Tourism fiction: History and Key Facts

Tourism fiction is a genre of fiction that is written to generate tourism to specific areas and places. This is done by setting the fiction in real attractions and including short travel guides within the story showing readers how to visit the real places.

Tourism fiction can often be confused with literary tourism. Literary tourism refers to the tourism that naturally develops around places from famous literary works and authors, but tourism fiction refers to modern works written to specifically promote tourism.

Tourism fiction has taken advantage of modern technological advances in publishing, such as digital books with embedded web links. Digital tourism fiction novels and short story can offer readers direct web links inside the work that lead to the websites of the real attractions. This can be done on new devices like the Kindle, iPad, iPhone, desktop or laptop computers, and other smart phones and tablet devices.

The first tourism fiction novel with a fully integrated digital travel guide was Blind Fate by Patrick Brian Miller, published on Kindle in 2010. That novel was set in Montgomery, Alabama, and offered the first tourism guide with embedded web links inside the story that led to real websites. Other tourism fiction novels are being developed that will include such travel guides in both print and digital editions.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Tourism fiction by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.