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JEFF GREENWALD
A travel-writing legend embraces the DIY aesthetic
Jeff Greenwald is about as accomplished as any travel writer could hope to be. His work has been published everywhere from The New York Times Magazine to McSweeney's to National Geographic Adventure, and all four of his books have been wildly popular among the adventure-travel crowd.
But while doing a bit of light bookkeeping lately, Greenwald noticed something strange: his recent royalty checks for Shopping for Buddhas, a book about Greenwald's hunt for the perfect Buddha statue in Kathmandu, were decidedly smaller than he figured they should have been. According to Greenwald, the book's publisher was taking in about $35,000 a year on the title, while Greenwald was seeing only a paltry $3,000 himself. "I thought I'd perform an experiment, take a risk, and see if I could get a bigger slice of my own pie," Greenwald said in a recent interview with Rolf Potts on MediaBistro.com, about the decision to self-publish his new book, a sort of greatest-hits collection titled Scratching the Surface (Naga Books). Young Pioneers spoke with Greenwald about his literary gamble, his decision to create a life as a travel writer over twenty years ago, and his advice for would-be writers looking to enter the game.
Young Pioneers: I was surprised to hear you say that that Lonely Planet made something like $35,000 a year on your Shopping for Buddhas reprint, and that you only saw $3,000 of that.
Jeff Greenwald: Well, what I hadn't realized is that there are a lot of costs associated with publishing that I really wasn't aware of. There's a lot of overhead in terms of storage and advertising and printing and distribution, and bookstores take a huge discount.
YP: Is that the sort of thing you're learning the hard way?
JG: I'm learning it the hard way, yes. I thought I would make $15 a book if the book had an $18 cover price, and what it's coming to is that I'm making more like $10 a book. So it's going to take me a lot longer to cover my investment than I thought.
YP: How have other writers reacted to your decision to self-publish?
JG: No one thinks I did it out of desperation because everyone knows my credentials, and they're aware that every single one of the stories in this book -- except one or two -- were published in very prestigious magazines. People accept the fact that I was curious about self-publishing and wanted to see what it was like to have complete control of the product from inception to design to distribution. It's been a learning process. Authors who have never published a book and who sort of are on that borderline of being able to publish a book are very encouraged by my attempts to self-publish, and by the results I've had. But authors who are getting six-figure contracts from Knopf, for instance... I'm sure they're very grateful that they're not going through the same thing.
YP: Do you remember how old you were and where you were in your life, mentally, when you figured out what it was that you wanted to do with your life?
JG: I still don't think I've really figured that out, quite honestly. I've sort of fallen from one career to another, and they've all been really interesting and rewarding. But I still feel I could change careers next year and do something completely different and be completely satisfied as well. I was a visual artist before I was a writer, but I was always writing since I was really young. It was in my late 20s that I began to make some money writing, and then parlayed my first few articles in regional magazines like the Santa Barbara magazine and Westways magazine into more national venues like Geo and Islands. And then I began writing full-time for a living. There was a point where I almost went into photography, and at times I wish I had. It's more lucrative. But I stuck with writing, really because it was more difficult, because it was a greater challenge. Two people can take the same picture of a place, but no two people will ever write the same thing. And I wanted to do what was really more challenging and more difficult to me.
YP: Freelance writers have to be very self-motivated and focused. Do you remember thinking that the life you were choosing was going to be really tough and challenging because nobody was actually making you do it?
JG: I knew it would be challenging because I knew there would be a lot of rejection involved, but I also knew that if I were able to succeed, the rewards would be very, very high, and I would get to travel, which I love to do, and write, which I love to do. I had a feeling I'd never become rich at it, but I did assume that if I stuck with it and really invested time in my craft, rather than, say, going back to school, that I could develop the contacts and skills that I needed to support myself. The breakthrough for me really came in 1989 when Shopping for Buddhas was published, because that book became very popular and was well reviewed. And it convinced me that it was possible to use the kind of conversational style I had in writing to do books, as well, that people would enjoy.
YP: After Shopping for Buddhas was published, did you ever do any other work to support yourself?
JG: No, I never did. I've stuck with writing and photography, and aside from things directly related to that, the occasional consulting gig. For instance, I've done work for some museums that have had exhibitions related to Asian art, or to, you know, marine biology or whatever. But aside from related work like that, no, I haven't taken any other work.
YP: Was there ever a point where it felt like a struggle to you--trying to figure out exactly how to make a living doing this thing that a lot of people want to do?
JG: I still think it's a struggle. I don't think there has really been more than a couple of years over the last fifteen where I haven't felt that it's been a struggle. My career has not had the kind of incline trajectory--upward incline trajectory--that you might have in a career in the business world.
YP: Is it a financial struggle, or a mental struggle, or all those things?
JG: It's all those things. It's a financial struggle and a mental struggle. You have to continually find resources of inspiration and of willpower, often, to keep going on in the face of adversity. If you can write books, you'll do a lot better because it's been the large advance, or the relatively large advances, for a few of my books that have given me the freedom not to work when work was lean for a period of months at a time. And I could draw from those savings. Also the fact that I don't have a very expensive or materialistic lifestyle is a big help. I still write on the Macintosh that I bought for myself in 1992. My flat is very beautiful, but it's not furnished in a very fancy or ostentatious style. I don't have a big television, I don't have a lot of fancy gadgets surrounding me, and I certainly don't spend a lot of money on clothes.
YP: You must have those moments, whether you're on the road or you're at home with a long day ahead of you, where you really just don't want to get out of bed and work that day.
JG: It's more like the opposite. Often the days that I don't want to get out of bed are the days when I have a plane to catch. And the days when I'm eager to get out of bed are the days where I'm really inspired to write something.
YP: Really? That's surprising.
JG: I hate flying, as you might know from my third book, The Size of the World, and I do it very reluctantly, but when I'm in the middle of a story or a book that I'm really enjoying, I love just getting out of bed and making a cup of coffee and getting started on the writing.
YP: The only reason I ask is because you've had a relatively long career doing more or less the same thing. And I can imagine it's got to get old at some point.
JG: It's always really different. Every story requires a different kind of research, meeting different kinds of people, looking at the writing process differently, contacting different kinds of people. No two stories are alike, that's one of the reasons I chose this profession. There's an incredible amount of variety in it. And if you're a curious-minded person, you get to explore so many different aspects and facets of the world that it's endlessly fascinating. So I really don't see it as being that kind of 9-5 attitude like, "Thank god it's Friday." I don't think I've ever gotten out of bed thinking, "Thank god it's Friday." Because I often have to work just as hard on Saturday and Sunday! (laughs)
YP: Do you find yourself working all the time?
JG: No. One of the reasons I have this job is so I can take off time when I want to take off time. That's one of the main benefits. I can go hiking at places like Point Reyes in the middle of the week whenever everyone else is at their job.
YP: If, for whatever reason, you decided not to write anymore, what do you think you would do?
JG: Well, almost any job that's an intelligent job requires some writing. So it's inconceivable to me that I would be in a job where there was no writing. But my job of choice would be to go into space on the shuttle as an astronaut of some kind, and record that process and adventure from a more literary point of view. If I could do something else that was science related, I'd work somewhere in marine biology, protecting the marine species and coral reefs, which is a real concern of mine.
YP: Aside from the fact that it's your career now, why do you travel?
JG: You know, I once wrote in Shopping For Buddhas that we go where we need to go, and decide why we're there when we get there. There's always been a sort of Zen approach to my travel. I tend to intuitively go to certain places, and then understand why I'm there. Quite often the things I see on my travels turn out to be metaphors for the inner processes I'm going through. I was reading a book last night called A Cod in Fading Light about a Zen student's search for a mountain lion in the hills of Marin County. And he makes an observation that I felt really explains why I travel. It's the sense that with day-to-day lives, there's a lot of repetition and there's a lot of routine. And when we travel we often are in the midst of scenes or situations that will never repeat themselves. So our attentions are finely tuned, and we really want to pay attention to what we're going through. And I think there's just something innately pleasurable about paying attention. I think when we're engaged in the world that way, we just feel a lot more alive. And the travel, because it makes us pay attention, makes us feel more alive, and maybe that's the attraction for someone with an active mind like myself.
YP: How do your parents or your family feel about what you do? Did it take a while for them to come around and see that travel writing was something that could be a legitimate career, or was it something that they were kind of leery about at first?
JG: Well, my parents were always very supportive of my writing because it was something that I did from a very young age. I don't think it surprised them at all when they learned I wanted to be a writer, and they were always supportive. I think they would like to see me make more money. My mother and sister are the only family that I have right now, and I think they're very pleased. They love reading my writing, and my mother always buys a lot of copies of my books to give to her friends.
YP: When you're creating a different sort of life for yourself, something outside the career mainstream, do you think it's particularly important to have that sort of support system?
JG: I don't know how important it is. I can certainly point to a lot of writers who never had it that did very well for themselves, and I can point to a lot of writers who have a great support system who never really succeeded as writers. So I really don't think there's any real formula at work there. The way we deal with our own lives, I think a support system is valuable, but it's certainly not the deciding factor.
YP: What do you think is the deciding factor?
JG: Motivation and discipline. Motivation, discipline and imagination. Not to mention talent or skill as a writer. I mean, you need that or you quickly are filtered out.
YP: Sure, but what sort of things motivate you specifically?
JG: love to tell a good story. That's a very powerful, motivating force. People really enjoy my readings because they hear a lot of stories that they don't even see in my books. That's the motivation. I'm a real gabber. I just love to share experiences, and I guess I'm vain enough to think that my perceptions and the way I experience things is quirky or interesting enough to divert people from their own lives.
YP: What sort of advice would you give to someone who was interested in traveling as a way of life, but who didn't know exactly how to go about making that happen?
JG: I don't think it's a particularly good idea to think of travel as a way of life from the outset. I think that it's fun to travel and it's very enlightening to do so, but I would encourage people to find a part of the world that specifically interests them, and live somewhere besides the United States for a long period of time -- six months to a year. And just learn to live in a foreign country and take trips from there, but to really focus your attentions on a part of the world that particularly fascinates you or that you've always had an intuition about, rather than just travel from one place to another. Just pick a place, be it Mexico, Kathmandu, Szechwan, Peru, and live there.
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ISSUE 01 / SPRING 04
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