Does Summer Travel Season Automatically Mean Slump Time for New Freelance Writing Business?
Summer is such a tricky time for travel writers.
If you have a family or friends that you travel with, it’s a time with much travel, but a frequent struggle between balancing the leisure side of travel (not just for you, but those you’re with!) with the demands of traveling as a travel writer, and all of the note-taking, picture-posing, and interview-grabbing that entails.
If you primarily get your work travel done in the off-season, summer can be a great time to relax and take a staycation to reset…but only if you have enough paid work on your plate.
Daily Free Travel Writing Webinars for July
These webinars are only available at the times listed, live, but you can catch the replay in video, audio, and transcript form, along with the webinar slides, at any time in our on-demand webinar library.
Check out the full schedule of July’s webinars and register for your favorites below.
Want to Take 50% of Registration for One of the Top Professional Associations?
A very cool opportunity came my way this past week that I am excited to share with all of you.
If you regularly join us for our new weekly webinar, you may have heard me rave about a conference that I went to earlier this spring/late winter that was bursting with editors that were friendly, easy to connect and chat with, and from very high-profile outlets.
I also mentioned that the conference itself was very expensive for an association conference and so it probably wasn’t the best fit for many of you.
But… (there must be a but, right?)
They have a really attractive promotion going on right now for membership to the association (the International Association of Culinary Professionals), which includes recordings of many of the sessions with editors I found particularly valuable from the annual conference.
Daily Free Travel Writing Webinars for June
These webinars are only available at the times listed, live, but you can catch the replay in video, audio, and transcript form, along with the webinar slides, at any time in our on-demand webinar library.
Check out the full schedule of June’s webinars and register for your favorites below.
Is Working on a Guidebook Really as Hard as It’s Made Out to Be?
When The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map first came out, weighing in at more than a pound and featuring nearly 400 pages covering every facet of the travel writing life from the schedule to the rates, the negotiating tactics to lists of hundreds and hundreds of magazines to target, and templates for everything from pitches to mapping out your best writing hours, a lot of people asked me how long it took to write.
Typically, these people were:
(a) not full-time writers, and/or
(b) not people who had ever written a book-length work
Help Underprivileged High School Students Experience the Transformative Power of Travel
Here at Dream of Travel Writing, we are passionate about the power of travel to completely change lives, especially those of young people.
It’s the reason I worked in study abroad before I left to freelance, and originally planned to be an Italian language professor before I realized I could reach and empower more people to learn about other cultures through travel writing.
I myself am from a very small town and never left the country until a program through my high school in my late teens, and my business partner/husband, whom some of you have met and others may have heard me mention is from India, had the same experience with a program to Germany when he was in high school that inspired him to intern in Switzerland and finally come to the U.S. for grad school.
Should You Take a Second Look at Guidebook Writing…For the Paycheck?
Like any profession, travel writing has its trends of what’s “cool” that flow in multi-year segments.
In the past few decades, those ebbs and flows of popular taste have elevated enthusiasm and then relaxed it around many different types of travel writing work:
- blogging on a personal travel blog
- freelance travel blogging
- earning money as a social media influencer
Most of us are aware of the rise of these temporary stars of the field—the things that people all teach and everyone wants to do all at the same time, creating a huge flood in the market so that the tactics those first pioneers use don’t work anymore, and clients become weary of quality and consistency and skittish about investing.
But while these “new media” media have gotten a lot of press and attention, in the background, the more traditional ways of earning a living as a travel writer also have their own mini vogues among those that are focused on the work of earning a full-time living as a travel writer.
You could, in fact, say that the periodic rises in popularity of these “old school” ways of getting paid for your travel writing are actually primarily embraced by those looking for the easiest ways to make a living from their travels.
Those with their nose to the ground for where the demand (for travel writers in the global marketplace) outstrips the supply (the travel writers who know about these opportunities and put themselves in their path.
How Does Our One-on-One Coaching Really Work?
If you’re still considering whether or not our coaching program is right for you, I wanted to take a few minutes today to really spell out, in detail, what our program looks like once you get started.
As we’ve been exploring in our emails on why we offer coaching, how coaching is different than consulting, what freelance and small business coaching costs throughout the marketing, and our coaching philosophy, everyone really has very different specific needs.
But that makes it really hard to know what you’re signing up for!
So, to help you visualize what we can do together, let’s start at the beginning.
Daily Free Travel Writing Webinars for May
These webinars are only available at the times listed, live, but you can catch the replay in video, audio, and transcript form, along with the webinar slides, at any time in our on-demand webinar library.
Check out the full schedule of May’s webinars and register for your favorites below.
When Can You Write the Same Things for Magazines Your Writing for Your Blog?
I say this a lot. And a lot of you are already very aware of without me having to mention it, but…
The kind of writing that flies on blogs is *very* different than what appears in print magazines.
The perennial question, however, is how?
In many ways, the way people (editors, namely) talk about this different calls to mind the famous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said:
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
Besides “you know it when you see it” , what can I point to that separates the type of writing that appears on the web from what appears in print?