Do you have an opinion on a travel-writing course?

By Bobbie Christmas

 

Q: Bobbie, do you have an opinion of the travel-writing courses offered in (name deleted to avoid impropriety)?

A: I don't have an opinion about the quality of the course because I haven't seen the contents or spoken with anyone who took the course, so my answer will be a little tainted by lack of knowledge. Frankly, though, I didn't like the promotional literature for the course. It spends thousands of words building a picture of a life of luxury visiting foreign places and getting paid for it. It describes how you can work from home without travel and earn a terrific income. It implies that you will become a completely successful travel writer and that it is a dream job. It gives "success" story after "success" story, but it never says you will have to work and you have to market yourself and you will have downtime when you have no assignments. It sets up a fantasy image--typical in every over-the-top direct-sales pitch--but it does little to explain the actual course.

Travel writers rarely live the life the course literature describes. Getting travel-writing assignments is as difficult getting any other kind of assignment, and few people get the rich assignments mentioned in the course literature. I consider the information misleading.

The information is vague in far too many places, too. For example, it says at "several critical junctures," you can send in your work for evaluation. It doesn't explain how many times you get your work evaluated and what the evaluation covers.

It says you can "get started for only $49." It does not say how much the entire course costs. It mentions  "additional chapters" that will be sent monthly, but it doesn't give the cost for future chapters, the number of chapters you must buy to complete the course, or the number of months it will take. I would not commit to anything without knowing the total cost and whether I would get feedback throughout the course. I went to the company Web site and found that the total course costs $274, but you can get a ten percent discount for paying in advance.

Instead of a highly pitched, overpriced course, you could glean sufficient information on travel writing from a book. I saw three current travel-writing books on www.BarnesandNoble.com priced between $12 and $15. Those prices are significantly lower than the $49 "introductory chapter" of the travel-writing course.

 

 

Bobbie Christmas, author of the valuable resource, Purge Your Prose of Problems and of Write In Style, and owner of Zebra Communications in metro Atlanta, edits and doctors books for publishing houses and individuals.

Do you have questions for Book Doctor Bobbie Christmas? E-mail them to Bobbie@zebraeditor.com or check her Web site at www.zebraeditor.com.