Risking your life in a foreign land to find out whether it's safer to travel by taxi or rickshaw and which back alley shop offers the best deals on fabric, it turns out, pays just as crappy as it does not risking your life, sitting behind a desk, and reporting by phone. In Sunday's Times, Warren St. John took us inside the life of your lowly travel guide writer, often a recent college grad on a quest to see the world on someone else's dime. We've oft wondered of these faceless scribes behind the words of Fodor's and Lonely Planet as we navigate the tro-tro system in Ghana or climb the stone temples in Siem Reap: Are they a brilliant class of twentysomethings marching through the third world, getting paid handsomely and writing postcards home from regions their parents warned them about? Hah. Hah, hah. Hah.

It's difficult to generalize about the pay scale for guide writing because it varies so widely, though most guide writers seem to agree that the wages are not enough. A writer working from scratch on a comprehensive guide to a country may get an advance of $100,000, from which a year or more of travel expenses must be deducted. Some companies offer guide writers royalties, like conventional publishers. But most guide writing is decidedly less lucrative, and expenses are almost never covered separately. MTV and Frommer's, for example, are collaborating to publish a budget travel series for Europe for which they are paying writers $1,500 for roughly 150 pages of work.

Going on an average of 250 words per page, that's 37,500 words MTV is requiring. At $1,500 per gig, that's exactly four cents per word. It's a sad day when the Village Voice's pay scale looks enviable.

A Job With Travel but No Vacation [Warren St. John, NYT]