Amy Piper had been travel writing since 2016, treating it as a hobby while planning toward retirement from her full-time job as a program project manager for a corporate IT company. She attended conferences with the Midwest Travel Network, building connections that would later prove valuable. During the pandemic, the network’s owner reached out with mysterious advice: “Someone is going to call you, just say yes.”
That call led to Piper’s first book project, “Midwest Road Trip Adventures,” where she contributed the Michigan chapter alongside writers from 12 other Midwest states. The timing was perfect—no one was traveling much, but everyone wanted to plan their next adventure. The book became an Amazon bestseller in 2021.
Building on this success, Piper pitched “100 Things to Do in Lansing Before You Die” to Reedy Press, published in September 2021 with approximately 1,500 copies sold. Her latest work, “Secret Michigan: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure,” was published in April 2024, featuring color photography and discoveries from her statewide travels throughout 2023.
A graduate of Holt High School, Piper has lived in the community since age eight, but her career has taken her around the world. With a Ph.D. in instructional design, she wrote training materials for Hewlett Packard and spent six months in South Korea working with LG’s top management team. Another six-month assignment took her to Argentina, where her undergraduate Spanish major proved invaluable.
These international experiences helped shape her future goals. “I wanted to be able to keep traveling after retirement,” Piper says. She took a travel writing course and attended a three-day workshop in New Orleans, learning industry insights like how to secure compensated stays at resorts.
For those pursuing their own dreams, Piper’s advice is straightforward: “You just have to have goals and set your sights on what you want to do. Once you know the what, you can then figure out how.”
“Before I traveled much, I thought, ‘Holt is just this small little place,'” Piper reflects. “But after you see the world and sit in 16 lanes of traffic in Seoul, you think, oh I really did like the fact that I never sat in traffic in my town. I can go to the Wharton and see Broadway plays but I don’t have to go to New York. You really learn to appreciate your town after you’ve been out and about in the world.”
Find Amy Piper’s books on Amazon, at local bookstores, or through her website followthepiper.com/pipers-books.