23 April 2008

Armchair travel takes you to the strange, bizarre

An AAP report says that following the recent Lonely Planets controversy - when a writer was said to have made up large sections of three "backpacker bibles" books - it would be easy to believe that many travel books are fiction rather than non fiction.

But that sort of deceit's a rarity, say publishers, in a growing and popular market for travel narratives and memoirs.

Swimming with crocodiles, walking to Africa, working on an oil rig, riding motor bikes through South America.

What hasn't been done, and more importantly, what hasn't been written about?

When it comes to armchair travel publishing, the more bizarre the better.

It's almost as if every area of the world has already been covered by writers - or would-be writers - with readers keen to know about the latest adventure or strange destination.

And publishers don't seem to be worrying that writers of the genre will run out of ideas in the forthcoming future - their desks are laden with manuscripts.

Writers however must satisfy a much more sophisticated market - the majority of which are women.

With people travelling so much more they want to know about locations a lot more off the beaten track.

Even before Lonely Planet there were travel guides on most bookstore shelves, but first person travel writing - or travel narratives - really burst onto the scene around 10 years ago.

Nikki Christer, Deputy Publishing Director of Random House, says people have always written wonderful travel memoirs (think Marco Polo, Mark Twain, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Peter Moore) but it was Peter Mayle's book A Year in Provence which probably kicked off the latest wave.

"It's a growing market. The stranger the place, the better it seems," she says.

France and Italy have been done, but now it's eastern Europe and Russia that are hitting the mark.

A recent example is Me, Myself and Prague: An unreliable guide to Bohemia by Rachael Weiss, which, according to Allen and Unwin Publisher Jo Paul, also details the author's internal journey.

Paul says the genre is now much broader and has split into sub genres - with the more lighthearted younger male writers setting out to write travel narratives as opposed to the books known as travel memoirs pitched more at women about how travel changes a person.

Random House publishes about three to four such travel books a year in Australia, as well as distributing many from the UK and other countries, and there's a "very considerable market" for them.

Paul says Allen and Unwin commissions around six to 10 a year. And several other publishers also commission and distribute travel books.

On the writing Christer says: "You want to be able to relate to the books and imagine yourself into the space...a lot is how good the writing is."

And they can sell well. Holy Cow by Sarah MacDonald (which is about living in India) sold around 114,000, Almost French: A New Life in Paris by Sarah Turnbull sold around 240,000 and Salvation Creek, An Unexpected Life by Susan Duncan, which is about finding a new life in Pittwater, north of Sydney, hit the 80,000 mark.

Such books have spurned many copycats - or me too books - that are seldom as good as the ones they're modelled on.

With booksellers suffering fatigue with shelves groaning with books describing the "zany man in the village", publishers have to be more clever about how they pitch the latest tome, Paul says.

"Writers are trying to find different avenues to bring something new to the genre," Paul says. "It has to have a really strong hook...a fresh way of looking at the world... using the intimate to look at the universal."

This includes focusing on food or history or some other aspect of a place.

Christer says books that follow the footsteps of an earlier explorer or character are also still popular.

Good books do more than tell of the destinations, they also reflect on people's lives and their struggles.

"We want things to happen along the way," Christer says.

Readers also want stories about extreme adventure and dangerous trips.

A more recent take on the travel memoir is Slow Journey South by Paula Constant about walking from London to Africa, which she describes as very funny.

As she says, humour is everything.

Readers want to hope that the writer's journey and adventure might happen to them, so they imagine themselves in the same setup, she says.

Still it's hit and miss, with the odds five to one on what will work as compared to the duds.

"... they have to have that special something... it's hard to define, but you know it as soon as you read it," she says.

Literary agent with Curtis Brown, Pippa Masson, however, believes the growth internationally in travel books over the past six years may now be slowing.

This may be because travel is more accessible to people than it was 10 years ago, and they may no longer need to see the world through armchair travel.

Over the past five years there's also been a proliferation of books by ordinary people who have "come through" difficulties.

People had got sick of books about "my year in Umbria" so the tales got more gritty, she says.

She cites Paul Carter's books, especially Don't Tell Mum I Work On The Rigs, as an example of what readers are now looking for, with travel memoir evolving from straight travel narratives.

Another example is Brian Thacker's last book, Where's Wallis?, where he goes to places he knows absolutely nothing about.

She agrees crazy and bizarre stories do well.

But a warning from publishers to those scribblers who have a manuscript under the mattress about your last holiday: don't send it unless it is well written or tells you something new and exciting, or makes you think differently about yourself.

Christer says the ideal is that: "you're realising something at the end of the book...maybe you realise there's nowhere like home."

by: The Mole