Louise Purwin Zobel's The Travel Writer’s Handbook: How to Write and Sell Your Own Travel Experiences is essentially a ‘how-to’ book that begins at the beginning. There is no end, because you’re always learning and relearning the tricks of the writing trade. But the best trick is they wrote it in an easy to read, easy to digest manner, which lays out all the necessary steps to make a successful career in the writing field.

Think it’s all peaches and cream? Think again. But it’s certainly not drudgery either, at least most of the time. And if it should become drudgery, you’re either doing something wrong, or you’re not doing something you should be doing. ‘Course, there’s always a third ‘should’: Maybe you shoulda gone to bed instead of staying up partying, or dancing, or buying that last bottle of champagne.

Judging from the Contents Listing alone, you’d wonder how many volumes The Travel Writer’s Handbook comprised. Looking at the original copyright date, you’d wonder why bother reprinting a book almost 30 years old. You’d probably wonder about a few other things, too, until you cracked the book and began reading it. This lady can write! The book is small in size and under 300 pages, but there’s a lifetime of learning packed into this slim volume.

The book begins more like a novel than a how-to textbook, gets better quickly, and stays there. Zobel draws you in from the first sentence, then painstakingly lays out the whats, whys, and wherefores of the travel writing field. She stresses research, which is, of course, at the bottom of any successful writing.

[A small aside: There’s a book originally due out later this month that rated a feature story in many newspapers around the globe in the last week or so. The book, entitled Madame De Maintenon: The Secret Wife of King Louis XIV, is by biographer Veronica Buckley. Buckley used quotes throughout her story from a book published in France in 1998. Buckley revealed the book was based on papers found only in 1997, some 282 years after this “secret diary” was written, “a packet of yellowed papers, wrapped in string and sealed with faded red wax.” It was found, she added, hidden “inside a heavy old chest in a Loire valley manor house.” She had read about the Sun King’s secret diary in a 1998 book published in France, and used the book as one of her prime sources. The only problem? The 1998 book was a work of fiction.]