All Posts in Category: Running Your Writing Business
How to Launch Your Travel Writing Career in One Hour (Seriously!)
In one hour, you’ll be official. I promise. Ready to start your travel writing career?
Find Your Next Gig on These Travel Writing Job Boards
If you are new to writing, travel writing, just the particular geographic area or type of travel you’d like to write about, or if you simply need to get money coming in as soon as possible, it can be faster and easier to start with jobs that already exist rather than creating your own.
How Much Can You Really Make as a Travel Writer?
In my post on three ways to earn six figures as a travel writer, I looked at three different paths for earning six figures as a travel writer based on your interests (workwise, not travel-wise) and the type of work that best fits your schedule, motivations and work talents.
But I know the idea of earning $100,000 a year from travel writing seems both far away and a bit preposterous to many folks who are just starting out and trying to figure out how to even earn their first $1 from something they’ve written.
Three Ways to Earn Six Figures as a Travel Writer (With Full Income Breakdowns)
Over dinner the other day, a friend asked me how someone would make, say, $10,000 a month as a travel writer.
It didn’t even take me a minute to think of a comfortable income breakdown to meet that.
Travel Writing Books and Courses I Recommend (Believe Me, I’ve Tried Everything)
Before I actually made the leap—as in quitting my job to freelance full-time, not simply starting to publish some pieces—into travel writing full-time, I spent five years seriously studying up on the profession.
In that time, when I thankfully had a full-time job to foot the bill, I took every course I could get my hands on, loyally read every blog on the topic, and devoured over travel magazines and books on travel writing.
“Normal” Travel Writing Pay Rates
Post “Great Depression of Publishing,” it’s a little difficult to call any freelance rates normal.
I had one writing coach once tell me, when I said that I maintained an hourly rate of at least $100 with all of my work:
Even before I stopped pitching, my hourly rate magazine work was never less than $250 per hour.
A Quick Way to Find Out If a Magazine Pays (Well)
When you pitch a magazine that hasn’t been referred to you as a viable market by another freelancer or been verified in a magazine database like Mediabistro’s How to Pitch guides, Wooden Horse Publishing (now sadly deceased), or the Dream of Travel Writing Travel Magazine Database, you can run into a real problem.
You get an assignment. You write the article. And then you find out the magazine pays peanuts.
Do Travel Magazines and Newspaper Travel Sections Still Pay?
One of the biggest myths about travel writing that I’ve encountered is about the pay for travel content.
For years, people have been going around saying there is no pay for writers anymore. Yet somehow a lot of us still earn a living this way.
Can You Break into Travel Writing Faster Through Other Interests?
When I first started learning about how one goes about actually making a career as a travel writer, ten years ago, I quickly noticed something that both surprised and disheartened me:
All of the people who called themselves “travel writers” actually wrote about other things. In fact, many write about other things most of the time.
There was the woman who taught my 8-week Mediabistro bootcamp on how to be a travel writer. She primarily wrote about technology. You could actually call her more of an aspiring travel writer, honestly.