I had a travel blog a why back, but lost interest in it. I was trying to do to much with it, I think. I feel I should have focused in just one area instead of reaching out to touch on so many areas. I was being very scatterbrained about it and it was just not organized properly. I still want to do travel writing, but I need to figure out a better way then the method I was using before.
I was trying to do what you were doing with: here's a place I visited and liked, let me tell you about it. But it turns out, I couldn't come up with enough to say about each place, off the top of my head, and I didn't like doing the research, because it felt too much like I was piggybacking off others and not drawing on my own experiences enough. The problem was each place I had only spent a single day in and did not spend a lot of time getting to know it in depth, so it turned out I didn't have as much to say about each place as I had originally thought I would. So writing about places I had visited, turned out to not be a thing I was good at.
On the other hand, however, it turned out I was very good at talking about stuff in my hometown. My family has living in this town more then 500 years. We are the original family that settled/founded the town and still live on the original settlement land. My family kept records of everything. I've got a huge Medieval era Bible (a giant church book that weighs about 30lbs) that they brought with them from Scotland in the 1530s and they wrote all kinds of stuff in it and all the town records are stuffed in between the pages of it.
I literally know every street, every business, and every resident of this town, along with the history of every one of them. (It's a small fishing village, 7k residents, so not hard to do.)
And I love talking about this town. I can talk about it non-stop. I do talk about it non-stop. One day, someone said to me: "You write a book about the town." And I am like, OMG, why didn't I think of that?
So, I've got an idea now that I'm working on, to make a book that is kind of a historical info and travel guide combo of my home town. Sort of a guide to all the neat places we locals know about that the tourists don't know is here, kind of thing.
I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I want to include and which places to write about, etc. So, I probably won't get started the actual writing of it for another year, yet. But hopefully, once I get it all straightened out in my head, exactly what I want to do and where I want to take this, I'll have a travel guide book published.
Just wanted to say thank you for the link. I had not seen that site before. It's got a lot of good info on it, and answered several questions I had about what to do with my own project. I think it will be very helpful to me in what I was planning to do. Thank you for sharing it.
My book is a mix of experience and extra info I look up on the internet, for example all places that are in there I've visited myself so the info comes from me. But I also give information about for example vaccinations, do I have to write down where I found this info?
If so, does it has to be in the text or can it be in the end of the book?
I think it depends on what the information is, how you word it, and where you got it.
I think if it's general knowledge type information, you don't have to cite the source as long as it's in your own words.
If you are quoting or paraphrasing you would cite the source. If it was me, I'd do it the way Wikipedia does. Put a number in brackets [1.] after the sentence, and have it link to the citation at the end of the book.
Something like vaccines though... uhm, I'm not sure. That falls under "medical advice" and I think you could run into legal issues there and would have to add something like "this is not intended to replace medical advice, please consult with your physician before following any medical advice"
I think with regard to medical topics like that, you'd have to cite the source even if it's your own words. So say something like "according to
NAME on
www.link-to-site-in-question you need to get ____ vaccinations before going to visit ___". That way you wouldn't be the one giving medical advice, but instead just relaying that someone else said the medical advice.
And where did you guys find an editor or did you work without?
I self-publish my stuff (been self-pubbing since the 1970s, so done various ways, most recently - since 2010 - I've been putting my stuff up on Kindle) so, editing depends largely on myself, and either finding someone to edit it for me, or editing the heck out of it on my own. Usually I do my own editing.
I'll print up a hard copy of the draft and with a red China pencil make it bleed red. Then I make the edits on the computer copy, based off whatever I changed in the hard copy. Then I run it through 5 different spell checker and grammar checker software programs (because each one misses stuff and gets stuff the others don't).
