Academy students about the publishing business.]

One of my most intriguing guest speakers at the Paris American Academy writing workshop last month was my literary agent, Sarah Jane Freymann, who gave an hour-long talk on the business side of book writing. Below is an outline of her tips (compiled with the help of PAA students Carol Bender and Joyce Hardy-McDonald) regarding finding an agent for a travel book:

• 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 prepare your book proposal.
• Rarely do agents send a work to publishers before they guide extensive revision and rewriting. Writers working with agents must be willing to rewrite until the agent says “go”.

• It’s better not to try and get an agent over the Internet — and never pay a reading fee. Legitimate agents don’t ask for payment in reading book queries.
• Books such as the Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents list literary agents by category, and are a worthwhile investment.
• Don’t approach an agent that doesn’t represent your genre of writing. A trick to finding an appropriate travel-literature agent is to go to a bookstore or library and browse through your favorite travel books. Authors tend to thank their agents in the acknowledgements, and a little bit of follow-up research will usually yield contact information.
• Do your research and call the agent by name when sending a query (never start a query letter with “Dear Sirs”).

• It’s preferable not to pitch an agent by email. Mail your pitch as hard copy — and use good-quality paper.
• Don’t send a “rough draft” pitch letter; hone it until you’re absolutely sure it’s perfect. Out of hundreds of proposals agents receive each week, yours must shine — it should be inviting and exciting while still being courteous. Capture the agent’s imagination, but don’t be gimmicky. Be intriguing without being “cute”.
• An effective pitch letter is brief — one page — and to the point. Tell the agent who you are, why you’re writing what you’re writing (including what authority, if any, you have on that topic), and how you can market your book.
• Simultaneous submissions are fine, and it’s OK to play the numbers game. It’s not uncommon to send queries out to up to 25 agents at once. Remember to include a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope).
• If an agent expresses interest in your book project, send her a more detailed book proposal, including three sample chapters, a chapter outline, and an overview. The overview should be well written, informative, and succinct, like a New York Times book review. [Note: While non-fiction is sold based on a proposal and sample chapters, fiction (especially for first-time authors) is generally sold based on the completed novel.]
• The book proposal, including sample chapters, is typically 15-30 pages long.

• Good writing is always the bottom line in attracting interest from agents and publishers. But good writing isn’t enough: Every book needs to transcend the experience it describes and tie in to the universal.
• This means you have to use storytelling to communicate your experience. Write from the heart, and let the reader share in your sense of discovery.

It’s now been about four months since I disabled the comments here at Vagablogging.net — and I think I’m going to keep them “turned off” indefinitely.

I’m doing this not because I dislike comments (to the contrary, I like the interactive nature of blog comments), but because I found the comments were too difficult to maintain — especially since the comment section was regularly becoming inundated with spam ads for porn and poker and penis enlargement. Hence, keeping the comments turned off is simply easier that spending ten minutes each day cleaning them up (and ten minutes each day — day after day — can add up to a lot of wasted time).

Since travel itself is more important to me than travel-blogging, I’m simply trying to keep my laptop time to a minimum, while still posting as much interesting travel information as I can.

If something I blog here moves you one way or another, feel free to send along a personal comment to me by email.

The current issue of the literary journal Hobart is entirely devoted to travel fiction and nonfiction — including an experimental story of my own, entitled, “In Varanasi, Death is Not Something”.

This story began when I was cleaning out some old folders on my laptop and I discovered some original article drafts I’d written for travel magazines many years ago. Reading through these articles, I’d realized that some of my favorite passages had been cut from these pieces for various editing purposes, so I pasted these favorite passages into a new file. Then, almost by accident, I read through this file from beginning to end and realized that — with a bit of rearranging — these passages fell into a rhythm and progression that felt like a whole new story. The result is a little collage of a story that absurdly veers all over the globe, yet yields epiphanies and payoffs along the way.

I only recently received my contributor copies of Hobart, so I have yet to delve into all the stories — though my early favorites include Jeff Parker’s Russia-based fiction “The False Cognate”, Samantha Hunt’s wacky “A ‘B’ Plan”, and Rebecca Taylor’s interview with freelance travel writer (and World Hum contributing editor) Frank Bures.

Few of the Hobart travel stories are available online, but some content related to the travel issue an be found here, including DVD-style bonus materials, alternate endings (including a kinder ending to Jeff Parker’s tale), photo essays, outtakes, and tales from behind the scenes — including an explanation of why the passages in my story were cut from magazines like Salon, National Geographic Adventure, and Islands.

This swimwear line, which is no joke, reminds me of an old In Living Color sketch, wherein Islamist swimsuit models wore bikinis over their burkhas. And, while I can appreciate the earnest desire of conservative Muslim women to find appropriate beachwear, I can’t help but think that swimsuits are one aspect of human existence that shouldn’t be legislated by religion.

“There’s nothing necessarily wrong about being a tourist. A tourist is somebody who happens to be more interested in the rest of the world than he is in his own little puddle.”
–Bruce Chatwin, interview with Michael Ignatieff in Granta 21, Spring 1987

A little over a year ago, I blogged a curious item from Esquire, wherein film director Barry Sonnenfeld sang the praises of using Tucks hemorrhoid pads as a more sanitary form of toilet paper. “Tucks,” the film director exulted, “are like a romp through a field of daisies for your butt.”

At the time, I used this tidbit to bring up the fact that toilet paper simply does not exist in most parts of the world (such as Asia), and that most world citizens consider water a much cleaner way to wash after “going number two”. Water-wiping enthusiasts (including many die-hard vagabonders) insist that their method is superior, arguing that if you had shit on your face, you would use water to wash it off instead of paper. Thus, they reason, water-wiping makes for a cleaner bum.

So what is it like when water-wipers are faced with the horror of using toilet paper in places like the United States? The following item, from the August issue of Harper’s, gives us some vivid clues:

From an anonymous contribution to “Lotah Sto