All Posts in Category: Pitching Writing Clients
How to Pitch Five Magazines Looking for Neighborhood Profiles
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.
National Geographic Traveller (UK)
“Neighbourhood” is a 1,500-word article covering a different city each issue. In third person, the writer covers three neighborhoods in the city covering some interesting points on the history, trends, and what the reader can expect to see in each. Quotes are sometimes used from locals. There are two sidebars to accompany the article. The first is called “When in [city name]” which rounds up six things to do in the city. Rather than specific places, these cover broader suggestions such as eat dim sum, rather than naming a particular restaurant. Further suggestions could be visit a park, play a local sport, or try a well-known drink from the area. The second sidebar is called “More Information” and it lists practical information such as useful websites, how to get there, and the cost of hotels and tours for example. Destinations recently covered include Venice, Madrid, and Hong Kong.
Join Us This Week for Free Travel Writing Lessons on Increasing Your Pitch Success Rate and Generating Sure-Fire Saleable Ideas
In the two years since we began running regular one-hour travel writing classes, we’ve covered more than 80 topics, including:
- how to land free trips
- how to get paid really, really well for your writing
- how to get on magazine editors’ good sides
- how to navigate every step of the process to land travel content marketing work, including phone calls and proposals
- how to keep your hourly rate down so your bank account goes up
- how to get work done on the road
- how to write, step-by-step, 15 different types of travel articles
- how to land guidebook and other traditional publishing deals
You can grab access to all of our past webinars (and a ton of other resources you can’t find anywhere else) with a subscription to our Dream Buffet or grab them one-by-one when you need them in our On-Demand Webinar Library for a set with the video, audio, transcript, and slides.
But we also air a free replay of one of our travel writing classes each and every weekday.
How to Pitch Five Magazines Looking for Chef Profiles
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.
OnTrak
“Chef Spotlight” is a 200-to-250-word profile of a Pacific Northwest chef who is contributing to culinary developments around the region. It’s written in third person, and offers a deeper, more personal look into a well-known restaurant around Portland, Vancouver, Seattle, and beyond. The writing style is detailed and fast-paced. Each article also offers a background of how the chef came to prominence, and why he or she chose to open a certain restaurant in a given city. A recent “Chef Spotlight” examined the daily operations of David Sapp, the chef at Portland’s Park Kitchen, who teaches cooking classes at Sur La Table, while sourcing everything at his restaurant from local farms, wineries and distilleries. Another article profiled Canadian chef and entrepreneur Erik Heck, who founded Vancouver’s Flying Pig eateries, and serves only sustainable seafood on-site. Text is accompanied by one image, and no sidebars.
Learn to Make Six Figures as a Travel Writer for Just $5 This Week
I’m often asked in interviews what my number one piece of advice for aspiring travel writers is, and I have an answer for that.
When you’re starting from zero, the path forward is much more clear than when you’ve been at it for a while and are struggling.
Not enough people ask me that question: What is my number one piece of advice for struggling travel writers?
For those who have been at it for years and feel like they’re gong to quit if things don’t turn around soon, or like they should quit but they can’t imagine doing anything else and need to find a way to make this work.
How Exactly to Move from Trip Memories and Notes to Completed Travel Article Pitches
To be honest, I’m a bit scared to do this series.
For our next round of live travel writing classes, we will offer a (probably shocking to many of you) window on how pitching takes place for an established writer in the most minimal time with the least possible fuss as we walk from initial trip notes all the way to polished pitches leaving my inbox right before your eyes.
To make sure you can see and ask questions about my decision-making at every phase, I will walk through each step of the process completely live with no prep work outside of our calls (or cheating, as I would call it!) to pretty things up or do more digging into an idea.
Become an Author with Our New Webinar Series on Non-Fiction Book Deals
I don’t talk so much about this side of my writing, but in the summer of 2015, I took some time off from my freelance writing work to give myself a DIY MFA in book publishing, from the craft side to the ins and outs of working with a traditional publishing house.
Over the last couple years, while I’ve been working with all of you on Dream of Travel Writing, I’ve kept my ear to the ground in those circles and continued that education, but something else very interesting has happened in the intervening years.
I’ve seen many folks I know go from book proposal to published book (and often follow-up books!).
It’s simply amazing how fast and easy it is to become a traditionally published author today. That is, if you go about it the right way.
Are You Still Waiting for that “Aha” Moment with Travel Content Marketing?
This past weekend, I had the privilege of spending three days with highly motivated, hardworking, and inspiring travel writers for our TravelContentCon retreat event.
We took our first three sessions up on the top of the Catskill’s famous Sam’s Point lookout as we explored what content marketing means today, and that’s when the magic began.
Want a Sneak Peek of What We Publish in the Travel Magazine Database?–Check Out These 70 Magazine Sections Waiting for YOUR Pitches
One of the main questions we get from people about how to use our Travel Magazine Database is whether there’s any point signing up if you aren’t already sending a lot of magazine pitches.
Or if you don’t already know how to write pitches at all!
The thing is, we actually created the Travel Magazine Database to teach people how to write better pitches.
Making Your Story About the Journey Rather than the Destination is a Easy Trick for Successful Pitching
I’ve been in a travel writing conference for the last couple days observing something very curious throughout the keynotes.
Both keynotes—one by Don George, who was formerly travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and Lonely Planet’s annual travel writing short story anthologies, and another by Spud Hilton, the current travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who has won an obscene number of top travel writing awards in that position—focused on storytelling.
Each keynote was excellent, composed of a heavy dose of first-person experience layered with specific, well-articulated and vitally important tips of how to completely overhaul your stories for the better.
But at the end of both keynotes, both speakers were asked nearly identical questions along the lines of:
That all sounds great, but who is really publishing narrative stories like that right now? No one really wants to publish stories about the writer’s experiences with other cultures.
After this question, in both cases, a very curious thing happened.
Even If You’re a Pitch Wizz and an Idea Magnet, You’ll Still Struggle to Get Pitches Out if You’re Missing This
People who aren’t happy with the types or quantity of the paid travel articles they’re writing tend to come in two flavors:
- they’re established writers, even established magazine writers, that always work with the same editors and have lost the confidence to pitch new-to-them markets
- they pitch so infrequently (and spend the rest of their writing time writing assigned work for content shops OR for themselves on their own blog or a novel project) that sending five pitches in one month is a serious event
On a very basic level, you could say that a regular, concerted pitching effort could bring about serious changes for people in these situations.
And pitching is actually very easy. It just involves writing 150 to 250 words. That only takes ten minutes! So these folks are all set, right?