Archives: Programs

56 minutes of video
56 minutes of audio
13 slides
18 pages of transcript

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Join us as we take a look at As-Told-To Features with examples from markets that you’d love to add to your clip file.

A staple of major magazines, these pieces offer a surprising way to tell the stories of fascinating sources you meet in your travels.

We will cover:
– Why we’ve saved these pieces last
– How these pieces are fundamentally different than anything else you will write
– Breaking down real-world examples
– Pitching FAQ

55 minutes of video
55 minutes of audio
21 slides
18 pages of transcript

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There are several parts of the non-fiction book proposal—the author bio, overview, chapter summary, and sample chapters—that can easily feel like the parts you should spend the majority of your time on, but they can easily become enormous time sucks!

In this webinar, we look at how to efficiently power through the rest of your book proposal to get it polished and down without drowning in decision paralysis so your proposal can leave your laptop and do what it’s supposed to do: get agents interested in your project so you can get the feedback you need to make changes based on the knowledge of people who live and breathe books (a.k.a. book professionals and not you!).

We will cover:
– While these “vital” sections are really the least important/last of your worries
– Reviewing the sections of the non-fiction book proposal
– Crafting your author bio
– Putting together your chapter summaries
– Selecting your sample chapters

48 minutes of video
48 minutes of audio
13 slides
16 pages of transcript

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In this webinar, I introduce the non-fiction book proposal and its main sections and zero in on one of the two you need to spend your most time and research prowess on: the target market.

This is where your book will literally live and die. It doesn’t matter to an agent how interesting they think your topic is if he doesn’t think they can sell it to an editor, and it doesn’t matter to an editor how much she loves your writing if her publisher doesn’t think he can make his money back and more on the book.

We will cover:
– The sections of the non-fiction book proposal
– Why the market (or lack there of) is the test step for your entire idea
– What does and doesn’t work when establishing your book’s market
– The concentric circles approach to proving your book’s marketability

53 minutes of video
53 minutes of audio
16 slides
17 pages of transcript

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You shouldn’t take one step down the research rabbit hole with a book project until you understand how it fits into the marketplace. Editors and agents love to ask “where would this go in Barnes and Noble,” and their favorite authors are the ones that understand the book industry.

In this webinar, we explore what is selling today (along with some peeks at what is not and why) and explore the age-old question of to self-publish or not to self-publish, but I introduce you to a powerful tool that can help you quickly and easily find both what your book should focus on (because the decision really isn’t up to you) and how to get an agent!

We will cover:
– Why you should be brewing a book idea if you aren’t already
– The secret is to go small (in topic) not big (and it’s easier!)
– What is selling in non-fiction today and how to fit in
– How to see live + up-to-date what is being bought and sold every day

65 minutes of video
65 minutes of audio
14 slides
23 pages of transcript

In our series walking through the construction of different types of articles, we hone in on the easy-to-write (and pitch!) staple of magazines everywhere: the front-of-book round-up.

A staple of websites and newspapers (yes!) these pieces are easy to do badly, so learn how to do them easily as they’re a quick type of article.

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I say this a lot. And a lot of you are already very aware of without me having to mention it, but…

The kind of writing that flies on blogs is *very* different than what appears in print magazines.

The perennial question, however, is how?

In many ways, the way people (editors, namely) talk about this different calls to mind the famous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Besides “you know it when you see it”, what can I point to that separates the type of writing that appears on the web from what appears in print?

Honestly, this is a focus of a large portion of our webinars, from exactly how to put together articles like news briefs and trend pieces to how to get quotes that make your articles pop and the best ways to get exclusive information on the ground.

But this division between church and state, or print and web as it were, is never harder to illustrate than when we look at “diary-style” feature articles.

When I speak at conferences like the upcoming Women in Travel Summit where the audience is primarily either professional bloggers or folks who started a blog because some idiot said that that was the way to get assignments with magazine editors who would magically find your site and ask you to write a paid piece for a print publication, I am constantly asked if people can pitch stories they have already written on their blog.

And when we dig into it, the simple fact of the matter is that a lot of the “trip report”-style pieces they write for themselves are far too “kitchen sink” to appear in a print publication.

They don’t have an angle, they don’t necessarily even have a thesis (a.k.a. a reason the reader can understand why their eyeballs are still attached to your story rather than the billions of other pieces on content on the internet, and they usually don’t even have an underlying flow that pulls the reader through the piece.

So why on earth do these “trip report”- or “diary”-style pieces also appear in magazines if they’re so picky and obsessed with angles and brevity and trends and other hot new things?

You can see these types of pieces you might see in newspapers, on BBCTravel.com, and even in the feature wells of major magazines.

And when they’re out there, in “respectable” publications, these kind of pieces make people say, “What gives? How come this person gets to write about their trip for The Dallas Morning News/BBCTravel.com/AFAR??!? I write the same kind of stuff on my blog!”

This is actually the reason that I saved our Article Nuts and Bolts webinar on this very ubiquitous article type for the end of our month on features.

Diary-style pieces are like cooking. People do them everyday, sometimes just for friends or relatives in a casual setting, and sometimes on a professional but not super demanding scale, but only a handful of chefs or “white hats” have earned the intangible seal of approval to do them as a consummate professional.

In our Article Nuts and Bolts: How to Put Together a Diary Piece, we’ll explore the correct way to put together these pieces for the level of expectation of a print publication editor.

A staple of websites and newspapers (yes!) these pieces are easy to do badly, so learn how to do them easily as they’re a quick type of article.

We’ll cover:
– What do I really mean when I say diary piece?
– How do these articles work in the real world (as opposed to in private settings)
– Real-world examples
– How to pitch these pieces

58 minutes of video
58 minutes of audio
12 slides
18 pages of transcript

In our series walking through the construction of different types of articles, we hone in on the easy-to-write (and pitch!) staple of magazines everywhere: the front-of-book round-up.

A second type of round-up feature, the guide piece separates a large amount of information on a destination or topic into mini round-ups.

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When the topic of writing feature-length pieces for magazines in heavily formatted articles like round-ups or guides is broached amount freelance writers who don’t have those clips under their belt (yet), one of two emotions usually comes up:

1. abject fear at writing something that long for a magazine (and how long it will take them to do it)
2. absolute “I got this,” because you write these exact same types of pieces for blog posts

In case you can already tell where I’m going with this, neither of those is the “right” answer.

Writing a long article for a magazine (as long as it’s not narrative) is not any different than writing a short one.

But…writing a round-up for a magazine is VERY different than writing one for a website.

For the last several months, we’ve been covering how–exactly, step-by-step on both a structural and procedural level–to write different kinds of articles.

We started this series for several reasons:

1. When folks are procrastinating pitching magazines, one of the big fears they tell me is holding them back is that they don’t know how they will write the article they’re pitching if it does get assigned.
2. With writers that I coach, cutting down the amount of time it takes to put together assigned articles is one of our central themes. Any and all successful businesses focus on streamlining their methods of production, and freelance writing cannot be different if you would like to have a reasonable output of compensation for the time you’re putting in. The surest way to cut that down is to focus on using an actual process for how you approach both researching, outlining, and writing your articles, and one exists–it is just different for each type of article.
3. In various social media circles where writers go to gripe about what is troubling them with their respective editors that day, there is a certain regular refrain I see that really pains me. Writers outline in detail how long they spent on a piece and how much of their heart and soul they poured into it–and, of course, worry about whether it was done correctly as well–and then lead to the dramatic climax of the editor either: (1) killing the story entirely, (2) asking them to essentially rewrite the whole thing, or (3) never getting back to them again. On further inspection, the biggest cause of this issue is that the writer submitted a story so fall out of line with what the editor publishes, the editor was in shock. Not good for the writer, but the writer tends not to see how the situation could be avoided on their part.
4. Writing for one magazine is always different from writing for another in terms of the way the words appear on the page. That’s just style and voice and editorial positioning. But writing for one section of one magazine is also different from writing for another section of the same magazine. That’s the difference between news and interview or short round-up and narrative feature. Those differences, unlike the seemingly intangible “voice” (which we do cover extensively in the Travel Magazine Database to help save you time figuring that out), come down to repeatable formats that are easy to learn and don’t need to be constructed from the ground up every time.

So, whichever camp you fall into–whether unduly scared of breaking into longer articles, even if they seem to have a recognizable structure, OR unduly confident about something you haven’t attempted because it seems just like something you’ve already done, even though it’s rather different–today, we’ve got you covered.

Join us for Article Nuts and Bolts: How to Put Together a Guide Feature. A second type of round-up feature, the guide piece separates a large amount of information on a destination or topic into mini round-ups.

We’ll cover:
– How are these type of round-up features different than baskets of kittens and narrative features?
– How does the FOB version blossom into a feature?
– What does this look like in practice?
– How to pitch these pieces

55 minutes of video
55 minutes of audio
14 slides
20 pages of transcript

Join us as we begin this new series with the elusive “postcard.”

Its trivial name suggests many things, and a well-written postcard creates all of those sense memories and more. “Postcards,” which offer an atmospheric moment in a place, are dying art, but an excellent one for those in travel writing for the writing aspect.

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I’m sure you’ve seen or heard it in the news regularly.

Newspapers are dead.

Especially newspaper travel sections, right?

I can count on one hand the number of dedicated, just travel, newspaper editors remaining in the U.S.

Newspapers have taken numerous content turns, from Jeff Besos of Amazon acquiring the Washington Post and bringing his unique business sense to it to the Tribune corporation, known for the Chicago Tribune, which has pioneered a new business model very heavy on centralized content that is syndicated out and, at times, written entirely by machines. Besides Besos, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher are even buying newspapers.

Among all this entrepreneurship, which should seem exciting, critics cry that journalism and quality writing are taking a back seat.

And meaty, atmospheric pieces most of all.

The “postcard,” a type of short article that is very light on service information but heavy with atmosphere, sense of place, and good old-fashioned great reading, is one of those old dinosaurs that many think is extinct.

However, this type of article is having a fascinating nine lives moment.

While there are, definitely, still newspapers commissioning pieces (and they also pay much better than you’d expect–something else we’ll cover in today’s call), there are actually surprising places popping up to for postcard pieces both on and offline, in the editorial and content marketing spheres.

And, the beauty of mastering this type of piece is that it teaches you to distill down to the most important thing that represents a whole place–a skill that will definitely help you with all your other pieces.

Join us as we begin this new series with the elusive “postcard.”

Its trivial name suggests many things, and a well-written postcard creates all of those sense memories and more. “Postcards,” which offer an atmospheric moment in a place, are dying art, but an excellent one for those in travel writing for the writing aspect.

We will cover:
– What is a postcard really in the writing context?
– The typical structure of this section and how to create one yourself.
– Real examples of different postcards out in the world.
– How to pitch these pieces.

64 minutes of video
64 minutes of audio
22 slides
23 pages of transcript

Join us for the first webinar in our new series on breaking into guidebook writing, The Guidebook Guide Series: The Players and The Game to learn about the guidebook landscape for professional travel writers.

Not all guidebook companies are equal–for the writer, which is very different than in the public perception of the brand–when it comes to pay, treatment, and the writing process.

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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.

These different types of travel writing become more prevalent in waves after years of neglected interest precisely because people aren’t looking at them.

They’ve become passe, “too hard,” “extinct,” or, in the case of what I want to talk to you about today, painted as abhorrent.

This picture was painted most famously by a frequently-link-to blog post by a writer I have become friends with over the years, Leif Pettersen.

He paints a harried pictured of just how many hotels and restaurants a guidebook writer must visit in a day and the fact that they tend to work all evening when they’re on the road (writing up notes if not partaking in the local nightlife).

But the interesting thing that this post, and the picture that it paints, misses out on is that scenario is one of basically any well-paid working travel writer when they’re on the road, whether they’re traveling for magazine assignments and taking in tightly-packed tours during the day and hitting article deadlines at night or are on the road producing content for their own blog and juggling contractually obligated posts for the trip they’re on with setting up future contracts and future trips from their phone on a bus or the spotty hotel wi-fi at night.

Most importantly though, guidebook writing–like all types of writing–is not for everyone because it prizes speed, organization, and project management skills.

If you have those in spades, you’ll come out of your $35,000 book contract with an excellent hourly rate. If not, you’ll wind up making a few dollars an hour.

But, we have to compare that hourly rate with what I know that many of your are unfortunately taking right now when you write only. I hear far too often that people are writing for sites that pay $20 or perhaps $50 a post and are spending 20 to 50 hours on all of the research, writing, and tweaking involved for those pieces.

Now, I’m not saying all online travel writing pays that. I’ve personally received or been offered everything from $350 for a sub-1,000-word blog post to $6,500 for one month of copywriting work.

And I’ve heard from people that I coach that these living wages are not only still out there, but often come from an unexpected place, such as tourism boards that pay no less than $150 per blog post no matter the length or banality.

Editors have also told me that some online outlets are paying fifty cents per word for magazine-style stories!

So, I’m not saying that writing guidebooks is for everyone, or the best way to make a living writing about travel today.

But rather, that you should be informed about your options—especially when they involved mid-five-figure contracts paying for research that will fuel innumerable stories you can sell elsewhere with no qualms about who has paid for your trip.

Join us for the first webinar in our new series on breaking into guidebook writing, The Guidebook Guide Series: The Players and The Game to learn about the guidebook landscape for professional travel writers.

Not all guidebook companies are equal–for the writer, which is very different than in the public perception of the brand–when it comes to pay, treatment, and the writing process.

We will cover:
– Why should you listen up when I talk about guidebooks – especially if you’re (a) new, or (b) don’t have enough work on your plate right now
– How do the different major guidebook companies set themselves apart for consumers?
– How each company’s culture plays out for writers?
– What do you need to know to break in?