Niche Writing Markets: Travel Guidebooks
Writing travel guidebooks can be one of the most difficult industries to break into. Not only are there too many such products already, they’re going after a largely finite number of potential customers. Regardless, they’re one of the most fun types of travel books to write, apart from being particularly lucrative if you luck out.
If you wish to write travel guidebooks today, it’s a good idea to steer clear of the common markets (i.e. countries and large cities), since those are dominated by big names such as Frommers and Lonely Planet. A potential focus, if you want to succeed, are smaller, regional markets, especially those still on the verge of emerging as popular tourist destinations.
Fact is, nobody writes about a lot of places that don’t regularly get featured in travel magazines. If you have some decent writing skills (plus a good proofreading software) and spare time to get acquainted with the area, you can probably produce a useful guidebook for it.
Like other guidebooks, you will want to get into the essential hotspots in the particular location you’re writing about. Since it’s not as popular as most locales that are written about, you’ll have to be very creative when finding areas of interest, making it particularly challenging. On the flipside, however, its relative “newness” gives you free reign to design your guidebook the way you see fit.
One area to look towards is self-publishing, especially if interest in that particular market isn’t all that great to begin with. Provided you have the necessary entrepreneurial skills (including some marketing wits and chutzpah), you might be able to pull out a decent income from it.