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?
Making Your Story About the Journey Rather than the Destination is a Easy Trick for Successful Pitching
I’ve been in a travel writing conference for the last couple days observing something very curious throughout the keynotes.
Both keynotes—one by Don George, who was formerly travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and Lonely Planet’s annual travel writing short story anthologies, and another by Spud Hilton, the current travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who has won an obscene number of top travel writing awards in that position—focused on storytelling.
Each keynote was excellent, composed of a heavy dose of first-person experience layered with specific, well-articulated and vitally important tips of how to completely overhaul your stories for the better.
But at the end of both keynotes, both speakers were asked nearly identical questions along the lines of:
That all sounds great, but who is really publishing narrative stories like that right now? No one really wants to publish stories about the writer’s experiences with other cultures.
After this question, in both cases, a very curious thing happened.
Applications for Our One-on-One Travel Writing Success Coaching Open Next Week
I often get emails from people who are looking for coaching on their travel writing or just want to hop on the phone for an hour and talk about what they should do next. Or perhaps they have a pitch or a piece of writing that they want me to look at and tell them what I think.
One-on-one coaching is how everything we do at Dream of Travel Writing got started. I was attending events as a freelance writer, chatting with other writers, and thought the rates that I was getting paid like $250 a blog post (in 2013) or 50 cents or a dollar a word were what everyone was getting.
I was working part-time, spending half my day exploring new cities, and had a healthy, self-sufficient income I was proud of.
Are You Too Afraid of Writing Round-Ups for Magazines–Or Not Afraid Enough?
When the topic of writing feature-length pieces for magazines in heavily formatted articles like round-ups or guides is broached amount freelance writers who don’t have those clips under their belt (yet), one of two emotions usually comes up:
- abject fear at writing something that long for a magazine (and how long it will take them to do it)
- absolute “I got this,” because you write these exact same types of pieces for blog posts
In case you can already tell where I’m going with this, neither of those is the “right” answer.