Travel Writing Career

Travel Writing Corner: Interview with Anja Mutić

Welcome to the first installment of my brand new  Travel Writing Corner ! Every other week, I’ll be presenting interviews with accomplished travel writers and sharing travel writing tips here. This week, I’m thrilled to present one of my favorite travel writers,  Anja Mutić . A native of Croatia and an adopted New Yorker, the accomplished writer has penned a dozen guidebooks, hosted several Lonely Planet travel videos and written for The Washington Post, Lonely Planet, Time Out, New York Magazine.

I came to travel writing from the world of publishing. As I always joke, I did my time in the “editorial cell”. I was steadily climbing up the ladder for five years, following the editorial assistant-editorial coordinator-editor-senior editor-editorial director path, and then realized I needed to break free. Travel started to lure me and I had to get to the other side and hit the road myself, like the writers I was commissioning in my editorial role. By that time I already had a decent network of contacts in the travel guidebook/website business, which gave me the guts to go freelance. So I did, in 2004. Ever since then I’ve been a full-time freelance travel writer and never really looked back. I know my soul would have withered holding down an office job so I’ve been willing to put up with the challenges of freelancing.

I started off, strangely enough, in textbook publishing, then worked on Complete Idiot’s Guides for a while. All that happened in the five years I managed to stick to various office jobs in publishing. Ever since I remember though, I loved traveling and writing – they were my two main passions. When I realized I wanted to and could combine them into one, I felt like I found the key to happiness. In many ways, it really was that key for me, and still is. I think a lot of people never quite figure out what it is that would make them happy professionally and get stuck in jobs they don’t care for. It can be a vicious circle. So I feel truly lucky that I found my calling. It’s not all roses, of courses, but what is? I feel happy about the fact I am true to myself and my passions and haven’t had to compromise my dreams in the process. In fact, I’ve created a profession out of a dream. Recently, I’ve also been thinking that the loss of my former country – Yugoslavia – led to this intense wanderlust which in turn led to travel writing as my chosen profession. It’s almost as if I’ve been wandering the world ever since my country fell apart twenty years ago to find the home that I lost.

A Travel Writing 2.0 Interview with Tom Brosnahan | Travel Writing 2.0

How did you “break in” to travel writing? What have been the keys to your success?

I wrote a guidebook on spec, and Frommer’s published it. Success: hard work, and always keeping the traveler’s needs in mind.

Where do you see your career as a travel writer being three years from now? How will your income mix change and what are you doing to adapt to the changing media landscape?

My income will continue to come from electronic (not paper) publishing. I will publish more work on mobile devices.

Knowing what you do now, if you were starting from scratch today to become established as a travel writer, what would you do?

Concentrate on websites, mobile apps and ebooks.

What advice would you give to someone near and dear to you who wanted to become a travel writer—assuming they had zero credits to their name. (Besides “Don’t do it”?)

Don’t write what you want to write (like a blog), figure out what millions of people want to read, and write that. The world doesn’t care about you. It cares about what it wants to know.

You’re one of the best examples out there of someone who has parlayed his knowledge as a guidebook writer into owning a niche in the online world. What advice would you give for guidebook authors who want to follow in your footsteps?

Know your audience. If you were successful with guidebooks, you already know how to satisfy them. You run what is by most accounts the most popular travel site for Turkey, but you also cover your own back yard in New England. What do you do differently in running these two websites?

Every destination is different, requiring a different approach, because the audiences and their needs are different—same as it was with guidebooks.

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Tom Brosnahan went to Turkey in 1967 as a US Peace Corps Volunteer to teach English. He wrote Frommer’s Turkey on $5 a Day (1972) as a Peace Corps project. In 1975 he returned to Istanbul on a Fulbright fellowship to study Ottoman history and language, expecting to be a university professor.  Instead, he became a travel writer, guidebook author, photographer and consultant on travel information.