Archives: Programs

55 minutes of video
55 minutes of audio
19 slides
16 pages of transcripts

In our weekly webinars, in my inbox, on coaching calls, and in my talks at conferences and workshops, I’m always getting questions on pitching. We sourced questions from dozens of readers for this webinar on Answers to Your Most Common Pitching Questions, so listen in for answers to your most burning pitch questions. I’d love to answer your questions too, to get you over whatever is holding you back and out there pitching all the magazines looking for travel articles.

*****

When I am reviewing the magazine breakdowns our writers put together for the Travel Magazine Database, I’m always blow away by just how many opportunities there are out there to get published.

And by how different they are!

People say there’s nowhere to pitch features, but many magazines I see these days have in-house staff writing other short sections and leave the features to freelancers, as is the case with travel features in three of our latest entries, Parisian family-focused  Milk , D.C. high-end local Capitol File, and the niche adventure travel TransWorld Snowboarding. Many of the new stunning indie magazine’s coming out today, like another recent entry, Flaunt , are even feature-only.

But there’s also so many super-specific article formats that editors of magazines, niche or mainstream travel, are straining to fill every month, like these sections from recent entries:

• Nashville Lifestyle ’s “Artisan Spotlight,” a 300-to-400-word article that tells the story of a local artisan and business in Nashville that needs to have a news peg, either related to the anniversary of an artisan product or a new line that launched;
• FT Weekend ’s “My London,” an 800-word article in which renowned writers and artists share their favorite places in London written in first person featuring individuals like writer Tessa Hadley on the Foundling Museum, playwright Hanif Kureishi on the Uxbridge Road, and novelist Naomi Wood on Rye Lane in Peckham;
• Vancouver Magazine ’s “Modern Family,” is a huge portrait of one self-made community in Vancouver, such as a collective of community gardeners in West End’s Nelson Park, a group of entrepreneurial foodies at Commissary Connect, and Vancouver’s own Santa Clauses, that is accompanied by a brief 50-word introduction, as well as multiple quotes from people within the community itself;
• Cowboy & Indians’ 1,000-word “Living West,” which features wild animals in the American west, such as “Bison’s Snuggly Side” about how the American Bison produces some of the softest, warmest wool and “Sierra Nevada Red Fox” about its recent rediscovery in Yosemite National Park after 99 years.
  

And then there’s so many article formats that are easily to fill with research from nearly any trip. We’ve been rounding up very every week around different article types in our Friday Freebie Five:

• city guides (editions I, II, and III)
• road trips
• essay sections
• front-of-book trend pieces
• expat profiles

Given the sea of writing opportunities out there, I’m always surprised that the most common reason people tell me their travel writing careers are not where they’d lack them to be is because they’re not pitching.

“Why not?” is a little different for everyone.

In our weekly webinars, in my inbox, on coaching calls, and in my talks at conferences and workshops, I’m always getting questions on pitching. While there are some basic questions that come up again and again, there are also deeper, more “circumstance”-based questions that many are afraid to ask in a group setting because they think they’ve done something wrong in their pitch or editor-writer etiquette to get into the situation in the first place.

I’ve got a huge store of these pitching questions that I think will be really enlightening for both the newer writers and people who have been doing this for a while so I’m looking forward to sharing with you this week as we focus on the truth behind sticking pitching situations.

Some of you have already sent in some great ones as well:

• After how many no’s should you stop pitching an editor?
• What do I say if a magazine that I know is a paying market asks me to send my piece on spec (on speculation, or working without a confirmed assignment)?
• What am I doing wrong if I am consistently getting responses from print magazine editors (often encouraging!) but never assignments?

I’d love to answer your questions too, to get you over whatever is holding you back and out there pitching all the magazines looking for travel articles. We sourced questions from dozens of readers for this webinar on Answers to Your Most Common Pitching Questions, so listen in for answers to your most burning pitch questions.

We’ll cover:
– Why this is such a sore spot for freelance writers in the first place
– 20 questions, Pitch Edition
– Our member’s questions!

54 minutes of video
54 minutes of audio
20 slides
18 pages of transcripts

In this webinar, Don’t Create Ideas Out of Nowhere: How to Always Find Them When You Need Them, I work in detail through three different ways to generate ideas from magazines and three different ways to come up with ideas “from thin air” so that you are never worried about *what* to pitch again.

*****

During our weekend workshops with an ambitious numeric goal to reach—100 article ideas matched to magazines at our recent IdeaFest, for instance—there is always a hesitation in the air on the first day and even the morning of the second about whether each writer will reach the goal.

For IdeaFest, we had several group sessions on what an idea really is, what editors need from us, and how to make sure your idea is a good fit for a magazine before I handed out pages marked one through 100.

But when they first went out, they felt like a sentence. Something ominous.

A blank page that’s meant to be filled with a large number of things that you’re not sure you can even do a few of.

And as I continually checked in with everyone’s “white pages” as we called them (as opposed to other colors of pages of worksheets for generating ideas and polishing the matches to magazines), they stayed largely white for a good 24 hours as the writers familiarized themselves with magazines, tried to find multiple homes for the ideas that they were just in love with from their recent trips, and investigated whether the ideas they had were actually a fit for the magazines they were interested in.

As I urged them to upgrade everything that was a clear fit from their blue brainstorming pages to their white pages, at first there was resistance to make that leap. During our one-on-ones, we would plow through blue pages, crossing things out and rewriting them on white pages, often with additional related ideas that came up as we discussed the ideas.

But then, around lunch time on Sunday, a curious thing happened.

White “100 Ideas” sheets that had only held 20 odd entries when I last looked at them suddenly had 40, 60, even 80 ideas recorded.

Everyone had broken past the ideas that they loved and held on to closely and started reaching out for the ideas floating in front of them all the time. Story ideas that magazines are looking for that they already have the background to write.

Because the thing about coming up with article ideas—like leads and other types of writing that feel like you’re staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration to strike—is that they work best when they don’t come out of nowhere, but rather when you draft them off of things that already exist and are already successful.

In this webinar, Don’t Create Ideas Out of Nowhere: How to Always Find Them When You Need Them, I’ll work in detail through three different ways to generate ideas from magazines and three different ways to come up with ideas “from thin air” so that you are never worried about *what* to pitch again.

We will cover:
– Why becoming an idea machine is the #1 thing you can do to kick your writing career into high gear
– Three ways to generate “new” ideas from magazines” past content
– Three ways to create “new” ideas out of other pre-existing sources – but make it look like you came up with them yourself

58 minutes of video
58 minutes of audio
34 slides
18 pages of transcripts

You can take workshop after workshop on how to write the perfect travel article, but if your pitches aren’t landing assignments, it’s all for naught. In this webinar, we walk step-by-step through what you need to know to write the perfect pitch–and everything that you should leave out.

*****

When I ask writers how long it takes them to write pitches for their travel articles, I pretty universally get one of two answers:

• 15 to 20 minutes
• 2 hours

I’ve rarely heard one hour, but I’ve heard half an hour a couple times.

So, after posing this question in many different workshops and conference talks, I couldn’t help but wonder: why the two clear buckets?

We’ve looked in the past on our blog at how, even if you type quite slow, say 30 words a minute, it still shouldn’t physically take you more than 10 minutes to actually type up your pitch.

What are these writers who take two hours (or more) writing pitches doing the rest of the time then? It tends to fall into one of three categories:

1. Not being sure about the idea
2. Not being sure about the research on the idea in terms of what needs to go into the pitch
3. Not being sure about what needs to be included in the pitch period

The first issue we cover much more extensively in other webinars like How to Generate Sure-Fire Saleable Ideas or How to Hone Your Ideas to Perfectly Fit Each Magazine, so I recommend you check those out if you’re strugging with the first point above.

But if you sit down to write pitches and simply don’t know which words belong on the page, tune into this webinar on How to Craft the Perfect Travel Article Pitch for a step-by-step process and fill-in-the-blank templates for getting your article pitches done and out the door.

We will cover:
– 5 signs that you’re not ready to write up a pitch just yet – and how to fix them (it’s really a problem with the article idea that keeps most of us from getting our pitches written!)
– The three-paragraph pitch structure that will keep you from getting lost in hours of research
– All the answers you need to travel writers’ 10 most frequent questions on pitching

74 minutes of video
74 minutes of video
27 slides
27 pages of transcripts

In this webinar we workshoped article concepts into ready-to-pitch, focused ideas with multiple angles matched to specific magazines. I pre-matched them with specific sections from multiple magazines and walked through the process of honing an article “idea” from your concept into something adapted to a magazine and ready to pitch.

*****

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.

This is actually what drove us to create the Travel Magazine Database in the first place, to not only show writers that there are move places to publish their words than they realize, but also, and most importantly, to outline EXACTLY what an idea needs to look like to fit into each magazine.

What Magazines Look to Publish May Surprise You

I was just wrapping up edits on some database entries before I sat down to write this message to you, and every time I read our entries, I’m always struck by the cool things that magazines are looking for.

In the three entries I just edited, I found these neat magazine sections:

• Suitcase  magazine, an indie travel magazine covering the intersection between fashion and travel, has this section perfect for big bloggers transitioning into magazine writing: “‘Living in My Suitcase’ highlights recent travels of an influencer with photos of the trip and a 350-word, first-person story about the experience. ‘Henry Holland in Puglia, Italy’ is an article from a recent issue about Holland’s five-year anniversary celebration with his boyfriend. ”
• British Airways’ High Life in-flight magazine has multiple opportunities for the kind of quirky, observational essays that I often hear folks in workshops wanting to write but not knowing a good home for: “‘Curiosities’ is written by well-traveled writers about random global phenomena they have recently noticed. It is broken up into four subsections, with one of those written by a regular columnist. Examples of the other three subsections include ‘Global Scorn’ about the wittiest remarks in history and how they unite us, ‘Feel the Burn’ about how part of a mountain in Yanartas, Turkey is always on fire, and ‘What I Pack’ about the travel essentials of Tony Conigliaro, one of London’s finest bartenders. ”
• The new UK edition of Robb Report magazine has a great quick win for people jonesing to go on luxury press trips to unique boutique hotels run by travel luminaries: “‘Masters of Luxury’ is a 1,600-word profile written in third person about an established, wealthy individual from the world of luxury. Alan Faena, developer and hotelier, was featured in a recent issue. ”

And there are thousands and thousands more specific magazine sections with angles that can inspire your travels and fill your bank accounts out there. It’s just a function of starting to change your thinking about your ideas, and now always holding so tightly to how you believe a trip should be written up, but rather opening yourself up to the possibilities of different slants and foci on the same experience.

In this webinar, we workshop article concepts from attendees into ready-to-pitch, focused ideas with multiple angles matched to specific magazines

We will cover:
– Quick look at the types of **hyperspecific** ideas magazines are really looking for
– How to make sure you have an article idea, not just a topic (and other things that come up when I was reviewing submissions)
– Workshopping your travel article ideas live two ways: pitchable ideas and ideas matched to magazines

58 minutes of video
58 minutes of audio
17 slides
19 pages of transcripts

Instead of generating article ideas and then trying to find a magazine that will take your idea, I find starting your brainstorming with the sections magazines include yields a much higher success rate. Here we cover techniques that you can also use with any magazine that you have a copy of and ensures that your pitches hit the mark and you get responses from editors.

*****

When I first started travel writing full-time, I spent a couple years doing the usual things:

• writing tons of travel articles for $20 a pop for large websites
  (please don’t do that! here’s why)
• pouring my heart into pitching epic travel stories to websites like GONOMAD (check out these much better sites to substitute for five major low-paying markets like these)
• writing “full-time” for a site that had me doing tons of articles a week in an area I was really interested in (Italy), but didn’t pay enough to live in a first-world country

At some point, I said enough, and threw myself into pitching print magazines. It wasn’t hard at all to get assignments (which is why I counsel you all to pitch first and skip the low-paid writing part!), but I still remember very distinctly when I got my first $2,000 assignment. A dollar a word for the text and $1,000 for the photos.

The Three-Step Process to Getting an Assignment You Can Do in One Step

I had just returned from my first press trip and had an amazing opportunity to visit tea plantations and drying and processing centers in Turkey. I had great photos and video. I just knew I had to place it somewhere.

So I made the first mistake a lot of us do, which is thinking too small. I looked up every tea magazine in existence and send them all a similar pitch completely focused on how wonderful my experience was . . . and not how it would fit in the editors’ magazines.

I did do some due diligence and I had verified that one particular tea magazine did take travel content and had covered tea plantations in India and China before. But the editor got back to me and told me that the article was a little too out there for here readers. (Another thing many editors think when you pitch them but often don’t bother to write back and tell you.)

So I dug in deeper to her magazine’s content and promptly pitched her an article on high teas in Boston to tie into the upcoming anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. I was pitching this in late November and the anniversary was the next year. So, unsurprisingly, she had already assigned that article to someone else.

Finally, on the third try, I managed to give her an idea that fit her readers and the magazine’s section, and wasn’t already assigned. Teas in California wine country, with a high-end, wine-oriented take on the typical high tea.

If I hadn’t pitched something sort of similar to something that she had run before, I’m not sure if that editor would have gotten back to me in the first place.

And if I hadn’t pitched her something that was so spot on that she’d already assigned it, I’m not sure she would have gotten back to me the second time.

But I closely studied her magazine and made sure that each pitch was my best wager for what I believed would appear in her magazine. And it was only when I stopped relying on my preconceived ideas of what I thought would fit, and stuck more closely to what she was consistently publishing that we got on the same page.

Pitching Magazine First Changes the Way You Travel

That first glossy, newsstand magazine article I placed at $1 a word was incredibly specific. It focused on five or more tea establishments in a given city or area. If I didn’t look out for that concentration of that specific type of place before my trip, I would never have been able to write it up after.

I love pitching magazine-then-idea rather than idea-then-magazine, because it also makes it much easier to sell stories before your trip , which is actually what I ended up doing with the story I mentioned above. (I sold it from the flight to the destination actually!)

Here are three magazine sections I highlighted in our webinar on how to match your article ideas directly to magazine sections last week that are perfect for pitching before your trip to make sure you have some assignments locked down:

• Travel + Leisure has a short (but they pay $1+ per word, so short is not bad) section that you can pitch for nearly any destination you’re going to: ““Worth Flying For” is a 200-word, second-person article about a must-try dish worth traveling for. A recent article details the Gâteau de Foie Blond at Le Suprême in Lyon, France.”
• Delta’s Sky in-flight magazine likewise has something that you can pitch for practically any city destinaton they fly to as long as you do your research and identify a cool opportunity to get out of the city: ““Break Away” is the final subsection written by a contributor, which is a 500-word first person article about getting out of the city into nature and focuses on moderate outdoor activities like biking, walking, or hiking. ”
• United Airlines’ first-class magazine Rhapsody likewise has a section on top restaurants that you could easily ferret out a good restaurant to highlight in any city the airline flies to: ““Fine Dining” is a 300-to-500-word section that gives the reader an insight into a restaurant, such as Noma in Copenhagen or Parador La Huella in Miami. It is written in the third person and takes the form of a review or commentary on the dining scene in the city. The cities are places that United Airlines fly to and are not limited to a specific region or country. ”

Having five, ten, or twenty of these in your pocket (as in, on your phone for easy reference when you travel) helps you to spot the types of stories editors will buy when you’re on the road, and, in the best cases, land articles in advance that you can organize your trips around.

Check out our webinar on How to Generate Sure-Fire Saleable Article Ideas, to watch us generate article ideas live on the spot and pattern how to do it on your own for your trips.

We will cover:
– Why pitching magazine-then-idea can help us better archive the true purpose of a pitch
– Walk through the Travel Magazine Database
– Live demos of reverse engineering ideas to perfectly fit a magazine section

47 minutes of video
47 minutes of audio
18 slides
17 pages of transcripts

The process of pitching regularly will drastically improve your income and portfolio, and editors respond best to pitches that demonstrate a knowledge of their publication. The best way to demonstrate that knowledge is by only pitching specific sections of the magazine.

*****

One of the biggest complaints editors have about pitches they receive is that the writer is clearly not familiar with the magazine he or she is pitching.

There are the comical editor horror stories about someone pitching an article about hunting one’s first chicken to a vegan food magazine or a report on local archeological digs to an interior design magazine.

But more often than not, writers are pitching stories that sound—if you only know the title of a magazine—like they could be a fit, but if you took the time to dig into the tone and structure of a publication, would obviously be a little (or a lot) off of what the magazine actually covers.

In a pitch, showing an editor that you understand his or her publication and its audience is more important than the idea you are pitching or your background—it’s what inspires an editor to write you back and encourage you to send more pitches rather than write you off.

Tune into learn how you on your own can break down any magazine you come across to create a personalized framework for what you can and should pitch that magazine.

We will cover:
– How the process of pitching regularly will drastically improve your income and portfolio
– Why editors respond best to pitches that demonstrate a knowledge of their publication… and how you can get them to respond even if they don’t like the idea you pitched
– 5 ways to show an editor you are familiar with their publication – even if you haven’t spend 10 hours reading back issues.