Another thing, too. Guidebook entries would be *so much easier* to win than national newspaper coverage, surely? I get oodles of releases about luxury hotels from PRs who quite clearly have never read anything I write, and mist be desperate. I have *never* written, any more than in passing, about luxury travel. What a waste of their time and resource; most of the senders are now automatically marked as spam by my email filters. In essence, there are hundreds of contenders scrapping over very limited space in national media slots.

However, how easy would it be to put together a list of guidebook writers specialising in, say, Madrid and thereby try to secure entry into the new editions of all the major guidebooks? Publishers, on the whole, stick with their author unless s/he has totally loused up the last submission. You could secure long term, repeat business on the ground by getting into all the big guides (Nielsen will tell you which those are very quickly); and, like Annie says, also find your way into national press ‘by the back door’. It’s completely mystifying to me.