Want to keep a record of your travels? Here are our tips for publishing a book about your travels!
When we go on vacation, whether in France or abroad, we take pictures of monuments and their colors, unforgettable encounters and dreamy landscapes, thinking we’re immortalizing an unforgettable moment. As soon as we get home, we often copy these photos onto our hard drive, share them with friends and family, and time flies, never to return to these snapshots. To avoid having to search for folders in the computer, or forgetting about them altogether, here’s an interesting alternative: publish a book of your travels!
Whether you want to make a photo album associated with a travel story, your impressions and anecdotes about a region, a population, a group of people, whether you want to print a travel blog as a book or advise the general public on the best tricks for traveling to such and such a place, your travel journal will reach an audience if it’s well done, from creation to promotion. Here’s how.
Why publish a book of his travels?
First of all, why write a book about his travels? Isn’t that a narcissistic idea?
Well, no, there are many advantages to embarking on such a venture. For one thing, it’s a way of recounting your impressions and stories from one or more trips. Selecting a set of snapshots and putting them together in the form of a photo album, and writing down your emotions and impressions, is a unique testimony that no writer – no matter how talented – will be able to write. For the good reason that every experience is unique to the person living it!
Publishing a travel diary or travel book is a great way to tell your stories: a bad experience (to warn the reader not to make the same mistake again), advice on how to avoid scams abroad, ideas for a new itinerary, tips on how to travel more cheaply or backpack, a guide to the best hotels and restaurants, etc. Anyone can choose their subject and publish a travel book. But how do you go about it, and how do you get published? Let’s just say right away that it certainly won’t be the traditional publishing houses (Gallimard, Albin Michel, Grasset, Actes Sud, etc.) that will grace the front cover of your book. You can, however, go the self-publishing route, or target alternative independent publishers, or use online book printers such as print24 to publish a travel diary in the form of a photo album.
How do I publish a travel diary?
Is your manuscript, complete with the best travel photos, ready to be sent out? Then begins a veritable marathon of publishing houses. But first, it’s important to note that there are six ways to publish a book in the publishing world:
- Self-publishing,
- Self-publishing,
- The « purchase order » contract,
- The « sales threshold » contract,
- The « underwriting » contract,
- Self-publishing.
We advise you to opt for self-publishing or self-publishing, if you can find a small alternative publishing house: Edilivre, for example. After a trip to Morocco, a safari in Kenya, a romantic trip to Tuscany? A birth or wedding to immortalize? To share beautiful photos and anecdotes with friends and family, consider self-publishing: there’s no editorial pressure, but you’ll have to cover the cost of printing and promotion yourself to publish a travel journal.
You also need to know how to use the following photo editing and retouching software: Word, WordPress, Book Wright, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Blurb, etc. Making your own travel book isn’t impossible, but you’ll need to manage the layout, printing and pricing to attract readers. In short, you’ll be the « marketing product manager » for your trip.
How much does it cost to publish your travel journal?
It’s very difficult to estimate the price of publishing a book about your travels, as several parameters need to be taken into account: the number of copies to be printed, the number of pages in black and white, the number of pages in color, the desired page format, the printing format (recto or recto/verso) and the type of binding and cover (soft, hard). The larger the travel book, the more it will be sold by the publisher, or – in the case of self-publishing – the more it will cost to print.
How do you promote your travel journal?
Then comes the fateful, most difficult stage: making your book known to a wider audience. Promoting your travel book, whether in digital or paper format, isn’t easy. To ensure your own communication, you forget your pen and become a salesman. The first thing to think about is the internet: on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Instagram, Pinterest, Tweeter, etc., you need to make your mark among readers looking for a good book to read. Literary fairs, literary competitions, word of mouth, canvassing in bookshops, joining a community of author-readers, creating a website and blog related to travel writing, are all levers for making yourself known.