Everything You Need to Know About Early-Bird Prices for Our New Press Trip-Style Event
It’s time to open up early-bird registration for our new event: My First “Press Trip.”
Early-bird registration is a special opportunity that we offer once for each event to get two things:
- $150 off the event
- special bonuses that are only available to early-bird registrants!
What Will We Do at Our Summer Camp + My First “Press Trip” Retreats?
This week, we’re opening up registration for a brand-new retreat specifically requested by our readers.
During our Coaching Program Summer Camp last year, we had such a wonderful, inspiring, and rejuvenating time simply being travel writers together, doing our own thing but in the company of others with similar goals, experiences, and issues to debate over meals and wine tastings, that our readers wanted us to expand it, so we’ve created a new retreat to do just that.
Win a Free Copy of Our New Book: 101 Magazines That Want to Publish Your Travel Articles
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A Brand New Way to Understand What It’s Really Like to Be on a Press Trip and If It’s for You
We asked, you answered, and we listened!
We’re launching a brand-new retreat format this summer that is 100% focused on being out, in the field, exploring a destination with ample guidance so that you can see if the life of a travel writer is for you and learn how to up your game in terms of how you travel vs. how a professional travel writer travels.
We’re modeling this event after our awesome but intense week-long bootcamp and our summer camp for coaching students, which focused entirely on tours and other pitch-idea-gathering outings laced with impromptu lessons on whatever most piqued the interest of the group, covering a wide range of topics like:
- the theory and practice of food photography, including trends over time and how to develop your own style
- how to get the most information out of reticent interview subjects
- what to do when a source basically invites you to meet their family, gives your a parting gift, spells out their name and important dates in great detail, and then tells you that you can’t write about any of it
- how to turn chance encounters with interesting people well-known in their fields into articles in subject areas you don’t know well
- how to get the information you need for your piece when there are customers vying for your sources attention
- what to take from your mountain of notes and information into an actual pitch or piece
and much more!
New Year, New Books, New Prizes for You :)
Isabel Allende, as a rule, begins all of her books on January 8.
“Originally, it was out of discipline; now it’s to organize my life,” she told a gathering of writers at the Book Passage book store in California in the summer of 2015. “I need the space and the silence.”
As an author of 22 books, which, though primarily works of fiction, typically feature a heavy sense of travel in space and often time that affords her a close relationship with travel authors, Allende has clearly devised a method that works.
What is the Travel Writing Summer Camp? Why Should You Care? And How Can You Join?
The very short answer to “what is the Coaching Program Summer Camp” is that it is probably similar to what you wish your life could look like all the time:
- the morning hours (until around 2 p.m.) are completely unscheduled so you can focus on getting your most important work done in your choice of ideal work space: a library stocked with magazines and inspiring books, desk set against floor to ceiling windows looking out at the mountains, or a chair in the sun in the garden
- breakfast is ready whenever you are, including house-made yogurt, jams, and freshly baked sourdough bread
- lunch is picked from the garden right before you eat it, whether for a salad of heirloom greens with just-plucked spring onions, chives, and herbs or a sandwich with just-made bread, house-made pesto from greens grown on site, and tomatoes that came off the vine one minute before being sliced
- (whenever it works for you) meals, morning workouts, and afternoon research outings can be shared with other committed travel writers excited to discuss everything from trips to troublesome editor relationships with you
- each afternoon includes the option to visit a winery, distillery, brewery, historic site, state park, museum, artist’s workshop, or whatever you-name-it-and-it’s-an-option-on-the-schedule activity you can think of to practice your interviewing or article idea generation or to bone up on a subject area that you might be interesting in writing about but currently don’t feel an expert in
- weekends are spent exploring new destinations after the requisite highly Instagrammable brunch on a mountain top
And yes, if you’re interested, there’s also croquet, bocce ball, frisbee, ping pong, bonfires, outdoor movies, and whatever other lawn sport or arts and crafts or summer activity screams summer camp to you.
What is the At-Home IdeaFest Program? Why Do You Care? And How Can You Join?
The short answer is: our IdeaFest Program is a revolutionary way to re-orient the way you think about article ideas.
If you feel like you just don’t quite “get” it, that’s exactly what we designed this comprehensive program to fix!
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The Real Reason Why We Travel Even When It’s Hard–And How to Bring That into the Rest of Your Freelance Work
There is an important part of doing something new that we always seem to forget in the excitement of novelty.
Our need for novelty has been well documented in pretty much anything you read today about the technology addiction pandemic.
Whenever that little ding of a notification or flash of a new email appears on our screens, we get a hit of the chemical dopamine, the same chemical associated with eating your favorite food, having sex, and getting high on cocaine.
And when the extent of the new thing in your life is equally as momentary–scanning the latest shutdown headline, trying a new flavor of ice cream, or checking an editor’s tweet calling for pitches–the let down if it doesn’t turn out as planned is short-lived and typically doesn’t cause you to ask bigger questions about why you are doing what you’re doing and if it’s really a good idea and whether you should just chuck it all and stop right now.
But when the new thing is bigger, like, say, trying to become a freelance travel writer, and what you’ve invested in that new thing is on a scale of months or years, when you hit a snag, the reaction can be very different.
What I Learned About How to Approach Freelancing Setbacks from Failing at Vacation
Over the holidays, I seriously failed at vacation.
Not in the way that many of us feel that we do, when we discover something with an amazing story and our unsuspecting friends and relatives get stuck listening to a half-hour lecture on the lives of potters in ancient Greece from a local we’ve decided is an excellent source.
Nor in the way that many of us also struggle with—cutting the laptop/phone umbilical cord.
Well, to be fair, I certainly am guilty of that on this trip as well, but since I’ve been doing that since long before I met my husband, back Thanksgiving meant my friends and roommates would endure six weeks before the actual event of fiendishly testing, photographing and blogging recipes every moment I wasn’t at my day job.
This year, I failed at vacation in a way that feels worse precisely because it isn’t as “simple” as deciding whether to or to not be on one’s laptop.