Programs – Page 8 – Dream of Travel Writing Products and Services

Article Nuts and Bolts: How to Put Together a Quest Piece

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

In our new 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.

The bread-and-butter of travel features, the quest piece, is one of the easiest features to pitch, get readers interested in, and research.

*****

I’ve been in a travel writing conference for the last couple days observing something very curious throughout the keynotes.

Both keynotes—one by Don George, who was formerly travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and Lonely Planet’s annual travel writing short story anthologies, and another by Spud Hilton, the current travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who has won an obscene number of top travel writing awards in that position—focused on storytelling.

Each keynote was excellent, composed of a heavy dose of first-person experience layered with specific, well-articulated and vitally important tips of how to completely overhaul your stories for the better.

But at the end of both keynotes, both speakers were asked nearly identical questions along the lines of:

That all sounds great, but who is really publishing narrative stories like that right now? No one really wants to publish stories about the writer’s experiences with other cultures.

After this question, in both cases, a very curious thing happened.

The speakers were just plain confused.

Their entire keynotes had been predicated on that power of narrative stories, the fact that they go back for thousands of years, and the justification that the reason storytelling in travel writing is the way to go is that it is a natural human impulse.

So they were just a bit dumbfounded at these questions of the “who really wants to publish stories anyway?” variety.

But I could see where the disconnect was brewing.

When Don spoke about storytelling, he hammered home the point that your story doesn’t exist without a point, without a takeaway, without something that your entire story focuses on without divergence.

The lack of having a point is the most common things editors complain about when you ask them what their pitching pet peeves are.

When Spud spoke about storytelling, he honed in on the repeatable structure that runs through everything from James Bond films to ancient myths to travel articles today.

But so many writers I see facing a story try to reinvent the wheel each time (much to the detriment of their hourly rate, to boot!).

The writers who posed these questions that puzzled the speakers so were operating from a place of trying and failing, and perhaps even of desperation, in terms of having editors take them up on the pitches they preferred.

The real disconnect though, was that the keynote speakers were trying to offer these writers the answer to their real, burning questions (“why aren’t editors responding to my emails?” or “why aren’t editors giving me assignments?”) without tying in the fact that all of the advice they were giving was exactly the way to write stories that win awards, get editors to double-take at the amazing quality of your writing, and generally turn you into the type of travel writer with the level of success you’ve always dreamed of.

In the webinar, Article Nuts and Bolts: How to Put Together a Quest Piece we continue our Article Nuts and Bolts series that breaks down exactly, step-by-step and paragraph-by-paragraph how to write different types of articles so you never have to waste time researching what should and shouldn’t go or what research you should be doing again.

The bread-and-butter of travel features, the quest piece, is one of the easiest features to pitch, get readers interested in, and research.

We’ll cover:
– Why is the quest such an important type of feature?
– How must we structure our quest journey and article?
– Real-world examples
– How to pitch these pieces

The Guidebook Guide Series – The Life of a Guidebook Writer on the Road

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

In our second webinar in our series on guidebooks, we’re going to dive deep into the vital work that makes writing any book, from a thriller to a guidebook, possible: the research.

Join us to learn what the day-to-day work of the guidebook writer in the field really looks like.

While you may have heard the bad and the ugly about life as a guidebook writer, we dig into the reality of those who have made it their full-time gig.

*****

When The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map first came out, weighing in at more than a pound and featuring nearly 400 pages covering every facet of the travel writing life from the schedule to the rates, the negotiating tactics to lists of hundreds and hundreds of magazines to target, and templates for everything from pitches to mapping out your best writing hours, a lot of people asked me how long it took to write.

Typically, these people were:
(a) not full-time writers, and/or
(b) not people who had ever written a book-length work

Before I was a full-time freelance writer, I was a full-time in-house writer at a university. While I do not mean to say that things move at the light speed of a newsroom or digital agency in my former job, I was accustomed to getting big projects out and writing something clever and deliverable on deadline whether you wanted to or not.

I’d put together book-length works that required interviewing dozens of professors and collecting research from all over the institution before.

And when I left the university, one of my first freelance writing gigs was as a daily news writer for the online offshoot of a print magazine. Suffice to say, I did not go into my book with high ideals of writing the great American novel or a lack of practical experience about how to put such a thing together and how long it would take me.

But even explaining that to people, I still think they did not like my answer to their simple question, typically voiced with awe and expectation of a double-digit (in months) response:

“About a month?”

To some of you, that will make absolute sense.

To others, it may sound like voodoo. And for others still, it will sound like a sure indication of a lack of depth of content and rigorous research.

But this is how writing books professionally–for a living–works.

The first major writing conference I ever attended, I remember the author who delivered the keynote being introduced, but not the introduction.

He had won so many awards and written so many things; the dense introduction was unretainable.

When he spoke about his plucky approach to getting an agent (tell them you’ll be in New York and want to meet, book appointments, then book a flight–I’ve heard of this working well for several high-profile authors!), he inspired us with his grit.

As he moved on to talk about all the simultaneous projects he now worked on side-by-side, however, he inspired me with the careerism of his writing.

Sorting through his Wikipedia page, I find he has more than 85 published works (not articles, but works), many of those following 2010 (64), and most following 2000 (80).

That’s an average of eight published works a year this decade.

Stephen King regularly puts out two book-length works each year on top of numerous short stories and other writings, and those often go onto to become TV projects because of his world-building appeal.

In writing, “mass production” is usually a derogatory term, but it clearly, in the careers of this highly awarded writers, also has its merits.

But why am I prattling on to you about the amount of time it “should” take to write a book when our focus is on guidebooks?

In order to truly understand the place of guidebook writing in a travel writing career, you must confront several fundamental truths:

Writing a lot quickly does not need to mean bad quality.
The work of writing a lot quickly is definitely not for everyone.
Writing a lot quickly can lead to a big, lauded career.

In our second webinar in this month’s series on guidebooks, we’re going to dive deep into the vital work that makes writing any book, from a thriller to a guidebook, possible: the research.

Join us for our The Guidebook Guide Series – The Life of a Guidebook Writer on the Road webinar today to learn what the day-to-day work of the guidebook writer in the field really looks like.

While you may have heard the bad and the ugly about life as a guidebook writer, we dig into the reality of those who have made it their full-time gig.

We will cover:
– The disclaimer: guidebook writing sourcing
– Another disclaimer: this is work
– The Five Pillar to consider
– The pitfalls of poor preparation

Article Nuts and Bolts: How to Put Together a Basket of Kittens Feature

55 minutes of video
55 minutes of audio
12 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.

In this webinar, we dive into a type of round-up feature in which you take a deep dive into a handful of interestingly-related topics.

*****

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:

abject fear at writing something that long for a magazine (and how long it will take them to do it)
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:

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.
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.
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 that 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.
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 Basket of Kittens Feature. In this webinar, we dive into a type of round-up feature in which you take a deep dive into a handful of interestingly-related topics.

We’ll cover:
– Where does this basket of kittens concept come from anyway?
– How do you create the perfect basket?
– What type of magazines use basket-of-kittens features?
– How to pitch these pieces?

Mastering AP Style: The Grammar Style of Choice for Publications

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

Understanding and using AP style, the preferred grammar and style format for print and many online publications, can quickly broadcast to an editor that you have solid journalist experience (even if you actually don’t!).

*****

I often find it quite comical that my job is (and was for several years even before I was a freelancer) to be a paid writer in English.

While I am a native English speaker, my degree is in Italian language and literature, and I had originally planned to become an Italian professor, so even when I started writing professionally in my pre-freelance full-time job, I didn’t immerse myself in the tenants of journalism, its writing style, or its specific stylistic rules.

Many of you tell me that you are in similar situations with your own transition to freelance travel writing. Your prior experience is in an area so divergent (science or technical writing, law, engineering and the like come up often) from mainstream journalism that you feel as if you’re coming from another language, even if it is English.

Then there are those among you that are not native English speakers, and even though you now write as though you are, you always have a sinking feeling like something will give you away.

These two sub-groups tend to pay extra attention to their own writing and that of the magazines they want to pitch.

But there is one tweak that more about those pesky just-must-do-without-asking-why rules of pitching editors that will help all of you–even if you come from such a close background as in-house communications for a CVB, travel-focused PR, or travel blogging. (And in many instances this subset needs it even more!)

It’s also one of the main reasons that I often include some writing gigs on the distinctly lower end of the pay spectrum in our newsletters.

When you are new to travel writing (and especially if you live in a low-cost-of-living area or still have another job to cover most of your bills), “exchanging” a portion of your rate for working with an editor who is required to maintain a set style across her website is invaluable.

In some ways, it the travel writer’s assassin’s guild training (a la Arya from “Game of Thrones” or “A Song of Ice and Fire,” or, more specifically, James McAvoy’s character in “Wanted.”

You are, through constant supervision, rewrite requests, and rejected articles, getting professional writing style beat into you.

As it’s not typically the most pleasant process, it’s good to get paid for it.

But it’s also very important not to wait too long in your development as a writer, lest the inaccurate habits become nigh irremovable. The app Grammerly, I’ve found through discussions with one of its algorithm crafters I know personally and several pointed experiments, is unfortunately not the answer.

Surmounting this summit in your travel writing education, however, will immediately open doors, creating an instant sense of camaraderie among even the most apt-to-hit-the-delete button editors of elite outlets and helping solve that even vexing problem of how to get someone (a major magazine editor) to trust you enough to respond or directly assign a piece in five seconds flat.

I’ll share some instances this has occurred, along with all the pervasive basics you need to know (and adjust) for your pitches to have that stylistic pop in this webinar looking at Mastering AP Style: The Grammar Style of Choice for Publications.

Showing an editor (in both your pitch and your article submission) that you already understand what she’s looking for is one of the best ways to forge a long-term relationship with an editor. But that goes behind simply familiarizing yourself with the publication. Understanding and using AP style, the preferred grammar and style format for print and many online publications, can quickly broadcast to an editor that you have solid journalist experience (even if you actually don’t!).

We will cover:
– Why does this dusty book matter to you?
– Getting a handle on the basics
– The world’s most commonly misunderstood AP style conventions
– How (free or paid) to get your hands on the real thing

The Art of the Essay and How to Find Them Everywhere

43 minutes of video
43 minutes of audio
14 slides
15 pages of transcripts

While some of your are at the point in your writing career of tentatively dipping your toes into the shallow end of the features pool, others of you have drunk the storytelling Koolaid and are looking for what is next.

Where do you go when you’re bored of writing features? What is next?

When you’ve amassed a considerable amount of knowledge about the areas you’ve covered along with writing experience, it’s time to consider the wide world of essays. There are an astonishing number of outlets to place them in, the pay is there, and, most importantly, you have the satisfaction of writing exactly what you want to write.

We’ll cover the landscape as well as how to start diving into writing magazine-style essays.

*****

When you hear the term essay, similar to the even more antiquated concept of a “composition,” you likely think back to your school days more quickly than your bank account.

Especially if the phrase used is “personal essay,” which fills an alarming number of people with dread.

The thing is, many of you are incredibly acquainted, both as readers and as writers, with the personal essays, just under a different name: blog posts.

I’m not saying all blog posts are personal essays or that all personal essays are blog posts–let’s be very clear about that–but there are amazing examples of the personal essay, as a piece of writing, that appear within the physical confines of the blogosphere.

As many of you are familiar with this first-person, thoughtful, exploration style of writing, it’s natural to seek out opportunities to do so for magazines when you begin to move into that space.

But it is just as easy, when you venture out into pitching paying markets, or simply flip through issues of various publications on the newsstand to get the sinking feeling that writing that pays is all top five lists, destination guides, or narrative features founded on interviews with other people rather than the insights and expertise of you, the writer.

All of these types of articles do exist, and someone is getting paid to write them (though it is always important to check if that someone is a member of the publication’s staff or a freelance writer).

However. You can not only get paid for essays, but also paid very, very well–that process just begins with looking outside of those markets you’re flipping through on the newsstand and feeling bummed about.

Join us for our webinar on The Art of the Essay and How to Find Them Everywhere.

While some of you are at the point in your writing career of tentatively dipping your toes into the shallow end of the features pool, others of you have drunk the storytelling Koolaid and are looking for what is next. Where do you go when you’re bored of writing features? What is next? When you’ve amassed a considerable amount of knowledge about the areas you’ve covered along with writing experience, it’s time to consider the wide world of essays.

There are an astonishing number of outlets to place them in, the pay is there, and, most importantly, you have the satisfaction of writing exactly what you want to write. We’ll cover the landscape as well as how to start diving into writing magazine-style essays.

We will cover:
– What do we mean by “essay?”
– How to compass a personal essay
– How essays fit into the greater marketplace and how the opportunities have changed since the advent of blogging
– Markets you can reach out to right now for your personal essays

Taking Control of Your Ideas, Pitches and Follow-ups

58 minutes of video
58 minutes of audio
20 slides
21 pages of transcripts

In the final chapter in our series on operating the business side of your freelance travel writing business, we explore how to capture ideas the second you have them, store them for later, and how to adapt best practices to what works for you.

*****

People who aren’t happy with the types or quantity of the paid travel articles they’re writing tend to come in two flavors:

they’re established writers, even established magazine writers, that always work with the same editors and have lost the confidence to pitch new-to-them markets
they pitch so infrequently (and spend the rest of their writing time writing assigned work for content shops OR for themselves on their own blog or a novel project) that sending five pitches in one month is a serious event

On a very basic level, you could say that a regular, concerted pitching effort could bring about serious changes for people in these situations.

And pitching is actually very easy. It just involves writing 150 to 250 words. That only takes ten minutes! So these folks are all set, right?

Pitch more. Done. Problem solved.

But, while pitches should be short, formulaic, and easy to write, there are significant psychological hurdles to overcome before reaching that sunny meadow full of idea wildflowers where pitches just come to you fully formed like Athena sprouting out of Zeus’ thigh.

These obstacles are clearly defined, if you’re ready to confront and get over them:

bone up on what magazines are looking for
get very clear on what an article idea really is
learn how to see ideas everywhere
tighten up your writing so you can pitch succinctly, quickly, and with success

But, here’s the thing.

Even if you’ve skilled up in these ways, it’s still very possible to find yourself in a situation where you just aren’t getting pitches out.

Not because you don’t have ideas–tons of ideas all the time!–but because you don’t have a system in place for connecting those ideas to magazines and pitches, and ensuring that each idea does become an article and each and every editor you email becomes a paying market for you.

We have **a lot** of content, from webinars to full, month-long programs to live events, to help with the obstacles we described above, so in today’s free live webinar, we’re going to focus on the business systems that allow you to use those skills and thousands of ideas jumping out to you to create your own personal system for guaranteed pitch placement.

Join us for the final chapter in our series on operating the business side of your freelance travel writing business today in Taking Control of Your Ideas, Pitches, and Follow-ups, as we explore how to capture ideas the second you have them, store them for later, and how to adapt best practices to what works for you.

We will cover:
– Zeroing in on the real point of all of this anyway
– How and when ideas come and systems for what to do with them when they do
– How to organize the information you need to match ideas and quickly piece together pitches
– Making sure not to drop the thread in the all-important follow-up phrase

Taking Control of How You Track and Reach Your Freelance Travel Writing Goals

53 minutes of video
53 minutes of audio
19 slides
20 pages of transcripts

In the third hour of our series on running the operations of your freelance travel writing business, we expand the big picture and how to ensure your big dreams become tangible reality.

To grow your travel writing income, you need a reliable, repeatable system for ensuring you have your eye on your benchmarks and pivot to meet them. We’ll explore how to adopt the systems big businesses use to great success for your solopreneur writing business.

*****

At an event for business executives I attended last week, the facilitator shared something that is a bit of a myth in the business world.

The short version is: in a room full of nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs, when asked how they track and check in daily with their goals, it turned out the that four wealthiest people in the room all carried a paper with their goals in their wallet on somewhere else on their person.

Let me say this again, because it bears repeating. In a room full of people who had successfully started their own businesses, the ones who made the most looked at their goals regularly.

Checking in, each day and each free moment, with the rallying cry for your life has incredible effects.

Everyone has a goal (or more than one). Everyone. Everywhere.

It might be to graduate college. Or to get through today until tomorrow. Or to buy a house.

Goals are everywhere!

But people who regularly meet, exceed, and generally kick the butts of their goals are not. They’re outliers. And the reason is simple.

We are biologically wired to do things that bring quick increases in pleasure. People who do big things have designed a way that works for them to resist that automatic process.

It’s not our fault that we have a hard time keeping our eyes on a big goal in the future that takes a long time to reach and has a lot of bumps, set-backs, disappointments, and obstacles along the way.

And the simple truth of running one’s own business is that it’s especially littered with these things that make the more basic parts of our brain seek pleasure and comfort (a.k.a. anything but continuing to work hard).

Thankfully, the right goals are both the end results and the solution.

The overwhelming majority of folks seeking to make a career out of travel writing are operating like it’s an all or nothing game:

they get a clip or they don’t
they make enough to leave their job or they don’t
they get people contacting them through their blog to ask them to do a paid writing assignment or they don’t

I remember a few years ago when my husband said he was going to run a half marathon with some friends, and I said I’d join them, because I was already playing a sprinting-oriented sport for several hours most nights a week, and I thought it couldn’t be that much harder.

But I did not just show and run the half marathon.

I googled training schedules, like the one below, adapted it to my needs, and did the longer runs as scheduled in addition to the running I was doing:

Setting appropriate goals on the way to running the actual half marathon did something very important: it gave me “pleasurable experiences” or “wins” along the way as I checked off milestones on the training program.

I worked toward something large, looming, and difficult on the horizon by giving myself something each week that was achievable for my skill level at the time that also instilled confidence that I could reach my eventual goal while making me proud of what I had done that week.

There are three key things in what I said above that are missing from the formulation of many goals that folks fail to achieve:

achievable for skill level
instilling confidence
making me proud

That’s why, this week, we may be talking about the single most important aspect of a freelance travel writing career.

Catch Taking Control of How You Track and Reach Your Freelance Writing Goals, to learn about the systems you can put in place to make sure your travel writing income is growing year over year (especially when you’re just starting out and need it to grow exponentially ;)).

For this week’s live webinar, join us for the second in our series on the business side of your freelance travel writing business. To grow your travel writing income, you need a reliable, repeatable system for ensuring you have your eye on your benchmarks and pivot to meet them.

We will cover:
– Are your goals on ICE? How to tell – and immediately fix this issue
– The MArathon-Training Method of reaching your freelance travel writing goals
– My favorite “hacks,” tips, and tricks for visible goals

Taking Control of Your Freelance Travel Writing Time

71 minutes of video
71 minutes of audio
11 slides
26 pages of transcripts

In this webinar on Taking Control of Your Freelance Travel Writing Time–the single most important groundwork I lay with our coaching program members so that they can handle the work they want to do when it starts coming in–we’ll dive into the number one difference I see between the people who “do it” and those that don’t: how they spend their freelance time–you always have choices.

This is the second webinar in our new series on the business side of your freelance travel writing business that began Taking Control of Your Freelance Travel Writing Finances.

*****

Uncertainty causes stress.

I didn’t pull data on this, because I think it’s something we can all agree on anecdotally. Viscerally in fact.

For example, tomorrow, there’s supposed to be a big storm on the eastern seaboard, and my JetBlue flight was unceremoniously canceled without even an email. Usually, I feel like there’s some notice from the airline or options. Or I don’t desperately have to be somewhere, so it’s not the end of the world that my flight has changed.

For tomorrow’s flight, however, I had to be somewhere the morning following and both the hotel and the event that I need to be at were non-refundable and seriously costly.

So, as I sat on the phone for ten…twenty….thirty minutes waiting to figure out if or how I could rebook my flight, there was a clear growth of anxiety due to not knowing if I was going to be able to physically get to my destination and use those pricey things I’ve paid for.

I literally felt like I couldn’t remember the last time I was so stressed. I thought about coaching calls that I have scheduled following the flight that I didn’t know what I was going to do about.

Sitting on the phone, I tried to figure out what this “stress” was catching me so off guard and it made me think of so many of you and situations that you find yourself with getting your travel writing business off the ground.

Sometimes, that stress comes from finding a market to pitch in the first place. Sometimes, it’s from pulling together a next round of pitches for an editor that declined a first pitch but asked you for more. And sometimes, it’s lining up exactly what you’re going to cover in a piece once it’s assigned.

These are all black holes.

And that’s one of the reasons we put them off! (I’m not just looking at those of you who have those emails from editors sitting in your inboxes ;))

They’re black holes of time. That’s what you already know. But the real issue is actually that they’re black holes of uncertainty…which causes stress…which causes you to not know where to begin…which causes stress…and so it goes. As does the time!

It can seem, especially when you’re new to travel writing or to freelancing generally, that there is no way to destress by diminishing that sense of uncertainty. There’s just too much you don’t know. Where do you start?

The very simple answer is data.

Specifically, time data.

In this webinar, the second webinar in our new series on the business side of your freelance travel writing business, we’ll dive into the number one difference I see between the people who “do it” and those that don’t: how they spend their freelance time–you always have choices.

This week’s webinar will be at both a different day and time, as I will be completing my certification as a professional career coach at full-day trainings for the rest of this week. I’m very excited to bring this expertise to you as there are no certified coaches specializing in the issues incumbent to and the business of travel writing to my knowledge!

Join us for Taking Control of Your Freelance Travel Writing Time–which is the single most important groundwork I lay with our coaching program members so that they can handle the work they want to do when it starts coming in.

We will cover:
– A business philosophy on time – do you have one?
-The big offenders and how to deal with them
– Approaches to time tracking for beginners (to time tracking) and for travel writing life

Taking Control of Your Freelance Travel Writing Finances

66 minutes of video
66 minutes of audio
12 slides
24 pages of transcripts

Join us for a new series on getting the business side of your freelance travel writing business. This week we’ll dive into everything you need to know to get your taxes in gear this year. We are not licensed tax advisors, but unfortunately, most accountants don’t know the nitty gritty of this profession, so we’ll steer you the right way.

*****

Have you done your taxes yet? If so, bravo!

Every winter, in fact before the holidays, I tell myself that I’m going to get my taxes in early so that I can get my tax refund as soon as possible. I like to think of it as a freelancer end-of-year bonus.

If you work for yourself, that might sound a bit surprising, right? That I’m looking out for my refund (a.k.a. money back) rather than dreading how much I’m going to own.

And I hear that from freelance travel writers often.

In fact, I have been getting *a lot* of questions about tax preparation this year, both from my coaching clients and from folks that have come to the Catskills to join us for a writing retreat.

Even though neither I nor anyone associated with Dream of Travel Writing is a tax professional, and, if we were, we would still have to tell you that all information is not official tax advice for your individual situation and to consult a tax professional, there’s one serious issue that I have noticed for travel and food writers.

Tax professionals, the vast majority of the time, do not treat our business taxes correctly.

To the point where I have had to do mine myself for years because I would be missing or misfiling many, many things that we as travel and food professionals should be deducting as business expenses.

I had the good fortune, before leaving my previous full-time job to freelance, to take an evening workshop through MediaBistro with a woman who was both a full-time editor of a luxury publication and a freelancer as well.

And she got very straight with us about what absolutely counts as a business expense for a food and travel writer that most folks will tell you you need to lose a lot of money on.

So today, for this week’s live webinar, join us for a new series on getting the business side of your freelance travel writing business. This week we’ll dive into everything you need to know to get your taxes in gear this year.

Join us for Taking Control of Your Freelance Travel Writing Finances. We are excited to share the insights of a full-time tax accountant and freelance food and travel writer who has graciously shared his slides from his own talk on this topic with us, and are going to leave a lot of time for questions so we can make sure to answer everything that’s been on your mind.

We will cover:
– Laying the ground work: what are the expenses categories for freelance food and travel writers?
– How does this play out with your month-to-month expense tracking (and quarterly taxes!)?
– Taking it to the next level: how should you manage these things on an on-going basis

Story Structure to Take Your Travel Feature Articles to the Next Level

60 minutes of video
60 minutes of audio
30 slides
20 pages of transcripts

Whether you’ve been scared of taking the leap into features because you’re “not that kind of writer” or have been wanting to move into features (or even starting to get those assignments) but spend an inordinate amount of time trying to research and structure those pieces so it feels like more work than it’s worth, this webinar is for you.

We explore classic story structures that have been employed, literally, for millennia to guarantee an interesting story as well as travel feature-specific story structures that will have you turning out stories in an hour or two each.

*****

There are some very extreme views on writing feature-length stories out there.

Some of you:

have been in this business a long time and feel like feature stories are the only thing worth your time in terms of both money and interest
have not been in the business-side of travel writing at all, but want to jump in only writing features, because you’re only interested in long-form writing and storytelling, not short, informational pieces
are absolutely petrified of even pitching a long story, because you don’t know how you’ll fill up the word count
feel very firmly that you will never write features because narrative writing is just not your thing

Features are a very polarizing issue, and there’s no single reason why.

Let’s unpack some of the assumptions, myths, and truths underlying the different stances on feature-writing I outlined above.

Yes, features do pay more than shorter stories. But typically just because of the sheer fact that they are longer, as many stories are billed by the word count. However, these stories also take–and not correspondingly–more time to write.

They take more time to structure, research, edit, and rewrite than their shorter counterparts, so if you aren’t well-prepared for those eventualities, your hourly rate will take a huge cut as compared to writing shorter stories. So why do some people want to jump right into these even if they don’t have experience working with editors and publication guidelines or researching to fit a specific assignment?

Features feel more meaty, substantial, and, above all, like stories.

Writers with writing backgrounds from other fields, particularly fiction or long-form writing of other kinds, aren’t intimidated by the word count or a feeling like they simply couldn’t find enough material to compellingly fill the space.

They’ve done it before (even if only on their own blogs), and feel confident they can do it again.

The issue is that writing features for travel magazines is not your average long-form writing–it’s long-form journalism. And that means that even if you are adept at weaving stories, you need to know how to do so as a journalist, not just a storyteller. Though carrying a full-length feature requires a keen understanding of the mechanics of story arcs as well.

It’s no surprise that folks get scared off at the though of it. I may have even scared you off just now!

Here’s the thing. Just because it is hard (honestly, what about professional travel writing isn’t? Even people who have been writing for decades can have a hard time sending pitches when they’re out of the habit) absolutely doesn’t mean it is impossible. And it is probably much easier than you think.

That’s why, today at our regular webinar time slot, we’re going to discuss my the concept of story structure so you can get a serious grounding in it, along with my favorite “tactics” or approaches specific for travel features.

Join us for our webinar on Story Structure to Take Your Travel Feature Articles to the Next Level.

We will cover:
– What does story arc even mean and how does that translate to real life?
– How do story arcs work in travel articles specifically?
– What key story structures we can directly trace over our travel features