All Posts in Category: Professional Writer Mindset
Want to Hit Your Travel Writing Goals Next Year? Start With Your Values
When I talk for the first time to a travel writer in the process of building their career—whether they’re just starting or they’ve been at it for decades but have never felt that ‘click’ of sustainability where they know they can do this and make the money they want for as long as they want—an eerily similar thing typically happens.
It takes a lot of guises though.
These writers are typically asking me a very specific, tactical question about how to do one specific thing: write pitches more quickly, make sure their ideas fit a magazine, find the right place to pitch a specific piece, or get started with those lucrative content marketing gigs.
And as I’m explaining the answer, the odd thing happens.
I Want to Stop the Scope Creep Hate that’s Making You Secretly Despise Your Travel Writing Clients
On a coaching call yesterday afternoon, I had a conversation that I have much more often than I would like.
This freelancer had a client that had landed themselves with a cold email–the first of the kind for this writer–and landing the gig filled her with so much pride and positivity.
At first. (There must be a but coming, right?)
The bumps started small. Her client insisted on providing her all of the blog post ideas, but would only give them one at a time. And not always on-time.
This left the freelancer constantly having to rush to complete the blog posts assigned, often dropping other things to do so. We talked about how to move the client into giving her batches of post ideas at once, and that helped. For a while.
Why Is It So Hard to Make the Changes We Need to Make to Achieve Our Dreams? (And What We Want to Do About It)
I always planned to be a professor.
Throughout college and for many years after. I laid the groundwork to go back to school for a PhD in Italian literature.
Travel writing was meant to be a way to pay the bills legally while I was in Italian working on research for a dissertation.
There’s all sorts of odd things you have to also learn about to get a PhD, at least in Italian literature.
It wasn’t enough to speak fluent, academic-level Italian. I actually was going to need to pass proficiency tests in up to three other languages, from other romance languages to unrelated ones like German. Theoretically this was so we could read literary criticism on a global scale.
I also would have needed to read and be able to speak at length in an oral exam on every single significant work of Italian literature over a roughly 1,000 year period.
How Are You Getting Where You Want to Go With Your Travel Writing?
Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on something very unusual for you guys.
In a way, you could call it the map to the Holy Grail, a la Indiana Jones–that is, if becoming a full-time, well-paid freelance travel writer sounds like a worthy mission to you!
Of course, there may or may not be poisonous snakes and collapsing tunnel floors in ancient ruins in this scenario. Unless that’s your preferred travel writing topic!
Want to Take 50% of Registration for One of the Top Professional Associations?
A very cool opportunity came my way this past week that I am excited to share with all of you.
If you regularly join us for our new weekly webinar, you may have heard me rave about a conference that I went to earlier this spring/late winter that was bursting with editors that were friendly, easy to connect and chat with, and from very high-profile outlets.
I also mentioned that the conference itself was very expensive for an association conference and so it probably wasn’t the best fit for many of you.
But… (there must be a but, right?)
They have a really attractive promotion going on right now for membership to the association (the International Association of Culinary Professionals), which includes recordings of many of the sessions with editors I found particularly valuable from the annual conference.
Should You Take a Second Look at Guidebook Writing…For the Paycheck?
Like any profession, travel writing has its trends of what’s “cool” that flow in multi-year segments.
In the past few decades, those ebbs and flows of popular taste have elevated enthusiasm and then relaxed it around many different types of travel writing work:
- blogging on a personal travel blog
- freelance travel blogging
- earning money as a social media influencer
Most of us are aware of the rise of these temporary stars of the field—the things that people all teach and everyone wants to do all at the same time, creating a huge flood in the market so that the tactics those first pioneers use don’t work anymore, and clients become weary of quality and consistency and skittish about investing.
But while these “new media” media have gotten a lot of press and attention, in the background, the more traditional ways of earning a living as a travel writer also have their own mini vogues among those that are focused on the work of earning a full-time living as a travel writer.
You could, in fact, say that the periodic rises in popularity of these “old school” ways of getting paid for your travel writing are actually primarily embraced by those looking for the easiest ways to make a living from their travels.
Those with their nose to the ground for where the demand (for travel writers in the global marketplace) outstrips the supply (the travel writers who know about these opportunities and put themselves in their path.
Is February–or March!–the New January? (And What We’re Doing to Make Sure You Rock It)
Is it just now your new year?
On a recent coaching call, someone explained to me that as they were slammed with deadlines both before and after the holiday, had many family commitments during the school break, and subsequently had to take a trip involving many time zones-worth of jet lag for a family health emergency, she only finally felt, at the end of January, that she was finally in a place to really start the new year.
The Way to Actually Use Everything You Hear on Your Trips
Working on front-of-book pieces has several key benefits we’ve discussed, especially honing your ability to write short and journalistically.
But one of my favorites is that it offers you a venue to use all sorts of excess pieces of research that you collect on your trips with the most minimal investment of additional research.
This week, during our winter Freelance Travel Writing Bootcamp, a very interesting question has come up several times.
It’s a very common situation that travel writers find themselves in.
During the bootcamp, we try as hard as possible to stimulate real-world circumstances in our afternoon tours. The bootcamp focuses through morning lessons and afternoon outings on honing your ability to find stories out in the world wherever you are. And one of the realities of traveling as a travel writer is that not everything you see is interesting to you personally.
How Confident Do You Feel Writing Short?
For the large subset of travel writers who come from blogging, specifically writing on their own blogs without someone overseeing the writing or editorial direction, 1,000-word articles don’t inspire trepidation. They write 1,000-word blog posts all the time!
But as you spend more time reading magazine articles, you’ll very quickly find that a 100-word magazine article tends to have as much information as a 1,000-word blog post simply because in print, space is at a premium.
Every block of text could potentially be replaced by an advertisement (and this is often what happens when your story gets killed last minute!).
If You’ve Been Waiting to Make the Leap into Travel Writing, The Job Market is Clear: Now is the Time
When I started to put down the list of travel writing jobs this week, I was absolutely shocked.
While everyone has been getting back into the swing of things during rentrée (the charming French term for reintegrating after a vacation), companies all of the world and in all portions of the travel industry have been starting in on their plans for 2018, and they require hiring a lot of travel writers.
Don’t believe me?
This week, we found 46 new travel writing jobs between Monday, January 1, and Monday, January 8, 2018. (Most weeks we have between five and 15.)
We typically only share our list of travel writing jobs, while we pull together from all corners of the internet, out network, and various whispers, with out newsletter. But we were so impressed by the overwhelming leap in the listings this week that we wanted to share it more widely.
Read More