Niche Idea 1: Activity Specific Travel Journals

When selling your own travel journals on KDP or any other platform, it can help to niche down to a more specific sub-type or sub-topic. In this week’s niche idea, we will niche down the travel journal to specific activities.

When deciding on an activity to create a travel journal for, the place to start is with the end user–what do they want to do with it? Many times these journals will represent collections of travel experiences.

Examples:

• The hiker who documents the trails they have been on. These would usually be day hikes or weekend trips. For this kind of journal you may design it so people can fill in the names of the hikes/trails themselves, or you could pick a region and format it like a bucket list. For example all of the best hikes in a state or province.
• Likewise, a skier or mountain climber may document the mountains they have skied or climbed. As with hikes, you could design the pages so people are free to fill in whatever mountains they want, or you could make pages for all the mountains in an area. For skiing (I am not a skier, FYI) I believe there are multi-mountain passes so that might be another way to theme your book.

Another type of activity specific travel journal may be slanted towards once in a lifetime experiences. For example, a journal about walking the Appalachian Trail, or the Camino de Santiago. Another popular walking vacation is to walk across the UK.

For these, the whole journal would be around that one experience. Because of this, you could add in some useful trip planning content and maps to the journal.

While outdoor activities are the obvious choice, you could also create a travel journal around music festivals. Unless your really lucky, most people only get to attend 1-3 festivals in a year, so design this one to span multiple years.

As a music fan, I would probably want one that would last me my whole concert going lifetime. If you are a fan of Portlandia, you know that while after 40 the desire to see a show may not fade, but the desire to do so at big festivals with tens of thousands of people does lose appeal. (Check out the episode with the Flaming Lips and virtual reality if you don’t already know what I am referring too–I can never look at a man bun the same again).

I would think room to document about 30-40 experiences would be enough.

Just like with the outdoor activities, some larger events might be worth their own journal. Large festivals like Glastonbury or Coachella which are destination events might be once in a lifetime trips for some. Just be careful about any trademarks for these festivals.

I hope this stimulates some creative ideas for you. I invite you to subscribe to my weekly newsletter for tips and tutorials for KDP and printable creators, including weekly niche ideas.