Photo: Rutger de Moddertukker

IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD YET, new FTC guidelines will be going into place beginning Dec. 1. These guidelines include, among other things, a mandate on disclosing any and all paid sponsorships or endorsements.

From the FTC Guide:

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. . . . Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

While many bloggers such as Marty Dickinson are bemoaning the impending regulations, some of us in the travel writing are looking at them as a step in the right direction. With full disclosure now being federally mandated, there seems to be more of a chance that current industry policies forbidding travel writers from taking comps will be revised, giving travel writers more freedom in looking for / accepting stories, and perhaps more to the point, earning a living.

How you answer Dickinson’s question about the regulations–”why would it be important for people to know that you’re getting a commission payment for a referral?” will probably determine how you feel overall about the issue.

The point is less about money and more about about transparency. After looking at this issue (or at least trying to) from all sides, I came up with a manifesto of sorts called Material Transparency.

I argued that bloggers and writers not only embrace the impending FTC regulations on material connections, but expand the concept into an overall aesthetic of transparency in their other connections, their crew, their companies, all as a way of defining and helping exhibit / promote their personal brand.

In what ways, if any, will these upcoming regulations affect your work as a writer or blogger? Please let us know in the comments below.

Photo by Kim Grant for Hawaii: An Explorer’s Guide.

I come at this issue from two different sides of two different coins: as a 25-year veteran travel writer and as an Acquisitions Editor for a national print publisher and iPhone travel app company. Every day, in many ways, I massage my brand and am pitched by other writers who have (or have not) polished their image with varying degrees of efficacy.

1. Be clear, simple and consistent in your message.

Whether you are posting on Facebook, engaging with other bloggers, spreading snippets via Twitter (which I confess to not pursuing much), writing a guidebook or speaking informally to colleagues at a professional gathering, decide who you are and stick to the message. Are you a fun-loving raconteur with a lively nightlife? Are you a resort reviewer who knows the value of a $650 a night room at Amangiri? Both are fine, but it’s tough to convince the world that you do both well. I’ll probably hire both writers at some point, but these two hypothetical people are not right for the same job.

Now in its 8th Edition. Buy it here.

2. Narrow your scope of expertise.

Skimming the surface of many topics, while perhaps personally exciting, might brand you a dilettante in all those topics – which is fine if “dilettante” is your brand. I became an expert on Boston, New England and Cape Cod, and then I moved outward into regions I frequented and was passionate about: the Southwest, Hawaii and Florida. By spreading myself too thinly, though, I stopped having time to exploit my expertise in all those areas. By cutting back to a few areas, I created the space to pitch myself again.

3. Write a book and then parlay it.

Think of yourself as an entrepreneur rather than simply as a travel writer. It probably won’t pay well, but the book will brand you as an expert and provide a launching pad for better paying and (potentially) more prestigious work. You probably won’t be an expert before you write it (even though you will have to pitch yourself as one), but you will be afterwards. For about six months, you will be the expert on that topic. Exploit the heck out of that window of opportunity while it is open. It will open other doors and windows; keep leaping from one to another before they close.

4. Not every gig is a perfect fit.

The Universe abhors a vacuum, but don’t seize everything that falls into your lap. If you don’t leave time and space for the right project, it won’t appear. (I know, that’s a very “Northern California” concept, and you know what I mean because Northern California has a very strong brand.) Be like Northern California; be instantly known. There isn’t time for anything but an instant, strong impression.

5. Question yourself unrelentingly.

Who and what, professionally, are you? (Skip the metaphysical answers for this exercise.) Make and continually scrutinize a 12-month plan. Be patient and persistent. Assess which jobs are furthering your path and which are not.

Craft your brand icon.

6. Image matters.

Once you build it, guard your reputation. Of course I would say this: I’m also a photographer. But presentation matters: from design and font selection to paperweight and PDF headings; from associations with colleagues and organizations to your revolving weekly update on LinkedIn. It all matters; build it with care and attention. On Facebook, I belong to the Change This fan page but not The Soup. There’s nothing wrong with The Soup, but the signal it sends doesn’t fit my brand as a travel writer who works in new and social media.

7a. Don’t necessarily use every means of communication available.

Choose your weapon(s) wisely and push each to the hilt. Develop wide circles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media outlets. If you don’t have time to maintain them all, pick one or two. Post frequently to your own blog; keep your web site up to date with clippings, radio interviews and upcoming appearances. (Yes, this presumes you have those to begin with.) Build an author page on Amazon; get friends and colleagues to comment on your books and blog posts. Give them talking points to stay on message – your message.

7b. Don’t ignore low-tech methods.

Print and distribute thousands of postcards promoting your books and website(s). Wear out some proverbial shoe leather by going door-to-door – virtually or literally. Print a dramatic business card that clients will keep for one day instead of one hour.

8. Be passionate about what you do.

People will notice when you are passionate, when your ideas almost sell themselves. How many people have you talked to today who absolutely love what they’re doing? We remember the ones who do (and I hire them). I love what I do, and I prefer to work with like-minded people. It’s a privilege to say this and mean it. It takes some luck – and more work – to get to this place.

9. Ultimately, you must produce a superior product.

No amount of branding will render you immune to what’s important: you must be an exceptional writer who knows how to research, organize and communicate your thoughts, provide value to your editor and reader, deliver on time and be pleasant to work with.

10. Use All the Great Resources You Can.

Here are a few to get you started:

a) TomPeters! – The Brand You
b) socialmediatoday, including “A Framework For Branding Through Social Media”
c) ChangeThis
d) Seth Godin’s Blog
e) SEO Traffic Spider
f) HubSpot Marketing Resources
g) “25 Social Media Sites For Entrepreneurs”

Community Connection

For more notes on how to make it as a travel writer, check 6 Tips for Making the Most of a Writers’ Group, Video Portrait of a Travel Writer, Do Freebies Undermine Honesty in Travel Writing?, How are Writing Conferences Relevant to Travel Writers?, and The Importance of Connecting with Travel Writing though History.

Other branding ideas? Comments? Give us a shout below.

Photo mark sebastian

Most of my ideas for stories, videos, articles and projects-yet-to-be come when I am either on my bike or running.
It is precisely when I am not at the computer, trying to think and be creative that I am able, with the help of my 3 ingredients, to get real creative work done.

MUSIC: Listening to music puts a tempo to my footfall and my racing heart. The melodies distract my thinking mind, lulling me into deeper channels of intuition and non-thought. Music is often a story and keeps me more focused on the moment at hand by active listening.

EXERCISE: Exercise is a key component in how creative and good I feel. I go to the gym several nights a week but I prefer riding my bike around the city to plodding on a treadmill. As I ride the landscape slips past me. Thousands of people cross my path. Infinite scenarios play themselves out. The physical toil of exercise allows my mind to exist in a simpler, more watchful state. I can release the tension that hours at the computer can build up and in this state my most productive thinking is accomplished.

NATURE: Communing with nature, whether it is a walk in the woods or on a mountain summit, lets my creative spirit free. But living in downtown Seattle I seldom have the option of wandering through unspoiled wilderness. That’s fine. I take the term urban jungle to heart and let the city be my forest. When I consider Man as an act of Nature then the city, with all of its pavement and neon, becomes a shifting natural landscape. Jogging through town I can watch the tides of human life ebb and flow as businessmen and transients share the sidewalk.

I know what works for me. When I am in a steady rhythm is when my mind flies beyond me and lives a imaginative life of its own. I reminisce, I day dream and start to mull concepts over in my mind. But something tells me these ingredients can be utilized by anyone who needs a creative kick in the pants.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What are your ingredients for creativity? Share your tricks in the comments below.

As part of our efforts to celebrate and promote travel writing, we’ve launched a new video series offering a behind the scenes look at the life of travel writers.

Humbly shot and directed by myself, the first profile features the gonzo travel writer and tv host Robin Esrock, wandering around his current hometown of Vancouver, BC.

The idea is to offer a realistic take on what it means to be a travel writer: the good, the bad, and sometimes…the ugly. Each profile is presented on behalf of MatadorU, where travel writers of all levels can advance their careers.

I hope you enjoy the video (and feel free to share far and wide!)

Do you know a travel writer who should be featured in an upcoming profile? Share your ideas in the comments!

Photo .:: LINUZ ::.

IN NORTHEAST LAOS, on one lane roads, we swoop through foggy forests. The driver of the bus strains forward, breathing a little stain of fog on the windshield. Outside the rain falls on sullen cattle.

The bus pulls aside and while the men step out to liberate their bladders, the glint off the barrel of a large machine gun catches my eye. The weapon is protruding from a young man’s denim coat. I stand and stretch, only now I have an electric current running from my toes to my testicles.

The kid, and he looks all of 16, seems to be trying to be inconspicuous. No one seems to heed him or his alarming semi-automatic secret.

We board the bus and the driver gives the machine gun kid a little nod as he takes his seat among us. My eyes won’t leave the muzzle or the angular protrusion of denim or the way he holds the barrel beside his leg. From the size of the gun it could well be an AK-47.

This is my third day in Laos.

The bus is full of sedate travelers surely carrying cash and cameras and all kinds of expensive gadgetry. We are sitting ducks. Oh God please don’t let me be the guy with a black sack over his face holding a newspaper for the unsteady camera. Of nearly equal gravity is the thought of the machine gun kid tearing through my bag to discover $2,000 cash.

We stop at a string of noodle huts waiting for us. Among the scraggle of hungry tourists there is a big lad in a tee shirt that says Vancouver. I need an ally in this unfortunate knowledge.

“Yeah, right there, um, twelve o’clock. He’s packing heat big time dude! And he doesn’t want anyone to see! See?”

“Holy shit, no way man. Look at him, he’s gonna rob the bus, you hear about it all the time. Why else would he be hiding a machine gun? What do we do?”

“Well I don’t know about you but I’m going to the bathroom and getting creative with my dough. I’m carrying, like, a lot of cash.”

In the bathroom stall I rip into my money stash. I duct tape some bills to the inside cover of my portable Steinbeck, making it a $400 edition. I tear into my travel pillow and stuff a few hundred in. The biggest chunk of change is crammed under my junk. I button my jeans and dozens of Vietnamese notes crunch in my underwear. If this is a full on strip-search-jungle-shake-and-bake, well, at least the money they steal will have touched my nuts.

For the next two hours the kid looks relaxed enough. I am sweating through my shirt. The Canadian fingers a serrated plastic knife.

Finally, the machine gun kid slowly stands and turns toward me. He steps forward, shifts his gun and strides quickly to the front of he bus. The bus slows down, but doesn’t stop as he hops off and waves us on. The driver smiles and slams the bus into gear. A queer disappointment contends with my relief. I was so set on being robbed that I’m…a little bummed.

The big Canadian leans close, “I have a plastic picnic knife.”

“You’re a better man than I. I have a fistful of dollars chaffing my naughty bits.”

“Oh, me too. Of course.”

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Have you had a close call? Or at least worked yourself up into thinking you were having a close call?! I would love to hear your stories of danger, real or perceived, on the road.

Please send to josh at matadornetworkdotcom.

Photo by a song under the sugar sugar

YOU DON’T MISTAKE travel writing for punk rock. Most of it just isn’t loud or raw enough. Publicly, at readings, travel writers tend to restrain themselves from smashing the podium or lighting shit on fire.

The process of creation itself (and the audience’s reception) is generally an ass-to-chair kind of deal, often with food and / or beverages nearby [writing these lines with a tomato and cheese sandwich + coffee in a cafe in Santiago].

Finally, as Chuck Klosterman observed, anytime punk rock tries to explain or justify itself, it’s finished. By contrast, most travel writing seems to be, at least on some level, a way for the writer to explain or justify whatever trip he or she is on. That’s the basic gig.

Still, I’d like to imagine a scenario where travel writing was 100% punk. Where you were all-out free to write anything about anyone or anyplace in any style you wanted, free to investigate and write the stories of what’s going on in say, the cruise ship industry, only from a deckhand, not a passenger’s point of view. Or with the Kalahari Bushmen. Or maybe the fucked up lady that lives right above you in your building.

The fact that we all actually have this freedom but so few of us choose to exercise it is partly a reflection, I’m guessing, on human nature (paraphrasing Saul Bellow: “We get as much truth as we have courage to ask,”) and part straight up bitch-slapping economics.

There appears to be no dearth of paying markets for stories that lend themselves to advertising, but far fewer options (and certainly far less sustainable options) for writers going after stories on people and their relationship with place, which, to me anyway, is what travel writing is. As Jim Harrison wrote “How could we disappear into ourselves and forget our subject matter, the earth?”

Obviously I recognize the need for other kinds of writing (and have actually enjoyed having a copy down here of the Fodor’s Patagonia that Tim Patterson and I contributed to last year).

But most of all I’m interested in reading the stories people write not out of a need to accomplish or get paid but just out of a raw need to tell the story. And unless or until someone is out there writing / editing / and publishing their work in real time as they’re getting shot at in Iraq or patrolling the mountains in Afghanistan, I guess that’s as close to punk rock that we as travel writers can get.

15 Vital Matador Narratives

So all of this blathered, I asked around our crew what we should include in a list of travel stories published at Matador which are the most punk rock, the ones that seem to keep reverberating:

- 8:46am, 9/11 Manhattan

- Huayhuash: A Convergence of Change and Resilience

- Notes on Los Pitayeros

- My Chinese Clown

- Another End of the Road: (Still) Searching for Surf in Centroamerica

- Carnaval. Darkness.

- What would you give for your traveler’s moment?

- The Ringer

- Golden Trout

- My Hometown in 500 Words: Lagos

- Wrestling, Pig Skin, and Beer

- Birth of Layla Miller

- Growing up in East Germany

- Notes on Not Being Able to Pray at the Wailing Wall

- Hiking the Chacaltaya Glacier

Community Connection

What and who are you reading? Who is producing vital travel narratives right now–either famous or unknown?

Photo: vancouverfilmschool

WRITERS LOOKING to ramp up their knowledge, receive feedback on work, as well as share information and insight may find a writing conference is the way to go.

But for writers searching for a more consistent and supportive environment, a writers’ group may be a better fit.

I’ve been a member of a women writers’ group and facilitated a children writers’ group over the past few years and found that while certain topics and genres gain and lose popularity, the overall success and dynamics of a group ultimately depends on its members. To be a productive member in your writers’ group and to get the most out of your participation, I suggest the following:

1. Find a group that meets your needs. Don’t settle on a group just because it’s the first one you find. There are many different options both online and in-person, so take your time to find one that makes you feel comfortable and supported.

You should leave your writing group feeling energized and inspired to write. If you feel frustrated, upset or unmotivated, move on and find a different group.

2. Give in order to receive. Writers’ groups are places where everyone involved should benefit from the interaction. If you hope to receive feedback on your work, you need to provide feedback to others, and this means saying more than you like or dislike something.

Be specific by pointing out passages or sentences that stood out. Provide suggestions on resources you’ve used that may help others. The more you engage in the conversation, the more people will reciprocate that engagement by providing you with suggestions, resources, and feedback.

3. Provide constructive criticism, pointing out both strong points and areas for improvement. Nothing is more unproductive than a writers’ group where everyone says they love what everyone else has written. If you are concerned about providing feedback on areas for improvement, work your feedback into a criticism sandwich by providing constructive criticism between positive feedback and words of encouragement.

4. Be timely. If you are expected to deliver a critique on a piece, follow through on your commitment to do so. Don’t leave your fellow writers waiting. Time is scarce for everyone, so if you’ve promised someone that you’d take a look at their work by a certain date, make sure you keep your promise. You are much better off by under promising and over delivering rather than the other way around. If you don’t think you can follow through on a delivery date then don’t commit to one.

4. Come prepared to participate. Turn off your cell phone and have a pen and paper handy. In order to get the most out of your writers’ group, you need to engage completely in the topic. Listen when others are receiving feedback on their work; you may be able to apply some of what you hear to your writing. Take notes on the feedback you receive. Ask questions. Speak up if you have something to add to the conversation. If your group invites a special guest, take the time to introduce yourself and always have a few cards handy.

5. Make it a routine. Be accountable to yourself and others by attending writers’ group meetings on a routine basis. Schedule them into your busy day and consider attending meetings as part of your job as a writer. If you participate in an online group, login to forum discussions and check comment boards on a frequent basis. A writers’ group is only as strong as the people who are committed to them, so prove to yourself and your group members that you are serious about your writing by making a point to attend and be engaged each and every time you attend a meeting.

Community Connection

What experiences have you had with writers’ groups? Please let us know in the comments below.

Feature photo and photo above by the_toe_stubber.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a total beginner when it comes to photography. I have virtually no skills. I’m totally humbled when I see someone’s work like Trey Ratcliff or Matador’s own Lola Akinmade.

That being said, I feel like I do have an appreciation for form, composition, color, and a good idea of how to select an image for a story I’m writing or editing. Basically, I think like a writer. What I’m looking for are pictures that tell a story. This shot above is a good example. [Original photo link.]

In trying to learn more, I thought I’d share what I like about this picture, what its narrative elements are, and then hopefully people with more skill / knowledge can add their expertise.

1. The setting and the subject are both specific and universal.

Where is this photo taken? I’m not sure, but it’s obviously an urban environment. From the reflection in the glass it seems like the woman is in front of a store, which, if you look in the background, might be a sex shop?

What’s important is that she’s not just ‘anywhere’, but in a specific and immediately recognizable place. This is also a key tenet of good travel writing: no matter what the storyline, the place itself is always underpinning everything. You should get (and ideally, ‘feel’) where the characters are as soon as you start reading.

Similarly, the emotions conveyed are specific to this woman, to her style, but are also familiar and perceivable to anyone. The way she is sucking on her cigarette, the look in her eyes: all of it seems to exude lasciviousness, fearlessness (or maybe feigned fearlessness?), defiance. Because it is so universally recognizable it all invites our imagining a story.

2. Every element in the image is balanced to create an aesthetic unity.

From the colors (the warm red of her sweater and pink bra of the woman [mannequin?] behind her, the cooler blues and greens of the wall) to the way her face in the foreground balances with the woman’s body in the background, everything seems to reinforce the overall aesthetic.

Similarly with writing, the best stories seem to do everything at once. The description flows into the plot which flows into dialogue which flows into the narrator’s reflections. Everything is balanced.

3. Subtle details keep leading your eye around the picture.

Pictures that tell stories make you want to keep looking at them and imagining more. The more I look at this image, the more I notice things like:

• She has one ear covered and one exposed.
• You see almost none of her body in the picture, whereas the model in the background is almost all body but with no face.
• Her hair looks like it hasn’t been combed very well, and she wears no makeup or jewelry.

The best stories have subtle and unexpected details throughout (and especially at the beginning and ending) that keep us moving along and leading us in new directions, ideally, adding more depth each time we go back and read.

Community Connection

What elements do you find in pictures that tell stories? And how can you apply this knowledge to your own photography? Please let us know in the comments below.