Announcing: At-Home Pitchapalooza Coming to Your Inbox This January
I want you to take your freelance travel writing to the next level next year. How can we do that?
I don’t know about you, but I suck at taking online courses.
Invariably, I sign up for them, I’m very excited, and then I just don’t make time to log in.
Or I do, and then I’m disappointed because the course is (without advance notice) only available in video that you have to watch live on the site one at a time with no transcripts or slides or worksheets to do offline, and that simply doesn’t work with my sporadic nomadic email access.
Or, and this happens a lot with courses that make big promises, the course material simply takes WAY more time than advertised because you’re expected to read 25 pages a day and fill in 15 pages of worksheets, and being a freelancer rather than a college student, I simply don’t have that much time to study on top of my work.
For all of these reasons (and I’m sure you have other gripes about online courses that hadn’t occurred to me!), we decided here at Dream of Travel Writing long ago that online courses aren’t for us.
They go against many of our core values, especially:
- We don’t believe large instructor-to-student ratios create tangible results, and we are committed to only offering small group and one-on-one sessions.
- We are committed to helping you navigate the difficult path of running a freelance business, which is not for everyone, to discover which route you personally need to be on and only take the best steps for your needs, background, and situation.
- We are committed to making sure our writers finish what they start.
So here’s what I decided to do to help you hit the ground running in the new year.
This January, we’re going to offer a five-week correspondence program designed to help you create 10 polished pitches and leave confident you know how to write pitches that get responses every time that you can do from your own home.
It’s not a course. There’s nothing to do online. It’s like pre-internet writing courses where your mentor mailed you an assignment letter, you mailed back your work, they looked at it and sent back comments with the next assignment, and so on.
Except it’s via email, and the homework is bite-size.
It’s incredibly important to me that you’re able to both read the lesson and respond to my email with the homework each day, so I’m keeping it very short and concentrated. Through each lesson, you’ll work on a facet of the pitching process, so that your pitches assemble themselves without you even realizing.
Or read more about the new program, include the full, week-by-week schedule and see how our Pitchapalooza weekend workshop inspired this new at-home version of the program.