Mark Ellingham
How did you get into travel publishing?
Well, I suppose the honest answer is that I couldn’t find an interesting job having left university, so attempted to create a proper job for myself that wasn’t in an office. I’d travelled around Greece quite a lot during my time as a student and it occurred to me that there just wasn’t a guidebook [on the market] that was aimed at someone like me. So I just tried to write a book for myself, thinking that there might be a few thousand others like me who might buy it. And it was, at the time, a ‘rough’ guide in every sense of the word, aimed at travel on a shoestring. We got very marginal backing from a publisher [Routledge]; I had a £900 advance and there were three of us doing it, so it was very tight. But from the letters that we started getting, we soon realised that all sorts of people were using it and that it wasn’t actually the cheapness of the book that appealed to them, but the fact that it was opinionated and quite contemporary, and treated places in a slightly different way to tourist guides.
Did you have any writing experience?
Well, I used to do a student magazine at Bristol University and I’d always written. But I did a brief job working for a broadcast-monitoring company, which I thought might go on forever – it was deadly. It was a sort of cuttings agency for TV and radio, and I’d have to write reports on the Brick Development Corporation’s treatment on the Six O’Clock News and things like that. I was desperate to either get a job that wasn’t a proper job or not have one at all.
Why have Rough Guides become so popular?
Today, [travel publishing is] a hugely competitive market, which it wasn’t when we started. It was just wide open, and in retrospect, we were incredibly lucky to be doing it at that point. But now, there are half a dozen guidebooks to every country of the world, so I think it’s the quality of writing [in Rough Guides] that’s important above all; we work very hard on that, and we expect our authors to work very hard on making interesting and readable books. And they don’t just contain practical information; they’re nicely crafted books that you might read on a long journey out of interest and for pleasure.
Where is a particularly special place to you?
Well, I’m probably not as well travelled as people imagine. I’ve sent a lot of other people off travelling but, ironically, having set up originally to avoid having a proper job, I’ve done more than my fair share of sitting at my desk editing other people’s text instead of being off doing more exciting things. I retain a huge affection for Greece and Spain, partly because I have a lot of Spanish friends, and my wife’s family is from Sri Lanka so that’s a special place for me. And probably the book that I most enjoyed working on was the Rough Guide to Morocco.
Shouldn’t we be cutting out non-essential travel to help reduce carbon emissions?
Yes, I think we need to rein in casual flights dramatically. I am entirely opposed to people flying off just for the weekend. We did a joint campaign with Tony Wheeler [co-founder] of Lonely Planet with a slogan of ‘fly less, stay longer’ and I think that it’s an absolute imperative that we, not necessarily travel less, but that we fly less and think about it each time that we do. We include a piece in each of our books asking people to fly less often and to offset [the resulting carbon emissions] when they do. I think there is a balance that needs to be struck; it would be a disaster for a number of countries if tourism suddenly was to terminate.
Is tourism a good thing for remote communities?
Travel should be sensitive wherever you go; I think you can swamp a small town in Europe just as easily as you can a remote part of Borneo. On the whole, our books are a positive force in that, hopefully, we guide people towards a level of cultural awareness that makes them more sensitive about the way that they travel. But, tourism is a mixed bag of benefits and harm. One positive thing is that it does move money around. With independent travel in particular, there are drop-down benefits of money spreading from the developed world to the developing world.
What does Rough Guides have planned to mark the 25th anniversary?
We kicked off the year with the World Party book, which is a celebration of the best festivals around the world, and we’ve launched a 25-title series called 25 Ultimate Experiences, 20 of which cover individual countries, while the rest cover, for example, the 25 wonders of the world and 25 wildlife experiences. They’re magazine-format books with a double-page spread on each experience and are very heavily illustrated – quite unlike the rest of our books. At the end of the year, we’ll be launching the Rough Guide to the World, which will
have lots of illustrations, ideas and hundreds of reasons to give up your job and head off around the world.
May 2007
Well, I suppose the honest answer is that I couldn’t find an interesting job having left university, so attempted to create a proper job for myself that wasn’t in an office. I’d travelled around Greece quite a lot during my time as a student and it occurred to me that there just wasn’t a guidebook [on the market] that was aimed at someone like me. So I just tried to write a book for myself, thinking that there might be a few thousand others like me who might buy it. And it was, at the time, a ‘rough’ guide in every sense of the word, aimed at travel on a shoestring. We got very marginal backing from a publisher [Routledge]; I had a £900 advance and there were three of us doing it, so it was very tight. But from the letters that we started getting, we soon realised that all sorts of people were using it and that it wasn’t actually the cheapness of the book that appealed to them, but the fact that it was opinionated and quite contemporary, and treated places in a slightly different way to tourist guides.
Did you have any writing experience?
Well, I used to do a student magazine at Bristol University and I’d always written. But I did a brief job working for a broadcast-monitoring company, which I thought might go on forever – it was deadly. It was a sort of cuttings agency for TV and radio, and I’d have to write reports on the Brick Development Corporation’s treatment on the Six O’Clock News and things like that. I was desperate to either get a job that wasn’t a proper job or not have one at all.
Why have Rough Guides become so popular?
Today, [travel publishing is] a hugely competitive market, which it wasn’t when we started. It was just wide open, and in retrospect, we were incredibly lucky to be doing it at that point. But now, there are half a dozen guidebooks to every country of the world, so I think it’s the quality of writing [in Rough Guides] that’s important above all; we work very hard on that, and we expect our authors to work very hard on making interesting and readable books. And they don’t just contain practical information; they’re nicely crafted books that you might read on a long journey out of interest and for pleasure.
Where is a particularly special place to you?
Well, I’m probably not as well travelled as people imagine. I’ve sent a lot of other people off travelling but, ironically, having set up originally to avoid having a proper job, I’ve done more than my fair share of sitting at my desk editing other people’s text instead of being off doing more exciting things. I retain a huge affection for Greece and Spain, partly because I have a lot of Spanish friends, and my wife’s family is from Sri Lanka so that’s a special place for me. And probably the book that I most enjoyed working on was the Rough Guide to Morocco.
Shouldn’t we be cutting out non-essential travel to help reduce carbon emissions?
Yes, I think we need to rein in casual flights dramatically. I am entirely opposed to people flying off just for the weekend. We did a joint campaign with Tony Wheeler [co-founder] of Lonely Planet with a slogan of ‘fly less, stay longer’ and I think that it’s an absolute imperative that we, not necessarily travel less, but that we fly less and think about it each time that we do. We include a piece in each of our books asking people to fly less often and to offset [the resulting carbon emissions] when they do. I think there is a balance that needs to be struck; it would be a disaster for a number of countries if tourism suddenly was to terminate.
Is tourism a good thing for remote communities?
Travel should be sensitive wherever you go; I think you can swamp a small town in Europe just as easily as you can a remote part of Borneo. On the whole, our books are a positive force in that, hopefully, we guide people towards a level of cultural awareness that makes them more sensitive about the way that they travel. But, tourism is a mixed bag of benefits and harm. One positive thing is that it does move money around. With independent travel in particular, there are drop-down benefits of money spreading from the developed world to the developing world.
What does Rough Guides have planned to mark the 25th anniversary?
We kicked off the year with the World Party book, which is a celebration of the best festivals around the world, and we’ve launched a 25-title series called 25 Ultimate Experiences, 20 of which cover individual countries, while the rest cover, for example, the 25 wonders of the world and 25 wildlife experiences. They’re magazine-format books with a double-page spread on each experience and are very heavily illustrated – quite unlike the rest of our books. At the end of the year, we’ll be launching the Rough Guide to the World, which will
have lots of illustrations, ideas and hundreds of reasons to give up your job and head off around the world.
May 2007
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