The Flourishing Creator

All Posts Tagged: pitching

Editors Have Needs. Please Fill Them.


Let’s turn your usual visions of editors around. Rather than envisioning an editor:

  • seeing an email come in from someone they don’t know and either ignoring or deleting it;
  • finding something fundamentally wrong with your subject line and deleting your email without reading it;
  • opening your email, checking if you have any clips from national magazines and deleting it when they find none;
  • reading your email, liking the idea, and then sending it off to one of his or her writers to work on

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When Was the Last Time You Met a Travel Magazine Editor?

I’ve previously attended the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference and I’m always delighted to see the seats full of writers, who already have a flourishing business with travel writing as their full-time occupation or are on their way there.

But even more than hearing their stories of taking the leap, quitting their previous professions, and making travel writing work for them, I loved seeing them interact with editors.

It is so easy to have an “us vs. them” mentality about editors as a freelance writer.

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Five Magazines Looking for Essay Pieces

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.

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Have You Ever Tried to Pitch a Travel Article Idea in Person?


A few years back, I went to one of the major writing conferences in the U.S.—more for writing books that journalism or blogging—and it included the opportunity to share a table with dozens of literary agents for three minutes each and directly pitch them your book in hopes that they would like it and offer to represent you and help you get a book deal.

You only got 90 seconds to present your case though. The rest of them time was for them to respond or ask questions.

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This Week’s Webinar: Don’t Create “Ideas” Out of Nowhere: How to Always Find Them When You Need Them

During our weekend workshops with an ambitious numeric goal to reach—100 article ideas matched to magazines at our recent IdeaFest, for instance—there is always a hesitation in the air on the first day and even the morning of the second about whether each writer will reach the goal.

For IdeaFest, we had several group sessions on what an idea really is, what editors need from us, and how to make sure your idea is a good fit for a magazine before I handed out pages marked one through 100.

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