Titanic Model, Free CA State Parks & Lonely Planet Writers
The end of the world is here. First, Fine Art Models, a Birmingham, Michigan based company has an exact 18 foot replica model of the Titanic based on the original plans of the White Star liner RMS Titanic, which sank with the loss of 1,500 lives some 96 years ago. The model is on sale and is attracting bids worth millions of dollars.
The 18-foot (5.49 meter) long replica of the ill-fated ship, meticulously recreated from brass, wood and fiberglass by Fine Art Models of Birmingham, Michigan, took seven years to make and is the only model to use the ship’s original blueprints, the makers say. Kohs wouldn’t say how much the replica may end up selling for, but added that a condition of any sale is that the public will always be able to view the model for free. Fine Art also added scale models of furniture and equipment. The successful buyer can, if he or she wants, rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic. - Titanic Model, With Deckchairs, Attracts Million-Dollar Bids, Chris Peterson, Bloomberg News, May 27 2008
Here’s a prediction. Some fruitcake billionare is soon going to build a life-size replica of the Titanic, and offer cruises on it. Sounds like fun, huh? If I was a fruitcake billionare, I would order a Titanic myself. For on-board entertainment, I would offer James Cameron’s Titanic going down with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Maybe hire Celine Dion to sing live on-board. Course, since I’m only a fruitcake and not a billionare, you’ll have to find your own Titanic.
Moving on, a California Assemblyman has an equally end-of-the-world kind of proposal. He wants to offer free admission to every one of California’s state parks and beaches all year long. San Jose Mercury News has the details.
Attempting to solve the recurring budget shortfalls that have left California’s once-renowned state parks system struggling with too many repairs and too few rangers, Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, plans to introduce a proposal today to increase funding for parks through the state’s vehicle fees. Under his proposal, which is expected to face opposition from Republicans who call it a tax increase, a $10 annual surcharge would be assessed on the registration of all vehicles except trailers and commercial trucks. In exchange, anyone driving a vehicle with a California license plate would get free year-round admission to any of the state park system’s 278 beaches, parks or museums - from redwood forests to Southern California sand dunes. Parks normally charge entrance fees between a $6 to $10. - Laird proposal would make state parks free, Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News, May 27 2008
Interesting proposal, but I doubt if it’s going to be implemented. You know, anything which works against a free market will eventually end up in the dust bin because the money intended for the State Parks will most likely never reach it. Meaning that the DMV will collect the extra tax, but after a couple of years, State Park funding will be back in the doghouse and the DMV money will end up getting lost in the blackhole of the State Government’s budget.
Lastly (hat tip to Jim Benning at WorldHum), Wayne Bernhardson, an Oakland, CA based writer who wrote guide books for Lonely Planet for ten years, including Chile & Easter Island, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Baja California, South America on a Shoestring, and The Rocky Mountain States, throws in his 2 cents on the real scandal of exploitation of writers at Lonely Planet. The recent storm in a teacup generated by Thomas Kohnstamm’s ‘Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?’, he says, is superficial.
But this may have been part of a strategy to rid the roster of authors whose royalties were too substantial; in fact, they soon demanded that authors who were copyright holders would sell those copyrights to the publisher. Reluctantly, the authors did so, and those who continued to work for LP took de facto pay cuts that I would estimate at 70 percent. - True Confessions? The Real LP Guidebook Scandal, Wayne Bernhardson, Southern Cone Travel, May 27 2008.
There’s a lot more in the post which deals with issues faced by travel writers, and the authenticity of guide books. End of the post, he offers some particularly useful guidance, where he says that he looks for a book that has continuity, from an identifiable author who has returned time and again to the destination.
I’d go a bit further and say that a destination guide should be written by people who live there, rather than a visitor. I mean, there are so many things to do in Chicago and places like Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York - How can you expect a visitor to write about everything accurately? Besides, it saves companies like Lonely Planet a lot of travel expenses, if the author is based in the same city that he’s writing about.
Posted on May 29th, 2008 by PLing
Filed under: Travel News
I don’t think it’s obligatory for a guidebook writer to be a resident in the destination he or she covers, but it is essential to have a longstanding relationship with it. As it happens, I live part time in Buenos Aires, but I feel equally comfortable in the rest of the country, where I was an established network of friends and acquaintances who can suggest the latest restaurants and hotels in, say, El Calafate (where my wife’s cousin is a year-round resident and a guide in Los Glaciares National Park).
LP, for what it’s worth, is not worried about saving their updaters expenses. They pay a fixed fee for the book, and it’s up to the author to control expenses if he or she wants to make a profit off the project.
So Lonely Planet doesn’t even pay travel expenses? That’s even worse. Scandal! :)
To clarify: To the best of my knowledge, LP still pays a fixed fee for every project. The person contracted receives a percentage of that fee as an advance from which he/she pays expenses; an equivalent fee on submitting the manuscript; and a smaller remainder when the book is published. If you keep your expenses down, your net earnings (if any) will be greater. Obviously, this is an incentive to do things on the cheap.
Again to the best of my knowledge, LP also prohibits its contractors from working on the same destination for another publisher for one year after the book is published. In my opinion, this contractual clause would not hold up in court, but I don’t know that it’s ever been challenged (or even if they’ve ever tried to enforce it).
Thanks for the clarification. One thing I still don’t get. Why write for them and then bitch about not being paid properly? You (not you per se, but Lonely Planet writers in general) could just refuse if you don’t think its a good deal. Is it some kinda career thing, where being a Lonely Planet writer looks good on your resume, and helps you get a better job, or its easier to get your own book published, or something like that?
That’s a very good question. I think there’s a certain relict romanticism about LP’s reputation that makes people eager to take the job on. As I wrote before, I have no complaints about my financial dealings with the company, but had I known more about contracts before signing on with them, I might have done much better. But I agree, any prospective LP contractor should run the numbers to see if it’s worth the trouble.