Artsy Traveler is a travel blog for arts lovers that turns your reading list into an itinerary

I launched Artsy Traveler in March 2020 , which is arguably the worst possible month to start a travel blog. Travel stopped, we all hunkered down, and my new blog sat waiting.

Mt travel blog grew out of my other work. I write historical novels, all of them inspired by the arts, and in 2019 I'd built Art In Fiction, a database of arts-inspired novels. Developing it, I kept noticing that my readers were also travelers, people who planned trips around the arts and history in the books they loved. Artsy Traveler was my way to scratch that travel-writing itch.

When travel returned in 2022, so did I, and I began building Artsy Traveler into a real arts and culture travel blog focused mainly on Europe and Canada, with recent forays into Thailand, Costa Rica, and beyond. For a while, I ran it separately from my novels and my podcast (The Art In Fiction Podcast, 75 episodes now). I'd decided that Art In Fiction was for readers and Artsy Traveler was for traveler, although I began to suspect that more often than not they were the same person.

In 2026 I finally connected the dots. My ideal reader is a 55+ independent traveler who values comfort, chooses novels related to their arts and cultural interests, and plans trips around museums, galleries, and performances. Once I saw that clearly, Artsy Traveler stopped being a side hustle and became the front door. I even built a bot, Your Artsy Traveler Companion, that helps readers find arts-inspired novels set in the places they're visiting, plus related blog posts. The novels, the podcast, and the blog stopped competing for my time and started reinforcing each other.

Read and learn more about the Artsy Traveler at www.artsy-traveler.com

I'm curious how others here have niched down far enough that separate projects ended up serving the same person.