Our Italy books hit the shelves!

I almost forgot to tell you... as my regular Cool Travel Guide readers know, we spent a lot of time in Italy last year researching and photographing first editions of new travel guidebooks, starting with a month in Calabria, then a month in Milan, followed by more than a month in the Italian Lakes region and Northern Italy. Our Calabria book written for the Thomas Cook Travellers series hit the shelves in late April (see this post), and our Northern Italy book for the same series will be released in a couple of weeks (you can buy it here). While we're proud of all of our Italian books - Terry shot beautiful photos for them and we put a lot of work into researching and writing them, a book that we're especially proud of (it took even more blood, sweat and tears during particularly challenging circumstances), is our book released last month on the Italian Lakes, including Milan and Po Valley Towns, which we wrote for Footprint's new Italia series. Do have a flick through them when you're next in a bookshop. And don't hesitate to let me know if you ever need tips on travel in Italy.

Our Calabria book hits the shelves!

The first edition of our Calabria guidebook which we wrote for Thomas Cook Publishing is soon to be released. We spent just over a month there last May researching the book and Terry shot the gorgeous images, and we spent another month or so writing it. It wasn't an easy book to do for a number of reasons, which makes us extra proud. And I was glad to find that I still got a little excited today when I opened the package from London. We've worked on more than 40 guidebooks so it's nice to still get a bit of a kick out of the achievement. But first editions tend to do that for you because they're so completely your own - you do preliminary research, write the outline and shot lists, go on the road and do the real research, in our case Terry also shot the pics, you then write the thing up, do your mapping, answer editor's queries, advise on photos, check the proof, and so on. So it's hard not to feel as if it's your baby.

Which is why I always find it curious when writers don't update their own books. With publishers like Lonely Planet you don't always get the opportunity to - editors move around so much, so by the time an edition needs updating someone else is managing the book and they don't know you from a bar of soap and have writers they like to use. But most publishers invite the original authors to update their books. I've already twice updated the DK Top Ten to Dubai and Abu Dhabi which I co-authored. Yet, along with our Calabria books, copies of Crete, Cyprus, Milan and the Lakes, and Sicily also arrived today - all books I updated during our time in Italy last year; all second editions of books written by other authors. Perhaps the timing wasn't right, there were clashes with other projects, or the job just didn't pay enough. Perhaps the challenges we faced on Calabria provide some insight. We haven't taken a close look at our Calabria book yet but already we've noticed a photo we don't recognise of a seaside restaurant in Cosenza. Cosenza, of course, is inland. And that's the reason Terry refuses to look at our published books. Hopefully the person who updates the second edition will pick that one up.

Keen to read more about Calabria? Take a look at my posts from last year:
On the road again... in Calabria!
Is Calabria the new Puglia?
Calabria: Europe's best-value destination
10 Reasons to travel to Calabria: part 1 & part 2
One more reason to visit Calabria: Liquorice!

Our latest travel writing: in print and online

Aside from our new Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook hitting the shelves, we had a couple of articles appear on the web recently. Check out our "Off the beach in Crete" piece on the NineMSN Travel website. Yes, it is a Greek Island and it is summer, but there is life beyond the beach resorts and this is one island where we strongly believe that getting off the beaten track is more rewarding than staying on the well-trodden sand. Likewise, avoiding the throngs of tourists and thousands of groups that stream through Rome's Vatican Museums each day by doing a private after-hours tour is the only way I'd recommend you visit the museums and Sistine Chapel, having now done it both ways. Terry and I road-tested one of the private tours offered by Viator when we were in Rome a few months ago (as you know, we don't recommend or write about anything we haven't tried ourselves), and this is definitely the way to do it. You can read why I think so in my post for Viator, Why Lara loved her after-hours Vatican tour (sorry, not a very original title, I know), and also here in my own post. A few readers have asked where they can buy our books... well, if you don't have a good travel bookshop near you (or any bookshop for that matter, but travel bookshops are much more fun, aren't they?), you can always buy our guidebooks online from Amazon.com via my Cool Travel Guide Shop where I've compiled our titles. I haven't updated it in a while, so a couple of titles are missing, but I promise to do so soon. You can also go straight to Amazon or other online bookshops, but obviously if you buy a book here I get a little commission. The photo? A young Italian couple kissing among the columns at St. Peters, Rome.

Our Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook has hit the shelves!

We've just received our author copies of our recently released Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook and I'm rather excited to see it in print as we put a lot of hard work into it. Admittedly, seeing a book for the first time is not as thrilling these days as it once was, especially as we've now written, contributed to and updated around 35 guidebooks. And it's even less exciting when Lonely Planet sends you a few mangled, well-thumbed copies, rather than issues that are hot off the presses and smell freshly printed! The fact that we researched it over a year ago, from April to June 2007, also takes a bit of the edge off it. Just thinking that some of it is already out of date makes me cringe. But such is the nature of publishing - books take forever to get from research through writing to manuscript submission, then through editing and author queries until they finally go to print...

I went online to see if there were any reviews of the book yet but unfortunately all I could find were a few Amazon.com reader reviews which, while attached to this edition, are actually for the last edition. Some were written 8 years ago and so apply to an ancient edition while one 2007 review applied to an edition we wrote that was already 4 years old, so obviously some content was out of date when the reader used it. Interestingly though, we used that edition when we were on the road last year and it was in pretty good shape. The way we research is to methodically check everything in the current book as we're travelling from town to town, retaining anything that's still open and is worthwhile, deleting or downgrading anything that's closed or is not as good as it once was, and then looking for places to replace any deletions. One reader writes of that edition: "It only gives you the most popular sites and then a few it claims are "off-the-beaten-track" but really aren't. It misses some of Syria's best out of the way castles and ruins." What he fails to consider is that we all travel differently. Some of us are more intrepid than others, and what might be a well-trodden sight for one reader might be well and truly "off-the-beaten-track" for other less adventurous travellers. And let's face it, Lonely Planet guides are mainstream books aimed to appeal to a wide cross-section of people. As someone who has been to Syria many times, when I next visit I won't be using a Lonely Planet or any other guidebook. My own well-thumbed and rather ragged version of Ross Burns' Monuments of Syria will be enough to guide me.

Pictured? My co-author/husband Terry at one of those out-of-the-way sights that may not be off-the-beaten-track enough for everyone. The first person who can identify the site gets the most mangled copy of the new guides that Lonely Planet sent me! How's that for incentive?