Our Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook: the challenges of guidebook research and other considerations

Our research last year for the Syria chapter of our recently released Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook required that we visit everything already in the book, along with many more sights that weren't in the guide. And while we loved visiting all of those "out of the way castles and ruins", when making decisions as to what to include and exclude in the manuscript we have to think about how much other readers might enjoy what may appear to be merely a pile of rubble to anyone but the most avid archaeological enthusiast. In some cases, the ruins of a castle may be rather spectacular (like the one pictured) and may well be worth the effort to get to. But most readers, who are staying in Syria for an average of five days, might not want to spend a long day travelling (or indeed several days) to get to the site, especially if the journey involves long waits between buses in the middle of nowhere and perhaps even a spot of hitchhiking to get there.

The other consideration we have is word count. We can't just keep adding sights to books, and therefore adding paragraphs and pages. In fact, for almost every book we ever worked on for Lonely Planet we were required to reduce rather than add new text. So, in order to add a few paragraphs to include some of those off-the-beaten-track places some readers would love us to include, we'd have to remove sights elsewhere. When it comes to making those decisions we have to ask ourselves whether we should cut a popular site that might be visited by thousands of travellers to include an out of the way castle that may get visited by only a few hundred people? And with a country like Syria (and, now, under the current political climate, also Lebanon), we have to give this serious thought. How many people are actually using our book and visiting these places? When we did our six week road trip around Syria we only bumped into around 20 other travellers. We were alone at most major sights.

It would be heavenly to write a book with an endless number of pages and complete freedom to include everything we wanted to. But it would also have to have a fee to match. And that's another interesting consideration. How many publishers are going to pay us to go to all those out-of-the-way sights that might only ever get visited by a few hundred travellers at most? Not Lonely Planet that's for sure. And probably not many other publishers either...

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