Lonely Planet is a brand that is recognized by anyone who has ever picked up a backpack to hit the road for exotic locations. Love it or loath it, it's a colossus in the market place (60 million books published), and continues to stand out among the plethora of travel guides that now flood the bookshelves of bookshops around the world.
"Well, we are Lonely Planet," said Maureen Wheeler, co-founder with husband Tony Wheeler of the Lonely Planet label, in an interview with Taipei Times at the 16th Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE, 第十六屆台北國際書展). They are in Taipei to promote Tony's book Bad Lands, which is being released by Taiwan's Linking Books (聯經) under the title Dangerous Travels (險惡之旅) and give a boost to the Chinese language editions of the eight Lonely Planet guides that were released here last year.
The story of how Tony and Maureen Wheeler found themselves in Australia in 1973 with virtually no money and put together Across Asia on the Cheap on the kitchen table is the stuff of legend. (It retailed for NT$52 at today's exchange rate.) From there, they were to ride a wave that has created a travel book industry that sees hundreds of new titles published every year.
"It wasn't just us thinking about this [publishing travel guides]. Other people were having the same idea at the same time," Tony said of the early days of the enterprise. Le Guide du routard (a French travel series) started up the same month, and Bill Dalton, who formed the US-based Moon Publications, published his Indonesia Handbook six weeks ahead of Across Asia. "It was a time to do those sorts of things ... ," Tony said.
Although Lonely Planet publications has become one of the great publishing success stories of all time, Maureen and Tony Wheeler insist that becoming publishers was never their main goal. "It wasn't about publishing, and writers and journalism; it was about travelers and traveling. ... It was really about getting information out to travelers. And because we were travelers, we were writing the books that we wanted and needed," Maureen said. The couple continue to travel, both together and separately, and Tony Wheeler's own writing has extended beyond the realm of guidebooks into travel literature.
After the success of Across Asia, the Wheelers set out to publish more books, and brought other writers into the project. "Those first 10 or 12 books, we would simply talk someone into writing the damned thing, and we'd put it together and we'd put it on sale, and if it made any money, then we'd pay them ... the idea that we could have got a real journalist to write something never occurred to us, and if we'd asked them, they would probably have told us to take a flying leap," Tony said. The books made money, and the rest is history.
The travel book industry has changed massively in the 30 years that saw Lonely Planet grow from a kitchen table publication to being one of the world's largest independent publishers. It's now a unit within BBC Worldwide, which owns 75 percent of the company. In the 1970s, Lonely Planet had little competition, and Tony even notes that they held off doing an Indonesian guide until the 1980s, "because Indonesia was Bill's (Dalton), so we can't do that."
It was only when Moon's guide become significantly outdated that the Wheelers decided to pick up the ball on Indonesia. Travel guide publishers were running out of new places to cover, and such personal considerations had to give way to commercial imperatives. "We had started from Asia and were moving towards Europe, and they'd [Rough Guide] started in Europe and were moving towards Asia, and eventually we realized that we had to go head-to-head against them. ... But competition is good and it keeps us on our toes," Tony said.
Lonely Planet and the Wheelers have remained very much on their toes, responding to changes in the travel industry with the release of new kinds of publications such as travel photography and literature (which have met with mixed success), translations of their travel guides, and quick adaptation of new technology, ranging from television to the Internet.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LINKING BOOKS
Translations of the Lonely Planet guides have helped the label grow, even as the demographic of travel changes. "It used to be that travel used to be just us rich Westerners going out to the rest of the world. And even in the West, the Italians didn't used to travel, the Spanish didn't travel. We may have gone to Italy and Spain from Britain or America, but they didn't come back to us. Now they do. We actually sell more Lonely Planet guides [Italian editions] per capita in Italy now than we do in America."
It's still relatively early days for the Asian market, and while Linking Publishing editor Chen Ying-che (陳英哲) suggested that Taiwanese still lacked the independence to simply pickup a Lonely Planet guide as the only preparation for catapulting themselves into an unknown country, the Wheelers found themselves impressed by the intense interest shown in their guides by Chinese readers. "We talked to students in Shanghai and Beijing, and they were so fascinated by the world ... I am convinced that in a very short time the Chinese will be all over the globe and they won't be going in tour groups and they will very quickly get the hang of it [backpacking]," Maureen said.
Lonely Planet was also an early adopter of Internet technology, setting up an online presence in 1994. Now, the company's Thorn Tree site (www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree), established in 1995, provides a forum for travelers to exchange information, and has an average of 170,000 posts a month. There is also Lonely Planet TV (www.lonelyplanet.tv), which gives people a chance to have their say in moving pictures, as well as producing highly regarded travel series such as Six Degrees, which began broadcasting in 2003.
Does all this debase the backpacker experience that the Wheelers began with 30 years ago? "I think all this is just another travel dimension," Maureen said. "If you are a real traveler, you may not enjoy watching these shows [travel TV], if you're not, it is half an hour's entertainment. Is it better than Big Brother? Definitely ... It can give you something else to think about."
The Taipei International Book Exhibition:
The Taipei International Book Exhibition is taking place at Exhibition Halls 1 to 3 of the Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC). Today, Tony and Maureen Wheeler will talk with the public about travel between 10:30am to 10pm at the Theme Square (主題廣場), and from 3pm to 5pm at the Australian National Pavilion. As part of the TextBox event in which authors read from their work, Tony and Maureen Wheeler will be at the TextBox Pavillion (A917) from 2pm to 2:30pm tomorrow. There will also be a book signing at the Linking Publishing pavilion (B1212) between 12pm and 1pm today. All locations are in Exhibition Hall 1.
Tomorrow, Linking Publishing will host a seminar at which Tony and Maureen Wheeler will talk with local travel writers Hsiao Fu-tien (蕭福田) and Wang Hsueh-mei (王雪美), and magazine publisher Wang Chih-hung (王志宏) of Rhythms Monthly (經典雜誌) between 4pm and 6pm at the Audiovisual Room of the Eslite Bookstore (Tunhua South Road Branch). The topic of the seminar is The Philosophy of DIY Travel (自助旅行的哲學).
More information about TIBE activities can be found at www.tibe.org.tw/2008 compiled by ian bartholomew
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