John is saving for his next travel backpacking tour and working on two more books.
Acknowledgments
Publishing History of
How to See the World on $25 a Day or Less
I first thought of the project during my second five-month tour of Europe. I considered it while hitchhiking during my next few trips and finally began typing in 1994. My working title was The Art of Travel: Tools and Techniques of European and World Backpacker Travel.
In the summer of 1995 I received an offer from a publisher consisting of a $3000 advance and a 6% royalty on the cover price. The advance would be paid in two or three installments over the course of a year, and the royalty would only kick in after the first several thousand books were sold. My agent would get 15% of my cut off the top of everything forever, and I would pay his expenses. Approximately 20% of the royalty would be withheld by the publisher to cover returns. The publisher and the agent would get major chunks of the foreign and other rights.
So for you paying a $14.95 cover price for my book, three or four months later I would see about sixty cents of that!
No agreement was made and I was left to consider the merits of a poor deal versus no deal. (While the money was relatively trivial, other factors seemed to favor any deal over no deal.)
Fortunately I am by nature an optimist, so after a few months I began thinking how these events could actually be fortuitous, and that's how this electronic edition came about. Instead of doing 98% of the work for a few percent of the reward and laughably little say, I'm presenting this and other works directly to the public.
I hope this book can be of use to you.