All Posts in Category: Travel Writing Resources
Test Drive A Personalized Selection of Magazine Breakdowns from the Travel Magazine Database Today for Just $5
Today’s holiday trivia: On January 8, Bulgarians celebrate the feast of Babinden. A female-focused affair, the event dates back to pre-Christian times and honors children, mothers, grandmothers, and childbirth as all babies born in the previous year are anointed with honey and butter, and young mothers bring the favorite traditional Bulgarian cream-filled pastry, banitsa, along with new clothes to their midwives.
I recently received an elated email from our of our readers and past retreat attendees about an upcoming assignment.
It’s her first $1 per word piece, and it’s for a national publication that is a household name even outside of the U.S.
In the past months since she joined us for our Pitchapalooza retreat, I’ve seen an enormous change in her confidence as she’s lined up recurring gig after recurring gig, allowing her to cut out her non-freelance writing work and have the time and space to move into pitching magazines.
But this was an enormous achievement to have just six months into buckling down on her freelance travel writing career coming from a completely different line of work without clips to speak of.
Pick Up Your Print Copy of The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map for Just $13–With Shipping!
Today’s holiday trivia: While Christmas is typically associated with December 25, Orthodox eastern denominations celebrate the holiday in January. But Armenians take it to an entirely different level. Today begins Nakhatsenendyan Toner , a three-day-long Christmas Eve celebration that includes climbing on the roof of your home to sing Christmas carols.
We’re admittedly stretching the ten number a bit here and counting the introduction and the (very full!) appendix as chapters, but today we want to give you the opportunity to get The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map at cost to us–including shipping!
It costs us a bit more than $5 each to get each book printed, a dollar or so per book for shipping from the printer, then another $6 to send it to you by trackable mail.
So, today, if you don’t already have a copy of The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map, you can grab your copy for just $13.
Holiday Specials Are Here Starting With a Video Bundle for Just $18
Today’s holiday trivia: In Russia, which was secular for decades under the USSR despite being the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are the main holidays of the season rather than Christmas. Russian employees are typically off work until January 12. Just the right timing for our own digital holiday celebration 🙂
Happy New Year!
And welcome to Dream of Travel Writing’s 12 Days of Holiday Specials.
FAQ About the Anniversary Special for Saving $90 on the Travel Magazine Database — EXPIRING TODAY
I just got off two coaching calls in a row with writers who have been writing for low- or non-paying outlets comfortably with good relationships with their editors but are intimidated to make the jump into paying markets.
Here’s the thing.
If you have been writing for an editor who doesn’t give you edits or in some way teach you about the industry and move your career forward, no matter how low or high the pay for those assignments are, or how quickly you can get the work done, or how easy the work is because you write it off the top of your head, you’re losing money in two ways:
- you’re missing out on mentoring, which is, like “exposure,” one of the things you should be getting in a bargain for lower rates (a.k.a. anything less than $1 per work—and I even mean online)
- you’re solidifying bad habits that are keeping you from getting future work from better markets, because these editors are examining your work with a fine tooth comb
Want to Get Paid to Listen to Our Webinars?
Photo by Alphacolor 13 on Unsplash
Before our free live weekly webinars are added to our on-demand webinar library, where you get:
- downloadable and streamable versions of the webinar video
- downloadable and streamable versions of the webinar audio file alone
- complete access to the webinar slides
- any applicable worksheets
- a 10+-page full transcript of the text of the entire call
…we need to have the webinars transcribed!
We’re currently looking to fill a backlog that has built up and have openings for two things:
- people available immediately to get through our current backlog of webinars awaiting transcription (so it matters what’s on your plate for the next two weeks)
- people to take on weekly transcription assignments going forward
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.
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.
Today Learn to Navigate the Landscape of Travel Content Marketing with our Special Webinar Guest
Photo by Jonathan Pendleton on Unsplash
If you came to travel writing from first writing you own blog, you no doubt ran into a serious internal recalibration the first time you wrote for another website or magazine.
It’s less about the deadline than the readership. When you have you own site, there’s a certain level of confidence that you know what the readers are there for, what interests them.
With a new outlet, especially the first time writing for it, it’s all too easy to question everything you write as to whether it’s”good enough” or “what the editor wants.” Or to have your piece sent back for extensive revisions because what you had in mind for the piece is very different than what the editor understood from you pitch given her background with her own magazine.
In many conversations with readers and workshop attendees, I’ve found that when it comes to content marketing, it’s an entirely different ball game.
Five Magazines Looking for Hotel & Accommodation Profiles
Welcome to the Friday Freebie Five, a new weekly feature on Dream of Travel Writing’s Six Figure Travel Writer blog.
Each week, we comb our Travel Magazine Database to bring you five magazine sections open to freelancers around a theme–front-of-book trend pieces, long-form first-person features, short narrative postcards–to inspire your pitches.
Conde Nast Traveller (India)
“Where to Stay” is made of up about six articles all focusing on hotels and accommodation options. Most of these highlight just-opened hotels which describe the amenities, activities on offer, and the surrounding area. These are usually around 300 words long and can be written in first or second person. There is also a profile of a well-known person which rounds up their five favorite hotels around the world in about 300 words. Examples of people who have been profiled include Ayan Mukerji, film-maker; Shilpa Gupta, artist; and Dia Mirza and Sahil Sangha, an actor and film-maker couple.