We recently connected with Brian Thacker and have shared our conversation below.

Brian, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Jumping around between different careers can be risky. Particularly if that ‘dream job’ you are chasing isn’t really a career. And it all happened because I got laid off. Twice.

My background is as an art director in advertising. When I got laid off (the first time) I applied for a job as a tour leader escorting busloads of 18-30 year olds around Europe. The ad also said that there was opportunity for ‘winter ski work’. That’s what sold me. I wanted to be a ski guide in Switzerland (yes, I know very specific, but I’d met an Aussie ski guide in Switzerland and thought that was the best job in the world).

Three years later I came back to Australia, got a job in advertising again then got laid off a couple of years later. This is where my other, what I thought was a silly dream, came true. While I was looking for work (well, while I was sitting at home watching Judge Judy) I started to write down some stories from my days on the road as a tour leader. After I’d written a couple of stories I thought: ‘Hey, this could make a really funny book’. I decided then to take four months off and write a manuscript. Around fourteen drafts later I had a 78,000 word manuscript and sent it to ten literary agents. The first four responses were rejection letters, including one agent who claimed: ‘No one wants to read that shit.’ Well, apparently they do because in the space of a week I had three agents write to me offering to take me on as a client.

I choose an agent and he sent the manuscript off to a couple of publishers who promptly rejected it. The next publisher he tried saw my manuscript on the top of a pile and thought the title sounded interesting and picked it up. She had a read and not long after I signed a book deal.

When Rule No.5: No Sex on the Bus went on to be a bestseller with nine reprints my publisher asked me to write another one. And then another one…

Because of my books I started getting requests from magazines to write travel articles. I now write for publications in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Life is full of pivots and I like to think that it’s these pivots that shape you and make life more interesting. I had to pivot when I got laid off from my advertising creative job and chose to chase what I thought were silly dreams, but also a big change was moving to another country.

The first time I moved was from Australia to London to work in advertising and then five years ago I moved to the U.S. (I married a Minnesotan girl). Then a little thing called the pandemic happened. Travel writing (and advertising) work dried up, but then the pandemic threw me a lifeline (so to speak). Because no travel journalists from Fortress Australia could get parole from Covid, I was offered a press trip to Colorado.

This is where a wonderful slice of serendipity came in. I was on a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and my guide was telling me how she had just started working for a new company that was making travel podcasts. They’d just finished a series on Estes Park, Colorado and had another series lined up for Tennessee Tourism.

She said that I should meet the guy who started the business because she thought we’d ‘get on really well’. That guy was Aaron Millar, an English travel writer (and twice British Travel Writer of the Year) who was now living in Colorado. He already had a successful travel podcast series that he started during the pandemic and was branching out making podcasts for tourism destinations.

We met and we did get on. I immediately started working for Aaron helping to ideate, research and write the Tennessee podcast series.Then it got busy. Since then, Armchair Productions has created podcast series for tourism destinations all across the U.S.

I now not only do research, writing and producing, I also host the podcasts as well.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My mission is very simple. Do something that I love. I’ve managed to ‘work’ (and I put that in quotation marks because I don’t consider it to be work) as a ski guide, tour leader, author, travel writer and podcaster.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.brianthacker.tv
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bthacker/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianthacker/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@brianthackertravelwriter