Fund Your Travels By Writing A Travel Book

Are you looking for a quick and easy way to fund your travels? Are you thinking that writing a travel book might be the answer to giving you the money to explore the world?

In this article, I will be writing about how you could possibly be able to use writing to fund your journey. I’ll be writing this article from first-hand experience. After publishing a Travel book 5 years ago, I will be able to give you stats on how much I earnt, how many copies I sold and how I would be able to sell more in the future if I was to write another book.

I will give you advice, tips and tricks, and success and failure stories to warn you about writing your own travel book.

So let’s start with the question;

Can You Fund Your Travels By Writing A Travel Book?

This can simply be answered with a yes. Many people have done exactly this. But this would be very contradictory to my own experience. Even the people that have had a lot of success from becoming travel authors, they don’t use books as their only source of income.

Before You carry on reading this article you can watch me explain this exact subject on a YouTube Video.

But for you guys that don’t like the sound of my voice and would rather read and follow along in article format, I’ll continue.

A Great Example Of A Successful Travel Author

So if you are looking at inspiring to become a great travel author of the modern age. Matt Kepnes is a great place to start.

His book “How To Travel The World For $50 A Day (Affiliate link)” was a New York Times Bestseller. This means it sold over 5000 copies in one week. This is a great achievement by anyone standard. But this alone doesn’t help Matt travel the world (But probably could afford to). He has a successful blog, Ebooks, courses and other incomes.

Check out his website here

Not The Only Success Story

You might think that Matt Kepnes has cornered the market for travel books so no one else has a successful travel book. There are loads of Successful travel writers;

• Michael Palin
• Paul Theroux
• Rolf Potts
• Elizabeth Gilbert
• Jamie Maslin
• Tony Wheeler

I could go on and on. These are big names but some of the success stories can be smaller names that have sold much fewer copies but yet use the selling E-books and Books to help fund their travels.

My Own Experience With Writing A Travel Book

So I have spoken about all the people that have sold thousands of copies and made a lot of money. What happens when a no-one like myself writes a travel book and tries to sell it on Kindle and Amazon marketplace without a publisher?

Well the book in question was called ” Backpacks To Beer Taps”

So let’s not beat around the bush here. Time to talk numbers

How many book copies have I sold (from 25/12/17 – 14/07/22) – 51 copies

How much money did I make selling those copies? – £69.32

It was a complete flop, even worse, most of the copies were brought by me to give to friends and family.

Why writing your own Book/ Ebook can be a massive flop

Personally, for me, it’s down to promotion and getting people to buy it. You could write a book with a map to a goldmine that gives you thousands of pounds of gold for each person that visits. or a book that tells people where and how to use the Holy Grail. It doesn’t matter how good the book is if no one buys it.

I personally didn’t have any plan on how to sell this book other than making a few posts on Facebook. I was so naive to think that is how you can promote things.

By the time I learnt how to promote things, it was too late the book wasn’t relative to me or amazon.

This book’s unique selling point was it was funny and it was about a personal journey. A person that no one knew or cared about on a journey that thousands do every year.

To sell a personal book you need people that want to hear your story. As it be they want to know more about how you become the you they know or want to know more about you or learn the secrets that you learnt. I had none of this.

Even now, If I was to write a book similar to this book about how I started my new travel life in Scotland, it would have a very limited amount of people wanting to know about it. I don’t have much of a following that subscribes or listens to me for me ( They like the information I give, they could care less about me). I would say 10% of subscribers watch my videos for me and most of my watches on my videos come from non- subscribers.

Nomadic Matt got popular by writing a book on how to travel (using his style) before writing about his travel life.

What To Do When Writing A New Book

Currently, I am writing a new book, Even though I know the last book was a massive flop. I am writing a book on what people want to know, Something they can’t get from a YouTube Video, A blog post or find for free on the internet already.

If you are writing a book like this you are already starting strong.

Think about how you are going to sell this book before you even start writing.

• Who is your audience?
• How are they going to find out that you released a book?
• Why would they buy your book?
• How is your book different from all the other books?
• Can they get better advice/stories online for free?