Guide special: You can't believe everything you read

"You are not tourist? You make guidebook? OK, OK. I give you free carpet if you put my shop in book." It's a warm spring morning in the back streets of the Turkish city of Antalaya. I'm in town updating the Turkish chapter of the Rough Guide to Europe. This is my first travel-writing gig and I've come to rely on the multi-lingual, local oracles that are the carpet sellers.

I explain that I don't want a free carpet, I just want to know if some restaurant three miles out of town is still open. "No, no. It burn down. Owner he die. Nothing there. My uncle has good restaurant much closer. You like my carpets?" I don't know what to believe but at least the carpet sellers speak English and look up from their tea and newspapers - unlike the staff at the local tourist office.

My fee to cover Turkey - roughly 2,000 miles in 20 days on spine-bending local buses - is £700 (£400 up front). For an updating job like this there are no royalties rolling in over the years and, apart from my flight - some publishers won't even stump up for that - I have to pay all my own expenses. My brief is to update information in more than 25 towns for several hundred restaurants, bars, nightclubs, hotels and guesthouses. Then I have to check local tour operators, bus services, maps and every other detail of the book. After that has been done, I must find new stuff and re-write the text.

To complete this task, to even a reasonable level, in such a large country would take months, not weeks. Most seasoned guidebook authors rely on steers, local contacts, some freebies and an intimate relationship with their subject country to make the job easier.

Before you start screaming "fakers," remember this - it would take years to thoroughly update, eating and sleeping in every entry in a guidebook about a very popular country. Factor in low fees from the less scrupulous publishers and what the paying public gets is hardly definitive.

Such companies rely on a high turnover of cheap, inexperienced labour. The good contributors then move on to better things, quickly realising that "travel writing" on behalf of certain guidebook producers is simply very hard work for poor pay and bad treatment. The product suffers and the eagle-eyed, guidebook-buying public (at an average of £16 a throw, these books are not cheap) will spot the mistakes.

In one of the guidebooks I worked on, details of a hotel that was set in a remote location hadn't been updated for almost a decade and four editions. The hotel's name, its owners, management, style, telephone number and every other conceivable detail had changed. But why would a jobbing writer who is earning less than £20 a day from which expenses have to be paid, want to travel miles out of their way for one line in an 800-page book?

Don't get me wrong, writing or updating guidebooks can be incredible fun. My favourite part is the reviewing of beaches - what's the sand like? Good snorkelling? Water quality? Can I get a good cocktail with a sunset view? These important questions need answering.

The flipside is trudging around filthy, labyrinthine backstreets, looking for a tiny, elusive flophouse for backpackers (the twentieth that day) and being chased by the local dogs and robbed by the local kids while suffering the after effects of the dodgiest food in town.

At the end of the day - thank God for the carpet sellers.

Andrew Spooner is the present author of 'Footprint Thailand'