Travel writing

So you want to be a travel writer? It sounds like a dream job: free vacations to exotic far-off lands, a fat corporate credit card for paying all your expenses, a big paycheck as reward and your name on the spine of books at every airport in the world. Another advantage is that much of the work can be done as a digital nomad; you write on your laptop in a café in some interesting place and submit the work over the Internet.

Alas, many others think so too, making travel writing one of the most brutally competitive and poorly paid professions around: an accepted and published two-page article in an average publication may net you around US$150. Now figure out how many you'll need to sell to make minimum wage, and you'll realize that very few people can scrape together a living from it, much less get rich, and it's difficult to even get your foot in the door with so many others vying for the same jobs.

Social media have provided amateur travel writers and bloggers with an audience; those who assemble unusually many readers can get monetization, but for most people it remains a hobby.