For those who haven’t seen this already, there is a great interview with Tim Leffel done by our friends at Brave New Traveler.

With everything under the sun moving online at an incredibly fast pace, the future of travel-writing on the Internet is a hot topic. I personally think that just for the pace at which content needs to be refreshed on line for it to remain valid, means a all sorts of new opportunities for travel-writers wanting to break into the market. You just need to know where to look and what to expect, depending on what you want to write. With the hundreds of already existing travel sites and dozens of new ones sprouting up every day, you also need to understand that equation online; Leffel addresses all of this.

He talks about the differences between the success of large corporate travel sites and small alternative ones, working for online publications (“page view whores” or not!) and paying online travel-writers.

Tim Patterson (the interviewer) has asked some great questions and Leffel answers them objectively but with enough personal insight that comes from his experience in the industry; for instance he says:”…the travel publications that pay the most tend to be the ones most resembling fluff…” and that “there just isn’t a big market for thoughtful, enlightening travel prose that really explores places and people in depth, especially if it encourages independent budget travel.”

The interview is relevant to everyone remotely interested in travel-writing. A must read!

2 comments

  1. It would be really interesting to hear some thoughts from other writers as to what they think about the revenue share model as opposed to one-off payments.

    Is this debate going on somewhere that I could find online?

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