Announcing an Exciting New Feature: FREE Daily Webinars as Dream of Travel Writing Turns 1!
Here at Dream of Travel Writing, we do so much that it’s easy to forget that we’ve only been doing it for a year!
Last November, we:
- officially launched the Travel Magazine Database
- ran our first webinar
- sent our first weekly job lists
- hosted our first writers at our retreat center in the Catskills (which is now open for $150/week individual residencies!)
- ran our first “on location” workshop in London on breaking into magazines for bloggers
This November, we’re taking a moment to celebrate not just what we’ve done, but the amazing writers (and especially formerly non-travel writers who now are travel writers!) we have had the pleasure to work with this year.
It like an early Thanksgiving!
In honor of our first anniversary, we’re launching an exciting new feature: You can now stream all of our past webinars–one each day–for free.
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.
Is Your Style Holding Your Travel Article Pitches Back? Part 2!
I don’t like to think of myself as a grammar geek.
Before I left the 9-to-5 world to freelance, I had several jobs that required editing publications, from letter-length to book-length with lots of magazines and printed newsletters in between, but that type of work stopped sparking for me after a few years.
A lot of editors (the ones you really want to work in particular) get a really high from perfecting a piece of writing–taking what the write meant to say and making it indelibly clear for the reader.
When discussions of grammar and style arise among writers, it is very rarely with that same verve, that sparkle with which editors discuss it. And, more often than not, it’s because writers misunderstand its purpose.
A+ grammar and crystal clear style is not intended to drown out your voice or make your writing sound just like everything else out there.
Quite the opposite.
Is Your Style Holding Your Travel Article Pitches Back?
I often find it quite comical that my job is (and was for several years even before I was a freelancer) to be a paid writer in English.
While I am a native English speaker, my degree is in Italian language and literature, and I had originally planned to become an Italian professor, so even when I started writing professionally in my pre-freelance full-time job, I didn’t immerse myself in the tenants of journalism, its writing style, or its specific stylistic rules.
Many of you tell me that you are in similar situations with your own transition to freelance travel writing. Your prior experience is in an area so divergent (science or technical writing, law, engineering and the like come up often) from mainstream journalism that you feel as if you’re coming from another language, even if it is English.
Plating, Staging and Food Photography: Bringing Still Lifes to Life
Photo by Nicolas Ladino Silva on Unsplash
As travel writers, there are so many occasions in our day-to-day doing of our work when we need to take quick, uncomposed shots.
Sometimes you take a quick picture just to remind yourself of something later.
Other times you’re trying to get a personality shot of a guide or other person talking to your group—snapping shot after shot on sports mode like an event photographer and hoping some of them will have usable poses, hands that aren’t in motion, and eyelids that aren’t unattractively half closed (though zombies are very popular these days on television, not so much in blogs and magazines!)
And yet other times, you’re seeking that stealth shot of a local in a location you’re visiting—trying to capture that ephemeral sense of place with your lens on the sly so that you don’t insert the notion of observation into the atmosphere, which inherently changes what your subjects do.
Looking for Travel Writing Jobs? Grab Our Weekly Travel Writing Jobs List!
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash
Every week, we scour the web for every job posting of interest to the travel writers on our email list.
These aren’t always strictly travel (we know you all have many interests and writing subject matter expertise areas, and that’s a great way to diversify your income!), and we always kick in the quirkiest–and simply bad a$$est–jobs we turn up as well.
Are Freelancers Travel Writers Beginning to Lose Ground to Full-time Staff?
There’s a very interesting job listing making the rounds right now that some of you may have seen.
It clearly appears to be posted in error (at least the overly honest part), but I can’t say that it surprises me.
A Simple Technique to Never Go Home Without the Shots You Need Again
It’s happened to all of us.
You go somewhere a.maze.ing.
You take *tons* of photos.
The light is even fantastic, even though the weather forecast was crap.
All in all you can’t believe your luck (because we all know how easy it is to plan a big day of shooting only to have it foiled by weather, equipment issues, construction, or an entirely unrelated personal emergency), and you are sure you have a memory card full of excellent shots to sell, use on social, and support an epic photo essay on your blog.
Applications for Our New TravelContentCon At-Home Program Now Open
There are so, so many opportunities out there for travel content marketing.
How many hotels can you think of off the top or your head? How many destinations around the world? How many cities where visitors take tours during their stay?
In just the tour and activities market alone, in just the U.S., there are 68,000 companies valued at 20 billion. That’s not even the size of fish you’re probably going after. There are many, many more that are smaller and don’t have in-house staff devoted to their content marketing.
Every year when I attend the ITB Berlin travel trade show, more than 10,000 destinations, hotels, travel tech companies, and tour operators cram, often sharing several to a table, into a space the size of 30 football fields and pay anywhere from $4,575 to $38,200 to be there for just 2 days in front of around 160,000 German consumers and trade visitors (i.e. less than the monthly visitors of the vast majority of these organization’s websites every month).
Tourism boards in cities as small as Ontario, California (population 173,212), and Columbia, Missouri (population 120,612) are spending $1.9 million and $1.2 million, respectively, per year on tourism marketing and promotion. Destinations like Florida (population 20.61 million) and Philadelphia (population 1.6 million) spend more like $76 and $19.5 million respectively.
This: You Asked for Examples of Excellent Brand Content Marketing
A little while back, someone wrote me a question for the Monday Mailbag series that I wasn’t quite sure how to answer: what are some great examples of company content marketing writing (particularly blogs) and magazine articles?
Hard to answer, not because I haven’t seen them, but because there are so many!
Can Five Minutes a Day Really Increase Your Assignment Rate Four Fold?
Wanted to make sure you heard a few quick things about today’s call:
Our webinar will take place today at a very different time than usual as I need to catch a flight to a get down to a writing conference in Nashville before our weeklong boot camp starts on Sunday.
(I’m so excited to see some of you there! We have been working so hard on the outings, set up, and menus for this week to welcome writers coming from as far as Argentina to take their career to an entirely new level! If you’re interest in joining us for next spring’s bootcamp, you can take 25% off now in our summer’s last hurrah sale!)
Our topic for today may literally be the most important thing that we will every cover in a webinar.