Joanne Miller at RolfPotts.com

This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I feature an interview with guidebook writer Joanne Miller. In addition to four comprehensive travel books — Moon’s Pennsylvania Handbook, Moon’s Maryland-Delaware Handbook, Moon’s Chesapeake Bay Handbook, and Best Places: Marin — she has contributed to Eyewitness Guides USA, Eyewitness Guides San Francisco, Travel Holiday and other publications.

Here are some outtakes from the interview:

• “As a book writer, I pay my own expenses, and build what I think research is going to cost into contract negotiations with the publisher. Of course, I want to spend as little as possible, so I pack my research trips heavily. On the average, in one trip, I’ll stay in a different place every night for two weeks, driving up to 100 miles from destination to destination, visiting an average of five to seven restaurants, attractions and accommodations a day. I actually see everything I write about, occasionally adding (with the remark that it’s “recommended”) a restaurant from local sources. On each book, I rack up an average of 10,000 miles over several trips. I train for these trips like a marathoner. Then I come home and sleep for two weeks.”
• “In order to write a book as comprehensive as Moon requires, the author has to have a weird combination of traits: organizational ability (to plan the book, itineraries, writing schedule, a zillion details), an outgoing personality (for all those people you meet on the road), patience (books take one or two years out of your life), and a high tolerance level for hours and hours of sitting motionless in front of an ELF-emitting box. After a week or two, you get into a rhythm and the daily writing gets easier. I love deadlines — writing is such a creative endeavor that the concrete reality of a deadline is anchoring.”
• “I think anyone can become a good writer given enough drive and real writing time. Whether your words end up in print or pixels or the dustbin depends on your persistence, desire, and ability to create fantastic origami figures from rejection letters. If you’re considering book writing, contact the publishers and make yourself available to individual authors for updates on a book that interests you.”

Full interview online here.