Video Transcript

Hi there, I’m Caroline Eubanks, the creator of this course. Firstly, thanks so much for purchasing it. My writing career sort of happened by accident after I took a class with an incredible teacher in college. I was a political science major that became an intern at a weekly newspaper, writing stories on everything from Halloween parties to book releases to hotel bars. It was there that I learned how to write for an online audience. I started a blog a few months prior but it was little more than photos and diary entries. 

In the years that followed, I used my published clips to leverage one into another. I was also growing my blog, Caroline in the City, during a year working abroad in Australia. Once there, I realized how little people knew about the region I came from. I told a fellow American that I was from Georgia and he said he was surprised to see all my teeth. So I saw an opportunity. 

I decided to focus my writing on the Southern United States and the places that I’d spent my life visiting. In 2012, I launched This Is My South to tell those stories. It was featured on Southern Living and other outlets.

From there, I continued to write for other publications including National Geographic Traveler, BBC Travel, Lonely Planet, Afar, and Fodor’s. And in July 2017, I was contacted by a publisher about creating a book based on my website. It became This Is My South: The Essential Travel Guide to the Southern States. I’ll discuss the process a bit more in the future but I wrote it in the course of about three months. I used the content I already had and added to it to create the guide. 

In this course, I’ll take you through the process to do it yourself!

Who Am I? What Do I Know?

I’m Caroline Eubanks, a freelance writer and travel blogger from Atlanta, Georgia. I started my first blog in 2009 as a college student as a way to express my creativity and love of travel. It also served as a portfolio for my burgeoning writing career. I started as an intern at a local arts newspaper and used one clip to pitch others. I moved overseas in 2011 and continued writing about my experiences. It was here that my writing career started to take off.  

Over time, I had bylines in BBC Travel, Afar, Thrillist, Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, Roads & Kingdoms, and National Geographic Traveler. But it wasn’t writing about far flung places. I found that everyone wanted to write about Paris and New York, but not everyone wrote about the places I knew.

From Blog to Book

So when I returned home after a year abroad, I decided to start focusing my writing on the Southeastern United States, an area I’d spent most of my life in. I heard a lot of misconceptions about the region while overseas and sought to correct some of them. 

In 2012, I launched my second site, This Is My South, a website about travel in the region. It was featured in Southern Living, Travel + Leisure, and many others. In 2018, my first book, This Is My South: The Essential Travel Guide to the Southern States, was published by Globe Pequot Press, inspired by my website. I was able to take the writing that I’d already done and expand upon it to create a print guidebook that travelers could use. It went on to win bronze in the Lowell Thomas awards.