All Posts in Category: Company Info
Join Us From Home for Our Landmark Live Workshop on the State of Magazine Pitching
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Due to some requests from our readers outside the New York area, we’re making this Saturday’s workshop on how to Master Magazine Pitching available to attend even if you aren’t able to join us in person.
We’ve tested the streaming in the event space and the speed is excellent, but we’ll have someone onsite specifically attending to those tuning in remotely to make sure that you can share in all the exercises and get your questions answered as if you were there in person.
Why is this workshop special?
Announcing an Exciting New Feature: FREE Daily Webinars as Dream of Travel Writing Turns 1!
Here at Dream of Travel Writing, we do so much that it’s easy to forget that we’ve only been doing it for a year!
Last November, we:
- officially launched the Travel Magazine Database
- ran our first webinar
- sent our first weekly job lists
- hosted our first writers at our retreat center in the Catskills (which is now open for $150/week individual residencies!)
- ran our first “on location” workshop in London on breaking into magazines for bloggers
This November, we’re taking a moment to celebrate not just what we’ve done, but the amazing writers (and especially formerly non-travel writers who now are travel writers!) we have had the pleasure to work with this year.
It like an early Thanksgiving!
In honor of our first anniversary, we’re launching an exciting new feature: You can now stream all of our past webinars–one each day–for free.
These webinars are only available at the times listed, live, but you can catch the replay in video, audio, and transcript form, along with the webinar slides, at any time in our on-demand webinar library.
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.
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.
Big Changes Are Coming to Our At-Home IdeaFest, Pitchapalooza, and TravelContentCon Programs
There are a lot of changes coming to our at-home programs–the versions of our live events, like Pitchapalooza, that take place over several weeks that you do from home rather than our location in the Catskills.
- major changes coming to ensure participants participate and finish their programs
- moving to a university-like model in many ways–your lessons and homework are when they are, and they’re due when they’re do–to move further away from the issues with online courses that people never finish
- new TravelContentCon and IdeaFest programs on the horizon
- IdeaFest (live or at-home) will now be a prerequisite Pitchapalooza (live or at-home)
- groups will be smaller and prices for some programs will change, but there will be much more personal attention as a result (in some cases more similar to a limited-term intensive coaching program, like at the retreats) and it will allow me to even run programs with just three people at a time if that’s who we have at that time (see–extra personal attention!)
- participation in group discussions (on a discussion platform for pitch- and idea-related programs or in group calls for TravelContentCon) will be a core component as it is essential to success–MFA programs are based on group critique sessions for a reason Read More
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?
Missed Out on Our Past Webinars? They’re Coming Back on Demand (with Full Transcripts!)
We heard you. A lot of you want access to our past webinar content.
And, even more importantly, you want to know exactly what I said, maybe even just read it rather than listen to the webinar.
Or, you’d like the audio version only so you can listen while you’re on a run or in the car. Or maybe just a downloadable version of the video webinar so you can watch it offline on a long flight.