All Posts in Category: Pitching Writing Clients
Are You Afraid to Pitch Feature-length Travel Articles?
A very curious thing has happened in our At-Home Pitchapalooza Program.
Even though, at the outset, a lot of folks said they are primarily interested in writing features or writing more features, there is a lot of reticence to nail down the ideas and magazines to pitch those features to.
Is That a Magazine Idea Cheat Sheet in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
One of my favorite ways to ensure that every trip:
- results in assignments,
- results in assignments that I want to write, or, best of all
- results in assignments that I want to write that are achieved with minimal pitching effort
…is my pocket idea cheat sheet.
How to Hone Your Article Ideas to Perfectly Fit Each Publication
Last week, we walked through trip itineraries and dissected the different article formats and audience slants that would work for each. But I’ve always found, especially with writers new to pitching magazines, that this process of thinking, on your own, what can fit into a magazine is potentially very destructive.
You run the risk of getting addicted to an article idea that simply doesn’t or wouldn’t fit into a magazine that will pay you for your words.
Announcing: At-Home Pitchapalooza Coming to Your Inbox This January
I want you to take your freelance travel writing to the next level next year. How can we do that?
I don’t know about you, but I suck at taking online courses.
Invariably, I sign up for them, I’m very excited, and then I just don’t make time to log in.
Or I do, and then I’m disappointed because the course is (without advance notice) only available in video that you have to watch live on the site one at a time with no transcripts or slides or worksheets to do offline, and that simply doesn’t work with my sporadic nomadic email access.
Our New Weekly Travel Writing Webinar Series Unpacks the Ins and Outs of Professional Travel Writing
In case you haven’t caught the news in our weekly travel writing newsletter (sign up at the bottom of this page and get the beginning of The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map for free if you’re not already receiving it) or social media accounts, we’ve started a weekly webinar series covering the inside scoop on travel writing.
Each week, we’ll look at what you need to know to become a pro:
- the most lucrative types of travel writing gigs–and how to get them
- step-by-step tutorials on all aspects of travel writing from pitching to coming up with ideas to writing different kinds of travel articles
- how to set up the work processes that professionals use to get their work done and keep assignments rolling in
8 Questions to Ask Before You Sit Down to Write Any Travel Article Pitch
This November, we’ve been kicking our live events into high gear with a new series of weekly webinars, travel writer focus groups around the world, a half-day workshop in London, and a weekend-long Pitchapalooza in our writing retreat center in New York.
In our live events, we use propriety worksheets to teach travel writers to walk through the same steps of generating, refining, and matching ideas that we do together in our workshops one their own at home.
One of the most powerful things that we do is teach people to think like an editor and get out of their own heads and their attachment to ideas and really begin to see the fit both with a specific magazine and it’s audience and with a print publication as opposed to a blog.
Pitch This, Not That: *Much* Better-Paying Replacements for the Usual “First Clip” Travel Writing Outlets
As one of the first assignments of its travel writing program (more on that here), Matador has long had students scour the web to find places that pay for travel writing and then share them online.
For each website or magazine, students list the editor’s name, how to get in touch, and the submission guidelines for the publication.
How Can You Tell Which Editor to Pitch at a Travel Magazine?
When I talk to freelance travel writers about their biggest issues in pitching a lot of people talk about the difficulty in finding the right editor to pitch.
Writers fear that if they send a stellar pitch to the wrong editor it will get deleted, simply because of irrelevance, before they even get their chance to shine and sell their idea and their writing abilities.
The Gift that Keeps Giving: How to Break One Trip into Unlimited Travel Articles
Writers love to talk about “finding a good home” for a story. As if the story, or the idea that pre-dates it, is a child you are putting up for adoption, and you’ll only let go of it if you know its new mother and father will take better care of it than you ever could.
How Long Does it Take Magazine Editors to Respond to Travel Article Pitches?
One of my favorite quotes of all time from a magazine editor came from Peter Fish, at the time editor-at-large for Sunset magazine, a major newsstand publication in the Western U.S.
At the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference in 2015, someone asked a panel of editors how long it takes them to respond to a pitch.