How to Hone Your Article Ideas to Perfectly Fit Each Publication
Last week, we walked through trip itineraries and dissected the different article formats and audience slants that would work for each. But I’ve always found, especially with writers new to pitching magazines, that this process of thinking, on your own, what can fit into a magazine is potentially very destructive.
You run the risk of getting addicted to an article idea that simply doesn’t or wouldn’t fit into a magazine that will pay you for your words.
Announcing: At-Home Pitchapalooza Coming to Your Inbox This January
I want you to take your freelance travel writing to the next level next year. How can we do that?
I don’t know about you, but I suck at taking online courses.
Invariably, I sign up for them, I’m very excited, and then I just don’t make time to log in.
Or I do, and then I’m disappointed because the course is (without advance notice) only available in video that you have to watch live on the site one at a time with no transcripts or slides or worksheets to do offline, and that simply doesn’t work with my sporadic nomadic email access.
Annual Freelance Travel Writing Review Part 1: Getting Real About Facts and Figures
Before we can do the very important and difficult work of planning the steps you need to take to reach your big, beautiful, well-paid travel writing goals next year, we need to know where you are now and how you got there.
What Travel Writers Need for the Holidays
My dad and best friend have both gotten me books as my Christmas present for years. From my best friend, it’s always her latest fiction love. From my dad, you never know.
How to Extract the Maximum Number of Articles from Each Trip
When we did our first couple travel writer focus groups, something really struck me about how many articles successful travel writers, as opposed to struggling (income-wise) travel writers, write from each trip.
I find that a lot of travel writers who aren’t happy with their income or still have a full-time job in another profession and haven’t broken out to make travel writing their full-time gig are essentially getting one paid article from each trip.
The Travel Magazine Database Went Looking for Writers: Here’s What it Found
We’re always on the lookout for talented people to add to our team here at Dream of Travel Writing (and we’re currently looking for an editor with WordPress experience and a 20-to-30-hour-a-week U.S.-based office manager, so reach out if you think you fit the bill!), and as a growing small business, there have naturally been growing pains in our hiring processes.
I’ve collected advice for years from friends who own other small businesses, from other writers and editors to web app company owners to digital agency heads. And one of the most frequent and resounding pieces of advice, frankly, feels a bit insulting.
They all agree that you have to relentlessly test people before you bring them on.
The Average Day in the Life of a Travel Writer
During a lovely interview for the Great Escape Publishing podcast (I’ll share it with you as soon as it’s out), the host asked me one of the most difficult questions for travel writers:
What is your average day like?
Our Values Here at Dream of Travel Writing
Last month, we had an extremely productive and illuminating team retreat for Dream of Travel Writing in London in advance of World Travel Market, our annual London travel writing workshop, our first weekend-long workshop at our retreat center in the Catskills, and our first freelance/small-business mastermind event.
One of the most important things that came out of that time was enumerating our mission both in terms of what is currently lacking in travel writing education that we would like to offer and the way we want to go about our business.
Our New Weekly Travel Writing Webinar Series Unpacks the Ins and Outs of Professional Travel Writing
In case you haven’t caught the news in our weekly travel writing newsletter (sign up at the bottom of this page and get the beginning of The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map for free if you’re not already receiving it) or social media accounts, we’ve started a weekly webinar series covering the inside scoop on travel writing.
Each week, we’ll look at what you need to know to become a pro:
- the most lucrative types of travel writing gigs–and how to get them
- step-by-step tutorials on all aspects of travel writing from pitching to coming up with ideas to writing different kinds of travel articles
- how to set up the work processes that professionals use to get their work done and keep assignments rolling in
8 Questions to Ask Before You Sit Down to Write Any Travel Article Pitch
This November, we’ve been kicking our live events into high gear with a new series of weekly webinars, travel writer focus groups around the world, a half-day workshop in London, and a weekend-long Pitchapalooza in our writing retreat center in New York.
In our live events, we use propriety worksheets to teach travel writers to walk through the same steps of generating, refining, and matching ideas that we do together in our workshops one their own at home.
One of the most powerful things that we do is teach people to think like an editor and get out of their own heads and their attachment to ideas and really begin to see the fit both with a specific magazine and it’s audience and with a print publication as opposed to a blog.