The Life of the Guidebook Writer

Writing a travel guide to Athens and planning a guidebook to Amsterdam, while my wife is writing about Rhodes, booking a trip to New York and planning to go to Orlando.

To most people the guidebook writer's life sounds like an endless series of free holidays, but when it's your job it has a different meaning. Guidebook writing is no 9-5 existence. If it was then I wouldn't be sitting at my desk most Saturdays and Sundays, keeping up with the deadlines.

This weekend I'm writing a guidebook to Athens while also planning a trip to Amsterdam for the next guidebook writing project. Meanwhile my wife is at her desk updating a guidebook to the Greek island of Rhodes, having just booked a visit to New York to update another guidebook, while trying to decide whether three weeks in Orlando will be enough time to research yet another travel guidebook.

Amsterdam's one of my favourite cities. I've written one guidebook about it, worked on several more, written newspaper and magazine articles and devised and written a podcast walk around Amsterdam for American Express. I need no excuse to visit Amsterdam, guidebook or not, but my next visit will see me wandering the streets alone. While I'm there my wife will be in New York, tramping those mean streets solo.

We have written guidebooks together – to Paris, Dublin, Tunis, Crete and Corfu – and plenty of travel guides solo too. But this time we were offered two separate jobs, needing doing at the same time and both to a fairly short deadline, so it was either go it alone or not do the work at all. Anyone who is self-employed knows the feeling – never say 'no', and worry about the practicalities later.

New York was of course originally New Amsterdam, and Harlem gets its name from Harlem Street in Amsterdam. Our guidebooks will be full of such fascinating facts. It's just a shame we won't be in the same cities at the same time!