How Are You Getting Where You Want to Go With Your Travel Writing?
Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on something very unusual for you guys.
In a way, you could call it the map to the Holy Grail, a la Indiana Jones–that is, if becoming a full-time, well-paid freelance travel writer sounds like a worthy mission to you!
Of course, there may or may not be poisonous snakes and collapsing tunnel floors in ancient ruins in this scenario. Unless that’s your preferred travel writing topic!
Five Magazines Looking for City Guides (Edition V)
Welcome to the Friday Freebie Five, a new weekly feature on Dream of Travel Writing’s Six Figure Travel Writer blog.
Each week, we comb our Travel Magazine Database to bring you five magazine sections open to freelancers around a theme–front-of-book trend pieces, long-form first-person features, short narrative postcards–to inspire your pitches.
National Geographic Traveler
“Mini Guide” is a short guide to a city offering suggestions on attractions, accommodation, and food. This is sometimes written by more than one contributor. It starts with a 200-word introduction and is followed by regular sections, “Book it” and “See it.” “Book it” describes, in 200 words, three accommodation options under the subheadings of “Trendy,” “New,” and “Classic.” Attractions are described in the “See it” section, with four options given in about 150 words. Destinations covered in previous issues include London and Tokyo. There is a further section which changes with each guide. Examples include “Eat it” with suggestions for comfort food in Tokyo and “Near it” with suggestions for other activities in England including hikes and mill tours.
Exciting Changes Coming to Our Weekly Travel Writing Webinars!
You may have seen that we have a very cool offer going right now for those of you interested in getting an all-access pass to the more than 500 magazine how-to-pitch breakdowns in our Travel Magazine Database, 300+-strong question-and-answer library, and 85+ hours of past webinars:
- When you join the Dream Buffet by July 31st, you can take 50% off your first month.
- When you join by July 20th, you have the opportunity to win a free conference pass and FLIGHT to the 2019 Women in Travel Summit.
But we have some other exciting additions to the offerings in the Dream Buffet that we wanted to let you in on.
Want a Sneak Peek of What We Publish in the Travel Magazine Database?–Check Out These 70 Magazine Sections Waiting for YOUR Pitches
One of the main questions we get from people about how to use our Travel Magazine Database is whether there’s any point signing up if you aren’t already sending a lot of magazine pitches.
Or if you don’t already know how to write pitches at all!
The thing is, we actually created the Travel Magazine Database to teach people how to write better pitches.
PayPal Now Available for the Travel Magazine Database
We’re delighted to announce that you can now also use PayPal to subscribe to our 500+-strong database of how-to-pitch information for magazines looking for travel articles.
We’re working on adding this payment option for other resources, like our Dream Buffet, but PayPal is not the best at playing with others, so we’re still working out the integrations with all of our different providers and will let you know as soon as that option is available!
Outside of PayPal, we use the top-of-the-line payment solution Stripe to handle all credit card payments on all of our sites.
Our On-Demand Coaching Concierge Now Has Answers to More than 300 of Your Top Travel Writing Questions!
Before there was Dream of Travel Writing or even The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map, there were questions.
I’ll never forget the time I was sitting in a room at the World Travel Market in London after one of the panels had finished up catching up on email, and a British gentleman came up and started chatting with my about what I did.
It was quite a few years ago, long before I ever even considered writing about freelancing, let alone coaching freelance business owners.
We were talking about what I did, and the conversation took a turn that it frequently did back then: a bit of puzzlement when I said that, yes, I was a blogger, but, no, I could not tell him what my blog was. I was a freelance blogger.
So I told him my mantra back then: “If I’m not getting paid, why would I write something?”
We Want to Pay for Your Flight and Registration for One of Our Favorite Conferences
Every year, on the mainstage and in the individual sessions at this conference, we are blown away by the amount of tell-it-like-it-is and no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you-you-can-absolutely-do-this wisdom shared.
It’s an environment in which attendees are so surrounded by people who are out there both doing work they love and running a solid business around that every year we watch those who haven’t yet made the leap into full-time freelance travel writing see that it’s possible to take the plunge successfully and put a deadline on when they will do it too.
Often just a few months after the conference takes place! (Because they’re so jazzed with possibility, they can’t stand to stay in their job any longer.)
We want this kind of experience for all of you.
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.