All Posts in Category: Coaching For Professional Writers
Last chance to get your roadmap for accomplishing your 2018 travel writing goals workshopped!
It sounds totally counter-intuitive, but we have spent a lot of the past four weeks in our five-week series on reviewing your past year and setting the course for the year ahead talking about why goals don’t work.
I wholeheartedly believe that goals can be a real impediment to moving your travel writing career forward.
Before I reached a point where I had clients I enjoyed working with, enough work (at at least $100/hour) that I didn’t need to do any marketing, and complete control over my schedule, I had a lot of goals for my freelance lifestyle and my writing.
And a lot of the folks that come to me for freelance business coaching have very strongly held goals as well.
In fact, I think it’s one of the things that separates the dreamers from the doers in many ways.
Want to Make 2018 Your Best Year of Freelance Travel Writing Yet?
I’ve been so delighted to hear by email and in the chat rooms of our webinars from many of you how our annual review webinars are making you see where and how you can improve your business in the year ahead.
If you haven’t yet joined the series, here’s what we’ve covered so far:
- What is Standing Between You and Your Travel Writing Goals: As the beginning of our series on working through a comprehensive inventory of your business, where it’s going wrong, and a clear tactical plan that fits with your life to move you through the next year, we devoted a full hour to discussing the most common issues that keep travel writers spinning their weeks and how we will chart a course through them in the coming weeks.
- How to Clearly Catalogue the Work and Opportunities You Have Now to See When Your Need to Go: We dove head first into an honest look at exactly what each of you has in your income, relationship, and opportunity inventory as we continue our series on annual reviews as a travel writer. We not only walked through exactly what data on your business to collect for your review, but also how to draw conclusions from it as to what you need to do differently or more of in the year ahead. *BONUS* This work will also give you a huge leg up on your taxes, in addition to positioning you to be just the helper your favorite editors need this time of year.
Announcing Two New Workshops Saturday, December 9 — Including a Live Online Workshop You Can Join from Anywhere in the World!
Many of you have asked me about or working with me on your writer’s websites, and I know this is a big sticking point for many of you!
We do have a “recipe” for getting your personal writing website (a.k.a. you freelance writer homepage, which should be different than your blog, if you have one) done in one hour, but for those of you that have varied interests, offerings, or travel backgrounds, or have been doing this for a while and simply have a lot to showcase, I know the task seems much more overwhelming.
So we’re going to offer a live, one-off, online workshop (integrating the participation, getting things done, and one-on-one critiques we offer in all of our live events) to make sure your website is ready for the new year: Plan, Perfect, Polish, Publish: Get Your Writer’s Website Done Now.
Is Your Style Holding Your Travel Article Pitches Back? Part 2!
I don’t like to think of myself as a grammar geek.
Before I left the 9-to-5 world to freelance, I had several jobs that required editing publications, from letter-length to book-length with lots of magazines and printed newsletters in between, but that type of work stopped sparking for me after a few years.
A lot of editors (the ones you really want to work in particular) get a really high from perfecting a piece of writing–taking what the write meant to say and making it indelibly clear for the reader.
When discussions of grammar and style arise among writers, it is very rarely with that same verve, that sparkle with which editors discuss it. And, more often than not, it’s because writers misunderstand its purpose.
A+ grammar and crystal clear style is not intended to drown out your voice or make your writing sound just like everything else out there.
Quite the opposite.
Is Your Style Holding Your Travel Article Pitches Back?
I often find it quite comical that my job is (and was for several years even before I was a freelancer) to be a paid writer in English.
While I am a native English speaker, my degree is in Italian language and literature, and I had originally planned to become an Italian professor, so even when I started writing professionally in my pre-freelance full-time job, I didn’t immerse myself in the tenants of journalism, its writing style, or its specific stylistic rules.
Many of you tell me that you are in similar situations with your own transition to freelance travel writing. Your prior experience is in an area so divergent (science or technical writing, law, engineering and the like come up often) from mainstream journalism that you feel as if you’re coming from another language, even if it is English.
Which Travel Writing Retreat is For You?
We recently announced the dates of (and exclusive $150 discounts through Sept 15 on) our winter and spring 2018 travel writing retreats in the Catskills:
- TravelContentCon: Friday, January 12 – Sunday, January 14
- Freelance Travel Writing Bootcamp: Sunday, February 4 – Saturday, February 10
- IdeaFest: Friday, March 16 – Sunday, March 18
- Pitchapalooza: Friday, April 13 – Sunday, April 15
But how do you know which event is for you?
Check out our step-by-step workflow to figure out which event best fits your needs right now in your travel writing career: Read More
Huge Discounts on All 2018 Catskills Retreats – Take 25% Off in Our Summer’s Last Hurrah Sale
If you’re in the U.S., I hope you had a great Labor Day weekend!
In France, they call this time of year the réentrée. It’s when people return from their idyllic French summers in their country homes or those of their friends (you know, the A Year in Provence life we have all dreamed of at one point). Children get ready for school. And the combination of cooling weather and shorter days subconsciously make us begin preparations for the coming bleakness of winter.
For travel writers, however, fall has the cheerful advantage of being the time we pitch stories to magazines or next spring and summer, as we’re always living in the future due to the rhythm of the printing press and its deadlines.
In that vein, I’ve already set up our calendar for travel, workshops, and weeks open for our $150/week individual creative residencies, and I feel silly keep those dates from you, as I know many have already asked me when the next batch of retreats will be, because they couldn’t make the dates this summer or fall work.
Catskills Creative Residencies Now Open Through April 2018
You’ve heard of our travel writing retreats in the Catskills, where a small group of travel writers come together in a peaceful country setting for intensive workshops and one-on-one critiques of their pitches, article ideas, content marketing proposals, and travel articles.
But did you know we also offer the opportunity to come up for a week on your own just to get work done?
The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map: “Must Read Book to Propel Your Travel Writing Career”
We’ve been very fortunate to have some lovely reviews of The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map come in recently!
Can You Make a Living from Travel Writing? Interview from Writers College
A travel writing teacher from The Writers College, a writing school that offers programs in the U.K., Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as online, recently interviewed my on what it takes to make it as professional travel writer.