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Island Press’ new edition of Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise?” by Martha Honey is an interesting read for anyone interested in the burgeoning ecotourism industry. This book attempts to answer the question of whether or not ecotourism fulfills its mission of reducing a traveler’s impact to the places he or she visits, in terms of not only ecological impact, but also in terms of benefit to local communities.
Honey writes,
Although ‘green’ travel is being aggressively marketed as a win-win solution for the Third World, the environment, the tourist, and the travel industry, close examination shows a much more complex reality.
This book is organized into two parts. The first part provides background information and defines ecotourism. The second part is a collection of case studies and analysis from around the world, including: Costa Rica, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya, South Africa, and the United States.
Ecotourism examines the cultural context of ecotourism and the fact that many communities have to compromise some of their values in order to appease and attract tourists. Though she mentions that some resorts and hotels make a special effort to educate travelers regarding local customs and traditions, she also discusses the example of Zanzibar, where she notes on page 185,
Nowhere is the clash between Western culture and conservative Muslim culture more apparent than in the streets of the Stone Town. Each evening, sun-worshiping, scantily clad tourists crowd into the many bars for sundowners while Zanzibari men head to mosque for prayer.
Ecotourism is well-researched, boasting 81 pages of footnotes. However, the academic presentation should not deter the casual reader. This book is an excellent resource for students, industry professionals, or travelers interested in analyzing tourist impacts on local communities.
Sam Carpenter once worked 100 hours a week, struggling to support his family with his telephone answering service business. At one point, his two teenage children lived with him in the office because the family could not afford another place to live.
Now, he’s living well and working only a few hours a week through the life-management techniques he describes in Work the System- The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Making More
In the same genre as Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek (which Vagablogging has written about on more than one occasion), Work the System offers advice and anecdotes on how to manage one’s life effectively, only exerting energy on the details that a person can control about his or her own life (which admittedly isn’t that long of a list…).
A Vagabonder could gain some useful insight from this book, as Carpenter helps readers analyze the systems in their own lives in order to streamline and simplify. He also acknowledges the importance of making time for the good things in life.
He recounts an experience in Italy where he sitting in the hotel dining room at breakfast while finishing up some work on his laptop. The hotel manager approached him and, after making sure he was through eating his breakfast, said “Please. To work, take your computer to the lobby downstairs. This is a place of breakfast“.
This book is worth a look for anyone who wants to manage his or her life in order to make time for the important things in life, like savoring an Italian breakfast.
It’s official: The Lost Girls have a book deal! The Girls (Amanda Pressner, Jennifer Baggett and Holly Corbett) are currently hunkered down in New York City writing and perfecting their tome for the masses.
In 2006, the Girls left their jobs, families, boyfriends, and worldly possessions behind to travel the globe on a girls getaway for a year. Their magnificent blog won the 2007 Travvies Best Group-Written Travel Blog award. They have blogged on everything from how to quit your job to travel to tips on starting a travel blog to selecting the best travel bra to interviewing each other about life on the road. The Lost Girls can do it all.
In 2007, they came home and are started putting a book proposal together. HarperCollins bought the book, a movie deal soon followed, and now the Lost Girls are working hard to get everything ready.
They were kind enough to take a few minutes to answer a few questions.
What advice do you have for a traveler who wants to get a book published?
First and foremost, know that it is possible to get a book deal. Someone has to write this generation’s incarnation of On the Road or put a cool new spin on Eat, Pray, Love—why shouldn’t it be you? The thing to keep in mind, however, is that it can take even talented writers several years before they find an agent, and a publisher, willing to take them on. Some of the most famous novelists got doors slammed in their faces (or worse, heard nothing at all) countless times before they finally convinced someone to believe in their ideas, and their talent.
Before going for the big book enchilada, we’d strongly recommend honing your voice and narrative style as much as possible by, well—writing. Keep a journal and jot down notes and ideas everywhere you go. Sign up for your own a travel blog. Contribute pieces to other well-know travel sites like Vagablogging, World Hum, or Brave New Traveler (some will actually pay you to publish your work!) Pick up a copy of the Writer’s Market to find out which travel magazines and newspapers accept queries. Learn how to write an article query by snagging a few more books from Amazon.com on the topic (there are several guides out there to help you get started) or take a class through Mediabistro (locations in cities nationwide). The point is to gain both experience—and collect the clips—that will later show an agent and publisher that you have the chops to write an entire manuscript.
One interesting thing we learned when trying to shop around The Lost Girls: agents and editors have recently been flooded with book ideas from one writer who has visited a single destination. These ideas are often discarded, because they’re not viewed as compelling, or unique enough. Our editor at Harper Collins told us that the reason they liked The Lost Girls was that it presented a unique spin on a travel tale: Three best friends from New York City, who abandoned all of the things that 20-somethings are supposed to want (stable jobs, great guys, a positive bank balance) in order to travel around the world.
Was it difficult to find an agent/publisher?
Not as difficult as we’d anticipated! We were surprised to learn that editors and agents—who receive thousands of book queries every year—actually check out popular blogs to see if they could possibly be translated into print. The reason being, if a blogger has already gained a large following online, her book might also be a popular success.
A few agents and one editor at a major publishing house stumbled across our blog while we were still traveling, and wrote to express interest. Of course, no one actually wanted to meet with us until we’d composed a polished book proposal, so the three of us holed up for an entire month at Holly’s family’s house in Syracuse to put together our 60-page document together. The whole thing sort of felt like we were cramming for a huge test or writing a group term paper—but the process was so much more enjoyable because we had each other around to take the pressure off.
Another thing we learned—writing a proposal is a little like taking the LSATs or SATs. It seems hugely daunting before you sit down to do it, but if you read a few how-guides, figure out what the people reviewing your work are looking for, it’s actually not as scary as it might seem.
Finally—anybody can write a proposal. And it’s amazing how many people you’ll find to help if you just start asking around—talk to friends, write to authors you admire, attend writing workshops. Plus, there is a tremendous number of resources online. You can sign up for an online class at Mediabistro.com to learn exactly how to write a proposal with the help of a professional. Look for agents in places such as publishersmarketplace.com.
How many queries and proposals did you have to send in order to sell your story?
We met with about five agents before we found one who “got” our quirky personalities and understood The Lost Girls’ vision. Once we signed on with an agent, he pitched it around to 18 different publishers, casting a wide net to garnet as many responses as possible. We ended up meeting with six publishers, and finally signed on with one.
Your priority should be to find the right agent—a person who you could imagine working with for years—because he or she will do most of the legwork for you. The agent will guide you toward a publisher who understands your project and agrees on how you want to market the book. We went with HarperCollins because they shared our vision for writing The Lost Girls as a memoir. Other houses wanted us to turn TLG into a how-to tale or guidebook—a setup we didn’t feel as passionate about.
Along the way, we also learned that a winning book proposal has to have a really strong sample chapter. Initially, we’d created an extensive proposal, but decided on blog entries to serve as examples of our writing. Most publishers wouldn’t even look at the proposal until we went back and penned a really solid sample chapter so they could get a sense of our voice and how it might work as a full-length book. It was an important section, because it demonstrated that we could blend our voices in a way that isn’t shown on the blog.
Is it true that The Lost Girls may become a movie?
Yes! Almost as soon as our agent had sold the book rights to The Lost Girls, he worked with the agency’s Hollywood arm to sell the movie rights as well. We knew he might do this at some point, but had no idea that it could happen so quickly.
Warner Brothers optioned to buy the movie, which basically means they have rights to The Lost Girls idea for 18 months. At 18 months they decide whether they want to keep the rights and move forward with a screenplay and producing a movie, or they can give us back the rights and we can try to resell them to another studio.
We feel that the success of films like Sex and the City and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants helped convince studios that movies about friendship (and lead by strong, likeable female characters) can do well at the box office.
Fingers crossed it’s a go!
Where do you find your “Lost Girl of the Week” for your blog?
They generally find us! We started that online feature to turn the spotlight on inspiring women we’d met on the road, or a reader with a compelling story about why she left to travel, and what she learned along the way. And since we know that women aren’t the only ones hitting the road to gain insight, we’ll occasionally feature the tale of a particularly cool Lost Guy.
We fully recognize that getting Lost isn’t a concept that applies just to us. There are young adventurers roaming every pocket of the globe and travelers who have left behind everything comforting and familiar in order to better understand themselves and the world at large. We love reading about their stories, and sharing as many of them possible on our blog—so write and let us know what you’re up to!
What are each of you up to now?
Despite our passion for full-time vagabonding, the three of us accepted desk jobs in order to restock our bank accounts (boring, but necessary!). Amanda is a nutrition editor at a health magazine, Jen does integrated marketing for an independent film/television channel, and Holly now taste-tests chocolates all day for a major candy manufacturer (well, that’s her dream job…she’s actually a freelance writer and editor for several national publications).
Recently, both Jen and Amanda approached their individual bosses about the possibility of going part time in order to focus more attention on book writing. And to their shock—both supervisors agreed to the arrangement! We’ve realized that if you put in the time and hard work to cultivate a successful career, your company/boss is generally more willing to allow time off to travel, or to rearrange your schedule to accommodate special project.
Now, all three of us spend our Fridays together at a coffee shop in Union Square, so we can make the task of book writing a collaborate process—and a fun one, at that.
Are you living in Manhattan?
Yes, Amanda and Jen both live in the Lower East Side, and Holly lives in Brooklyn.
Are you working on the book full-time or do you also have other jobs?
See question above. While we’ve received the first third of our advance (and split it by three!) we realized that we didn’t quite have enough left to quit our day jobs entirely.
Working a few days a week puts enough into our bank accounts to pay for rent and lots of caffeinated beverages while we’re writing the book.
Do you still crave a life on the road?
Absolutely. After living out of a backpack for a year, we found that we craved the stability and comforts of home. But now that we’ve been back in NYC for a while, all three of us find that we miss the freedom and ever-changing nature of life of the road.
Travel brought us rewards in the form of new friends, discoveries, and cultural experiences. It’s kind of fun never knowing where the day will take you, and we can’t wait until our next adventure.
Are there any trips in the works?
When we finished our year-long trip, we vowed to take a Lost Girls Getaway together once a year for the rest of lives. Since returning, we’ve planned a few weekend excursions together in the United States, and have traveled independently to Antarctica, Ecuador and the Bahamas. For the next six months, we’ll be staying close to home in order to write and promote the book. Once we finish the first draft of the memoir in January ’09, we’re planning to return to Argentina, the country that inspired our around-the-world adventure.
Kelsey Timmerman, of Where Am I Wearing? fame has been featured on Vagablogging a time or two before. Now, he has a new book scheduled to be published on December 1 (available for pre-order on Amazon), a new wife, and a baby on the way. Despite his busy schedule, Vagablogging was able to track him down for a few questions.
How is the book publishing process coming along?
Nicely. So far there have been surprisingly few glitches. I’m not sure what I expected.
As a first-time author it really helps to have people walking you through the process step by step. What’s cool is that so many people jump on board behind your idea. I have an editor, assistant editor, agent, marketing guru, publicity guru, production guru, copy editor, etc., and we are all working to get the story out about the people that make our clothes. It’s a lot of fun.
Is the process of writing and publishing a book different than you expected or surprising in some way?
It’s different in that I never knew I could write a book so fast. Before Wiley bought my book, they asked if I could have it done by mid-April so they could publish it in the fall of ‘08. It was January.
To myself: Is 3.5 months enough time to write a book? What if something goes wrong? What if that something is my brain?
To Wiley: Only one book? Sure, I can have it to you by mid-April. No problem.
I had written the first chapter already, which was included with my book proposal, but I still had to write the remaining 3/4ths. It’s amazing how much you can get done if you put in 3 to 7, 8-hour days per week.
It helped having major motivation.
In the book I meet the people who made my clothes and I learn about their lives. If they hadn’t opened-up to me, there wouldn’t be a book. I feel that I kind of owe them to tell their stories to as many people as possible. That’s motivation #1.
Motivation #2 is the book contract. I think they haul authors who can’t meet their obligations away to a labor camp to write instruction manuals for IKEA (if not the author themselves, at the very least, their career).
What advice would you give to a traveler who wants to publish a book?
Love to write as much if not more than you love to travel. I used to be a traveler that wrote, now I’m a writer that travels. There’s a big difference. I don’t book tickets to destinations, I book tickets to (what I hope to be) stories that will grab me, slap me in the face and scream, “Tell me! Tell me!”
In a way, writing has kind of ruined my traveling. If I go a day or two without uncovering a bit more of the story I’m after or if I spend all day in a bungalow swinging in a hammock, I go nuts.
The hakuna matata, living-on-island-time lifestyle that I had on my early trips is gone. To write a book, sooner or later, I think this line has to be crossed.
Write for an audience. In order to get your book published you have to write something that a host of someone-else’s thinks an even larger pool of someone-else’s will be interested in reading. That’s not an easy something to accomplish. Write for your local paper or on your blog or wherever, just write to be read. By writing for an audience you’ll hold yourself to a higher standard.
Go to writer’s conferences and make contacts. I’ve only been to a few, but all of my “breaks” (first story in nationally recognized publication, first major assignment, and landing my agent) have resulted from writer’s conferences.
Be completely indifferent to rejection. When I submit something I make sure that it’s my best work, but once it is out of my hands, I don’t expect anything to come of it. I call this being cautiously pessimistic. I have stacks of paper rejections and megabytes worth of email rejections.
Don’t do it for the money. I do it because I love telling stories. I’ve always had other work and still do. If I would have taken a year off to make a go at the writing thing back when I dubbed it my career of choice six years ago, I probably would have said “screw it” a long time ago.
Patience is required.
And most importantly, don’t put too much value in other people’s advice.
How did you get an agent and a book deal?
Agent:
I met my agent, Caren, at a writing conference in Indiana . I sat at a table with agent-hungry writers and asked her, “I have a couple of agents interested in my book and I’m not sure what to do. Any thoughts?” To which the agent-hungry writers rolled their eyes and said a version of “Oh, you poor thing.”
Yes, it was a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. Caren asked me what my book was and she said something like, “There aren’t that many original ideas out there, but this is one.”
She had me at “original.” A few weeks later I sent her my book proposal, she liked it, and offered me representation.
Book Deal:
Caren should get much of the credit for this. She helped tweak my proposal and then sent it to 20 or so publishers. As it turned out Wiley was re-releasing Travels of a T-shirt by Pietra Rivoli, in which the author follows her T-shirt from Texas cotton field to Chinese factory to Florida T-shirt shop, and my book that focuses less on the economics and politics and more on the people and lives of the garment industry would make a nice (step-) sister to Rivoli’s. Ironically, when I first had the idea of Where am I Wearing? and started vetting the idea, Travels of a T-shirt was the first place I turned.
Long story short: Right time. Right editor. Right publisher.
What is the next step in this process?
I turned over my most recent version of the manuscript last month and I’m waiting to hear back from the copy editor. Hopefully it isn’t too mistake-ridden. After that I guess the next stage of the book will be talking about it. Until then, I’ve got another book idea that I’m raring to get started on.
Congratulations on expecting a child! What would you like your child to learn from your writing?
Wow! That’s a tough question.
I heard on the radio the other day that Randy Pausch of “Last Lecture” fame died. In his last lecture he mentions brick walls: “The brick walls are there for a reason. Right? The brick walls are not there to keep us out, the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.” In general, that seems to be pretty awesome advice.
Mostly, I would tell him or her, “When I was 20, looking back to when I was 15 I saw how foolish I was. Now that I’m 30 I see how foolish I was when I was 20. So if you really want some wise advice, check back in about 60 years.”
Gary Buslik once accidentally urinated on the infamous “Butcher of Uganda” Idi Amin in the Caribbean. Thankfully, he survived the encounter and can now enthrall us with his exploits in his new book A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it’s Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen.
It seems there isn’t a Caribbean adventure Buslik hasn’t discovered, from receiving a dinner invitation from the late Princess Diana, to witnessing a cockfight, to his nervous attempts to smuggle Cuban cigars through United States customs (he only succeeded thanks to his wife). One thing is certain: his time in the Caribbean is never dull.
Vagablogging asked him a few questions about his sojourns:
In Napoleon’s Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped
The Marquis de Sade had always fancied himself a man of letters, and the first manuscript he intended for publication was his pompously titled Voyage in Italy, or a Critical, Historical and Philosophical Dissertation on the Cities of Florence, Rome and Naples, 1775-6 — an account of his experiences in Italy while on the run from the police under the assumed name ‘Comte de Mazan, Colonel in the French Army.’ Written on the journey and his return to France, the work falls easily within the formulaic (and today excruciatingly tedious) genre of gentlemanly travel memoirs of the eighteenth century. Filled with descriptions of architecture and artworks, and erudite references to Dante and Petrarch, the book is distinguished from dozens of others only by its unusually eclectic scope, which includes long diatribes on religion and local social customs. Sade was particularly offended at the Italians’ lax attitude to marriage, which he felt involved a shameful lack of affection. He hired an illustrator in Naples to illustrate his humble opus, but became distracted from its completion when he was arrested and never pursued its final publication. (It was eventually rediscovered in Paris and released in 1995.)
Instead, while languishing in the Bastille, Sade went over his notes from the Italy trip and culled the more sordid material for the first draft of his porn novel Juliette. The research proved fertile: Sade has his perverted heroine travel the same route through Italy as in his travel book, visit the same museums, and stay in the same inns, with less than edifying results. For example, Voyage d’Italie had included a visit to Florence’s Uffizi galleries, with a clinical report of a celebrated ancient sculture, The Hermaphrodite. In Juliette, the androgynous image inspires the heroine to flights of erotic fancy, as she admires ‘the most beautiful ass in the world…’ while her male companion assures her that ‘he once fucked such a creature, and there is no more delicious pleasure on earth.’ Other picturesque Italian settings became the settings for Juliette’s outrageous orgies and criminal acts. Sade remained a dutiful tourist: in his critical work Ideas on the Novel, he insisted that authors must do their on-site research. ‘I will not forgive you any improbable customs, or any mistake in costume, or even less, a mistake in geography…’
For more information on Tony Perrottet’s book, which includes all manner of curious historical trivia, check out his author website — or if you live in New York, head to his reading tonight at Lolita Bar, 226 Broome Street, from 6-9 pm.
It took me a year of traveling and living abroad to buy this fantastic book. When I first read Vagabonding, it gave me the push I needed to quit my job. Now I’ve read 4-Hour Work Week, just at the time when I’m debating next steps: stay on the road or get a “real” job, and it couldn’t have come to me at a better time. It’s given me the encouragment to continue living the life I want to (by not having to worry about $) and by giving me a completely valid and achieveble way to make that happen.
For those not familiar with the book: it inspires you to be part of the “new rich” who work 4-hours a week, are independent of location, and earn enough money to do whatever they want to, e.g. travel the world, speak Chinese, etc.
It shatters the notion of the conventional rich, who slog their whole life to earn mountains of money, only to retire old and unfit to do anything they wanted to. A BMW is bought with their hard-earned money, the rest of which stays in the bank as the owner wiles away his retirement vegetating and getting fat on some beach, on the road to ultimate boredom.
The book taps into the fact that life is about doing what excites you. Not when you are 60, but now, when you are young and able. It’s a step-by-step guide to help you make it happen, validated by the author (Timothy Ferriss) who has done it at 30.
The topics covered include: how to take mini-retirements, outsourcing your life, finding your muse, putting your business on autopilot, and time management suggestions. It’s also a treasure of online resources, inspirational quotes from famous people, and personal challenges to help you work towards achieving your goals.
For updates and regular advice, check out Ferriss’s website/bloghttp://www.fourhourworkweek.com/.
As you read this, I’ll probably be sitting in the sun at a cafe in Prague (unless it decides to pour heavily!). Yes, I’m on a short though long needed break from Madrid and my computer!
A friend asked me what book I’ll be taking for the flight; I’ve just started reading Jack Keroauc’s On The Road (no, I haven’t read it before so shoot me), that’s what I plan to have in my bag if I haven’t finished it before — which is possible — I started it yesterday and have been hooked.
Otherwise, I’ve stopped taking books for trips. I used to buy easy reads just for flights and lazy days; but lately all my trips have been so short and my brain has been overloaded pre-departure, so for the last year or so I’ve been resorting to Time Magazine, the Economist or even OK! magazine (yes, yikes!) for my in-flight entertainment. I find the short snippets they write easy to read and the variety helps me stay alert for longer periods of time when in the air.
The last few books I read on flights were: Lonely Planet’s “Tales From Nowhere“, Traveler’s Tales “Hyenas Laughed At Me And Now I Know Why” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter Of Maladies.
That’s it for me: short stories or magazines. What do you read on flights?
I’ve never been one of those uptight literary types who thinks that you have to have actually read a book in order to recommend it to others. So I feel no trepidation in suggesting Eric Weiner’s new travelogue-slash-memoir The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. The premise of the book is simple but intriguing– here is Amazon’s description:
Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author’s case, moments of “un-unhappiness.” The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Singapore benefit psychologically by having their options limited by the government? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.
In the imaginary Netflix queue of books-that-I’m-planning-to-read, this one has just jumped to the top. By the way, why has no one started a Netflix for books? This question, and many more, I’ll leave for another day.
For more on The Geography of Bliss, check out a review or two.
Travelers Tales recently released a great new anthology, Encounters With the Middle East, which is based on a simple (yet very worthy) premise: To humanize the people behind the news headlines in a turbulent and misunderstood part of the world. “A dizzying amount of media coverage bombards us from the Middle East,” editors Jim Bowman and Nesreen Khashan write in the introduction, “yet little filters through about the experiences of ordinary people. Encounters with the Middle East tells their stories through interactions with 30 writers who go beyond the usual reporting to reveal the simple and poignant ways that life goes on.”
My Jordan-based essay “Dancing at the Blood Festival” is featured in the collection, which also includes essays from all corners of the Middle East from writers such as Jeff Greenwald, Murad Kalam, and Michel Moushabeck. In the opening pages, Bowman and Khashan point out the importance of engaged travel reportage in that part of the world:
When we don’t connect people to the greater global scheme that includes us, we consign ourselves to the images presented on television. In that way, we become myopic and abandon all the moments that represent the complexity of lives in the Middle East. While those experiences remain hidden from our view, we remain deficient by failing to see them. When we are unaware of other possibilities, how then can we imagine solutions to the global challenges that face us?
More information about the book can be found here.
