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.
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