Today’s holiday trivia: January 4 marks a major festival in the Ryukyuan religion, a formal of Shintoism practiced in the islands between Japan and Taiwan, particularly Okinawa. The hinukan, a hearth god that guards the sacred family fire, returns to the family after returning to its own home for several weeks and is welcomed with offerings of rice and local alcohol.

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 Program.

Based on our live IdeaFest retreat, this new four-week program is designed to provide a serious and lasting foundation to turn you into an idea machine, turning up dozens of article ideas every day.

For the home program, we’ve spread the same material we cover in our live event out over four weeks with one email lesson each day (rather than me talking for an hour and a half for each!):

  • January 15 – 19: Getting crystal clear on the three sides of the idea triangle–the conceptualizing approach that will insure you never have an idea that an editor doesn’t think fits her magazine again.
  • January 22 – 26: The magazine-first approach to pitching in practice–learning how to let magazines give you dozens of ideas of what to pitch them, and getting comfortable enough with the magazine landscape that you never have to wonder what kind of magazine would be interested in a certain story again.
  • January 29 – February 2: Final checks and the spin cycle–the methods to not only ensure your ideas don’t bong with the magazines your pitching, but the see how those “outside the scope” concepts actually become dozens of new pitch ideas for other magazines.
  • February 5 – 9: Pitching specialized articles–digging into the dreaded (or highly anticipated!) feature, essay, and long-form markets and learning to formulate ideas that cover thousands of words as well as thousands of miles or years while expressing everything in the succinct format of an idea that can be proven to sell.

You can read more specifically about the new IdeaFest program here, including why this program is the foundation you’ve been missing, how the program progresses, and how the program works if you aren’t able to attend to the lessons right away as they’re assigned.

The crazy thing about today’s special offer, however, is that we are not only giving you first crack at the new program and a deep discount–we’re also throwing in the At-Home Pitchapalooza Program.

In its five weeks, from February 12 through March 16, the program will walk you through:

  • breaking down your past trips and future trips into pitches tailored for specific publications
  • learning how specifically to pitch short magazine sections (100-300 words), recurring columns, and features
  • troubleshooting all the common pitch issues and work through all the snags you are each hitting individually
  • spending time not only writing pitches, but reworking them to make sure they hit the mark
  • breaking down common editor responses, how to handle them, and how to negotiate for higher rates when you do get the assignment

As part of this special, nine-week offer, you’ll receive:

  • 45 lessons (daily on weekdays for the 9 weeks of the two back-to-back programs)
  • access to the Travel Magazine Database for the duration of the program
  • private forum to discuss and critique assignments, article ideas, and pitches–available not just during the course, but going forward for you to use again and again, even to redo the program material during future rounds of the At-Home IdeaFest and Pitchapalooza Programs

Today, you can grab a spot in both programs for just $99–more than 60% off the regular price ($129 for each program).

Besides this serious discount, this is also one of the only ways into the At-Home IdeaFest Program running January 15 through February 9, or the continuation, the At-Home Pitchapalooza Program running February 12 through March 16, this winter.

This iteration of IdeaFest will only be open to:

  • past participants in the At-Home Pitchapalooza Program or live Pitchapalooza retreat who opt in to participate in IdeaFest at this time
  • people who have already requested access to the At-Home IdeaFest Program when we first offered the opportunity to enroll through our webinars at the end of 2017
  • people who grab a special $99 offer for both the At-Home IdeaFest Program and At-Home Pitchapalooza Program (a more than 60% discount off the regular price of $129 per program) during our 12 Days of Christmas deal on Thursday, January 4

Grab your spot in both programs for just $99 now.

Please note: If you have your eye on the live version of these events (IdeaFest and Pitchapalooza) coming up this spring, we’ve got a special offer for those retreats coming later in the 12 Days of holiday specials! And, attendees of the live Pitchapalooza will receive access to the At-Home IdeaFest Program before their workshop to prepare for the event.

This offer has ended. Thank you!

Please check the 12 Days of Christmas page for the new daily offer, or add your email address below to get the day’s offer in your inbox each day when it opens.