As you are all hard at work on your own annual reviews, we are here as well, planning out the next year.

Spring is coming sooner than you’d think, so it’s time for us to open up registration for our two spring retreats, IdeaFest from Friday, March 16, to Sunday, March 18, and Pitchapalooza from Friday, April 13, to Sunday, April 15.

If your pitches are getting nowhere, these events will majorly move the dial on your success rate.

The quick and dirty version of knowing which one is for you is:

If you’ve tried your hand at pitching but get no responses or rejections across the board…

IdeaFest will completely rock your world.

Receiving these types of responses means that no amount of perfecting your pitch writing along will turn the tide–you need better ideas. Learning to formulate better ideas goes far beyond understanding how to turn into what each magazine needs or including a strong time peg, and this retreat digs deep to rejigger your entire method of say “Aha! Idea!” so that you’ll never languish in the “maybe” or “no” piles again.

If you just aren’t getting pitches out the door (regularly or haven’t in years!), but get favorable responses when you do…

Pitchapalooza is likely what you need.

So many writers don’t move up to new, bigger, and better markets because they’re intimidated by writing cold emails to editors that they don’t know–and when they try, it takes hours or days to get the damned things out.

In this retreat, we work in depth through each section of the pitch letter so you understand the formula inside and out and can easily pop pitches off quickly (seriously! you’ll just need five to 15 minutes when you’re done) when you spot a magazine you’re interested in.

A quick note on both of these events:

Whenever I’m teaching pitching workshops and write live pitches for participants based on their ideas and sections they’ve identified in magazines, someone always says something along the lines of, “well, of course you can do it quickly, you’ve been doing this forever” or something to that effect.

Here’s the thing.

People who have been in the freelance writing space can still be absolutely atrocious at pitching. I’ve seen it!

When I first started, I witnessed these magazine editors who could spin out 25 headlines for the same story or spin the same story into 25 formats and felt the same way you do. Like there’s no way I could possibly do it.

But you can (not just because I learned!). The entire format of these programs is designed to get you there in one intense weekend.