All Posts in Category: Travel Writing Resources
Five Magazines Looking for City Guides (Edition V)
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 Traveler
“Mini Guide” is a short guide to a city offering suggestions on attractions, accommodation, and food. This is sometimes written by more than one contributor. It starts with a 200-word introduction and is followed by regular sections, “Book it” and “See it.” “Book it” describes, in 200 words, three accommodation options under the subheadings of “Trendy,” “New,” and “Classic.” Attractions are described in the “See it” section, with four options given in about 150 words. Destinations covered in previous issues include London and Tokyo. There is a further section which changes with each guide. Examples include “Eat it” with suggestions for comfort food in Tokyo and “Near it” with suggestions for other activities in England including hikes and mill tours.
Exciting Changes Coming to Our Weekly Travel Writing Webinars!
You may have seen that we have a very cool offer going right now for those of you interested in getting an all-access pass to the more than 500 magazine how-to-pitch breakdowns in our Travel Magazine Database, 300+-strong question-and-answer library, and 85+ hours of past webinars:
- When you join the Dream Buffet by July 31st, you can take 50% off your first month.
- When you join by July 20th, you have the opportunity to win a free conference pass and FLIGHT to the 2019 Women in Travel Summit.
But we have some other exciting additions to the offerings in the Dream Buffet that we wanted to let you in on.
PayPal Now Available for the Travel Magazine Database
We’re delighted to announce that you can now also use PayPal to subscribe to our 500+-strong database of how-to-pitch information for magazines looking for travel articles.
We’re working on adding this payment option for other resources, like our Dream Buffet, but PayPal is not the best at playing with others, so we’re still working out the integrations with all of our different providers and will let you know as soon as that option is available!
Outside of PayPal, we use the top-of-the-line payment solution Stripe to handle all credit card payments on all of our sites.
We Want to Pay for Your Flight and Registration for One of Our Favorite Conferences
Every year, on the mainstage and in the individual sessions at this conference, we are blown away by the amount of tell-it-like-it-is and no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you-you-can-absolutely-do-this wisdom shared.
It’s an environment in which attendees are so surrounded by people who are out there both doing work they love and running a solid business around that every year we watch those who haven’t yet made the leap into full-time freelance travel writing see that it’s possible to take the plunge successfully and put a deadline on when they will do it too.
Often just a few months after the conference takes place! (Because they’re so jazzed with possibility, they can’t stand to stay in their job any longer.)
We want this kind of experience for all of you.
Help Underprivileged High School Students Experience the Transformative Power of Travel
Here at Dream of Travel Writing, we are passionate about the power of travel to completely change lives, especially those of young people.
It’s the reason I worked in study abroad before I left to freelance, and originally planned to be an Italian language professor before I realized I could reach and empower more people to learn about other cultures through travel writing.
I myself am from a very small town and never left the country until a program through my high school in my late teens, and my business partner/husband, whom some of you have met and others may have heard me mention is from India, had the same experience with a program to Germany when he was in high school that inspired him to intern in Switzerland and finally come to the U.S. for grad school.
We Want to Hear About What You Love to Do (In Addition to Travel!)
We’ve got a favor to ask you, if you have ten or fifteen minutes available.
But don’t worry! We value your time, so as our thanks, we’d like to offer you a coupon for two free webinar packages from our webinar library as our thanks.
Now Open On-Demand, Whenever You Need It: Our Revolutionary At-Home IdeaFest Program
When I first started helping travel writers finally reach their goals and dramatically grow their income, I saw, straight away, that the single, simple, easy answer to how to get from where each writer was to where they wanted to be was simple: pitch.
So I worked up live and online programs, workshops, and webinars to combat this great “evil,” the fear of pitching.
But, of the course of that work with writers, I found that while they were telling me their pitches were the problem, the responses they were getting from editors were telling them (and me!) that their ideas were really the problem.
That’s why, based on our live IdeaFest retreat, our new four-week program is designed to provide a serious and lasting foundation to turn you into an idea machine, turning up dozens of article ideas every day. And I’ve already seen the transformation happening daily with the writers beta-testing the program this past month, who regularly share exclamations like:
“The tips were really useful! I managed to double my article ideas for the magazines I identified!”
“Done! Love this exercise. Makes it visually accessible to see all the ideas for one place, along with the magazines and the sections to pitch.”
“This was a super useful exercise!”
“This actually helped me discover sections of magazines I might not have looked at otherwise.”
“As I started this exercise I really didn’t like it too much, but did finally break past a little barrier and thought of some good stuff!”
“Woo-hoo! I managed to find ideas around all nine articles types from the one concept. “
“This was fun! Each trip has so many aspects to share!”
“This was a really great exercise for me, and it helped me realize that even small things from an experience can lead to an entire article.”
The Dream Buffet is Served!
If one-on-one coaching is not for you where you are right now because:
- you’re still in a full-time job in a different industry and don’t have a solid timeline for making the jump into freelance travel writing;
- you’re still getting your bearings in terms of what you want to do with travel writing (brand storytelling! meaty features! blog posts for destinations! well-paid trend pieces about your latest stop in a year-long nomadic journey after quitting your job! so many choices!);
- you would love to have the one-on-one attention by financially can’t swing that investment right now; or
- you’re working on your travel writing alongside several other interests, such as yoga teaching training, cooking for retreats in exotic locations, WWOOFing, or a developed blog that is a serious time commitment;
but you want a constant source of answers to your travel writing questions, whether an in-depth lesson from our webinars, an instant script or tactic for dealing with a tricky editor or client situation, or a quick answer to the perennial question “where should a pitch this story?”, we bring you the Dream Buffet.
Did We Become a Travel Blog? What is All of This About Points and Miles?
This week, we’ve got a special webinar double header week since I was out with the flu last week, and we’re also doing a very different mini-series.
We’ve looked in the past at a lot of facets of free travel that are specific to travel writers:
- Setting Up Sponsored Travel 101: How free travel really works for travel writers.
- How to Set Up an Individual Trip From Scratch: The ne plus ultra of press trips are the ones you design yourself.
- Getting a Spot on a Group Press Trip or Fam: Cracking the code for getting offers and acceptances for scheduled group press trips.
- Putting Together a Pitch Portfolio to Support a Big Trip: The simple secret to landing a spot on any press trip you’re interested in.
- What to Expect on Press Trips: What you can realistically expect from your press trips–the good and the bad.
- How to Prepare for Your Press Trip: What you get out of a press trip depends largely on what you put in.
- How to Get the Most (on the Ground) Out of Your Press Trips: Getting on a free trip is the easiest part. Leaving with saleable ideas is the real challenge.
But this week we’re talking about a totally different way to travel for free: trips you book yourself…but don’t pay for.
That’s the real dream, right?
A Two-Week Getaway with Food and Accommodations for $299–Seriously? Seriously!
Today’s holiday trivia: In many Asian traditions, odd numbers are lucky, and Japan is no exception. The 11th marks the festival of Kagami Biraki, which means “opening the mirror,” and implies the end of a period of abstinence. The celebration began with the samurai in the 15th century and continues in the judo martial art tradition today, as well as in private homes, to whack open sake barrels with wooden mallets, drink the sake from specially made square wooden cups, and break upon and share a mochi (traditional japanese rice and red bean sweet).
Ever since we laid our eyes on what is now our 3,400-square-foot writing retreat in the Catskills, we knew it had to be used for one thing: a place for writers, editors, bloggers, and other creatives to come and do deep work, like…
- finishing a first draft of a book
- editing a documentary
- processing a huge batch of photos from a trip you’ve just wrapped up
- banging out an entire month’s worth of blog posts
- finishing some big feature assignments
- recording a series of videos for your audience
- writing the materials for a course you’re planning to launch