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Guidebook vs article writing

Guidebook vs article writing

How easy is it to switch from one to the other?

Emma Gibbs's avatar
Emma Gibbs
Feb 07, 2025
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Guidebook vs article writing
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My new guidebook, Scotland’s North Highlands, is published today! (Apologies if you follow me on social media as you will have seen this countless times already…) So I thought it would be appropriate to talk about guidebook writing, and how it differs to article writing.

There’s no doubt that guidebook publishing is a very different beast to what it was when I got my first editing job back in 2006. The way that the likes of Rough Guides and Lonely Planet commission and publish has changed a huge amount from what they were doing 20 (or even ten) years ago. I contributed to five Rough Guides when I worked in-house for them, and for each book the company paid for my transport to the destinations I was covering; the fee itself wasn’t huge, but not having to pay my transport out there made a huge difference. The last time I was approached to write for them, as a freelancer, the expectation was that I would do it all from my desk – and if I wanted to travel to the destination, it was going to have to be paid for by me, out of my very meagre fee.

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