Upcoming Webinar: VoiceMap’s new publishing plans

Join us for one of two webinars breaking down VoiceMap’s publishing plans, with a focus on the new features and services we’re offering to publishers.  We’ll look at why we’ve set them up this way – and why there are five of them – as well as how we expect the plans to develop over time. 

We have tours in almost 400 destinations now, and across all of them, we’ve seen a wide variety of opportunities and challenges – from production issues like GPS canyons and tight deadlines to distribution puzzles, like tours that do fantastically through one channel but barely sell anywhere else. We’ve always aimed to offer each of our publishers a solution—or at least a set of tools—that support their on-the-ground efforts and set them up for success, but with the new plans, we’re offering a more structured approach, where this is helpful. 

Continue reading “Upcoming Webinar: VoiceMap’s new publishing plans” »

Upcoming Webinar: How a Berlin-based tour operator published 6 audio guides in 12 weeks

Join VoiceMap’s second webinar for a conversation with tour operator Jo Eckardt, who started A Friend in Berlin after she moved back to Germany from New York twenty years ago. 

Jo taught German at NYU, and also worked for the UN, but Berlin is her favourite city, and while she showed everybody around herself in the early days, her company now has a team of guides offering tours in eleven languages. Jo is also a psychoanalyst, an author and – of course – a VoiceMap publisher

The first of Jo’s tours was published in 2015. She didn’t publish another one until October 2022, then she published six of them in twelve weeks – and at last count, she was on eleven. Jo was inspired by how much easier it had become, and all the ways in which VoiceMap’s tools and processes had improved over the years. But she was also really clever about using the structure of a tour to her advantage. 

Continue reading “Upcoming Webinar: How a Berlin-based tour operator published 6 audio guides in 12 weeks” »

Webinar Recording: Following Prince through Minneapolis with Frank Bures

VoiceMap held its first webinar in March. Our Head of Content, Gary Morris, spoke to Frank Bures about how he produced his third VoiceMap tour, In the Footsteps of Prince. Frank has published six VoiceMap tours and is the author of The Geography of Madness, which Newsweek called one of the best travel books of the decade.

Some highlights from the webinar:

(4:35) The beginnings of the Footsteps of Prince tour

(17:30) The working relationship between the publisher and the editor

(19:30) The audio recording process

(23:05) Mapping techniques and considerations

(2:10) Frank on creating his first VoiceMap tour

(27:35) The importance of storytelling when creating a tour

(31:49) Frank’s top advice for new tour publishers

(32:42) A live reading of Frank’s favourite passage from the tour.

Continue reading “Webinar Recording: Following Prince through Minneapolis with Frank Bures” »

Upcoming Webinar: Following Prince through Minneapolis with Frank Bures

Join VoiceMap’s first webinar for a conversation with Frank Bures, the author of four VoiceMap tours as well as The Geography of Madness, which Newsweek called one of the best travel books of the decade. 

Continue reading “Upcoming Webinar: Following Prince through Minneapolis with Frank Bures” »