All Posts in Category: Company Info
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 9: Nine Weeks of Intensive, Pitch-Revolutionizing Online Programs
Today’s holiday trivia: In Greece, name days are a much-anticipated event each year, greatly overshadowing birthdays. Each person’s name day is celebrated on the day of the saint with the same name and is a cause for birthday-like celebrations including sweets, gifts, and parties, hosted by the person with the name of the day and often featuring live music. On January 3, it is the saint day of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, who is said was said to have saved Paris by diverting Attila’s Huns away from the city.
For today’s 12 Days of Holiday Specials offer, we’re giving you the first shot at accessing our newest opportunity to seriously up your magazine assignment game–the At-Home Ideafest and Pitchapalooza Programs with teaching assistant support to make sure you are on-track each step of the journey.
The responses past attendees have received from editors are incredible. Here’s one of my favorites:
“Thank you for sending in this pitch – I would like to take you up on it! Sounds like you have everything fairly dialed in and know the department well (thank you for that!)”
And it was a very quick acceptance, too!
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 8: Eight Classes to Learn How to Get Your Name on a Published Book in the New Year
Today’s holiday trivia: Celebrated from January 2 to 7, the Blacks and Whites’ Carnival is the largest carnival celebration in South Colombia, attracting a considerable number of Colombian and foreign tourists. The modern carnival is based on the need to express imagination, play, friendship and sharing the joy that surrounds the Epiphany. January 2’s celebration includes Tribute to the Virgin of Mercy, the Colonies Parade, and Pastorock, an event for the development of alternative music.
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 7: (Domestic flight included!) Seven-Day Travel Writing Bootcamp
Today’s holiday trivia: While countries across the globe celebrate New Year’s Day on January 1, Montserrat celebrates Jump-up Day. Commemorating the emancipation of the slaves of Montserrat, Jump-up Day is the last day of Carnival on the island with steel bands and masquerades, as well as male dancers chosen for their large size, who dance encumbered by chains to represent slavery.
If you woke up today, the first day of the new year, and thought to yourself or made yourself a promise somewhere along the lines of, “This year is going to be different. I am going to make sure that my travel writing takes off,” then this one is for you.
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 6: Six Steps to Never Having to Worry About How to Afford Your Trips Again
Today’s holiday trivia: Traditionally, the Japanese celebration of Ōmisoka had participants ensuring the completion of important activities before the end of the year in order to start the new year afresh. Activities ranged from house cleaning and repaying debts to purification rituals such as driving out evil spirits and bad luck, and bathing so the final hours of the year could be spent relaxing. More recently, families and friends gather together for one last time on December 31 to have a bowl of toshikoshi noodles—a tradition based on people’s association of eating the long noodles with “crossing over from one year to the next,” the meaning of toshi-koshi.
When we asked what people wanted to see in this year’s holiday specials, there was one thing people universally agreed on: they wanted to know how to land a spot on a press trip!
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 5: Five Webinars to Fix the Last Thing That’s Keeping You from a 90% Pitch Response Rate
Today’s holiday trivia: Kwanzaa’s week-long celebration from December 26 to January 1 honors African heritage in African-American culture. Created in 1966 by secular humanist Maulana Karenga as a specifically African-American holiday, Kwanzaa is observed in the U.S. and in other nations of the African diaspora and culminates in a feast and gift-giving. While observers of Kwanzaa initially avoided the mixing of the holiday or its symbols, values, and practice with other holidays, today, many African American families celebrate Kwanzaa along with Christmas and New Year’s.
Whenever I work with writers on their pitches (longer pieces of writing as well, but particularly in succinct formats like query letters), we spend at least one-third of the time on the concept of “journalistic detail.”
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 4: Four Days of Our Favorite Travel Conference
Today’s holiday trivia: December 29 is the main official holiday in Mongolia, marking the day the country obtained independence from China in 1921. To commemorate the holiday, Mongolians hold the largest wrestling match of the year. In Mongolian culture, wrestling is one of their “three manly skills,” the English name for the trifecta of wrestling, archery, and horsemanship. Wrestling is regarded as the most important of the three, and it is said that Genghis Khan considered wrestling to be an important way to keep his army in good physical shape and combat ready.
Today’s holiday special is very different than anything we’ve offered in the past. You don’t actually even pay us for it!
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 3: Three Days of Personalized Travel Writing Retreat
Today’s holiday trivia: As part of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28 is a day for pranks (similar to April Fools Day in North America) in Spain and Latin American countries. Pranksters or “inocentes” trick their friends and family; even newspapers, radio and TV stations have been known to participate by providing false stories.
The town of Ibi in Alicante, Spain, celebrates the festival of Els Enfarinats each year, as well, with participants in the day-long festival dressing in mock military uniforms and staging a mock coup while a band of street musicians tour the city. The “military” exercise their authority under a blaze of fireworks, flour bombs and eggs, surrendering at the end of the day with a traditional dance.
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 2: Two Private One-on-One Coaching Sessions
Today’s holiday trivia: Continuing our look at holiday traditions around the world, we travel east for a very different type of holiday. As a secular, communist country, North Korea has a different take on holidays than many societies. Its 71 official holidays include Sundays, for instance, and many holidays are based on birthdays of the party leaders and founders. Today North Korea celebrates its Constitution Day, for which the state provides rations explicitly for the holiday feasts.
When we surveyed you guys to see what you’d most like to see in our holiday specials, one of the things that came up again and again was opportunities for one-on-one coaching!
Since I’ve finished my coaching certification this year–which was a very eye-opening experience that I wish more people who offer business “coaching” would do–I’m even more excited than ever to work with you one-on-one to move your career forward.
Welcome to our 12 Days of Holiday Specials! Spread the Holiday Cheer
Today’s holiday trivia: A secular holiday, December 26 is celebrated as Boxing Day in a number of countries that previously formed part of the British Empire. For the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Trinidad and Tobago, Boxing Day is primarily known as a shopping holiday similar to Black Friday in the U.S.–the perfect start to our holiday specials!
In Ireland, however, the holiday combines both the religious feast of St. Stephen and an older pagan tradition of a purge day into something called Wren Day, when bands of young men dress in cloaks of straw and parade through the town “hunting” a (usually fake and stuffed these days) wren bird atop a decorative pole, stopping in at homes along the way in a trick-or-treating fashion with coins rather than candy as the treats.
If you’ve been itching for an opportunity to pop off questions to me when you need help–our new program will give you a way to do that too!
It includes the opportunity to have small-group calls with me to get your questions answered live nearly every week, include exclusive live access to all of our new webinars and a members-only monthly ask-me-anything call.
You’ll also have access to every question and answer we’ve ever handled for other clients, so you can find even what you need on the spot.
Help Us Choose What Special Deep Discounts You’ll Have in Our 12 Days of Travel Writing Holiday Specials This Year!
Small disclaimer: Absolutely no Dachshunds will be sent through the postal service as part of our travel writing holiday specials!
But, puppies aside, we want to know what you would like to see this year.
Each winter, we put together a riff on the 12 Days of Christmas between December 26 and January 6, 2019, with advance access to products we’re not launching until next year and deep, deep discounts on many of our offerings.